873 results about "Audio mixing" patented technology

The invention relates to a method and an apparatus for mixing audio signals. The invention is based on the idea to base selection of what audio channels to mix on the dynamic behavior of the audio channels in terms of whether they are active or not, rather than basing the selection on quantative measures of the audio channels. According to the invention, a set of audio channels are arranged in a mixing stack and a mixed audio signal is produced from the topmost channels above a predetermined threshold level in the stack. Whenever a channel becomes active, it is placed at the top of the stack.

The present invention is directed to a system, including apparatus and architecture, and method for providing scheduled and ad hoc voice over IP conference services having enhanced quality and reliability. The system uses an overlay network of geographically distributed conference servers working simultaneously and collaboratively to host a given conference session. Multiple conference servers simultaneously and collaboratively perform the necessary audio mixing. The voice routing path is established and controlled within the overlay network and supports conference services across different conference service providers.

A multimedia collaboration system that integrates separate real-time and asynchronous networks—the former for real-time audio and video, and the latter for control signals and textual, graphical and other data—in a manner that is interoperable across different computer and network operating system platforms and which closely approximates the experience of face-to-face collaboration, while liberating the participants from the limitations of time and distance. These capabilities are achieved by exploiting a variety of hardware, software and networking technologies in a manner that preserves the quality and integrity of audio / video / data and other multimedia information, even after wide area transmission, and at a significantly reduced networking cost as compared to what would be required by presently known approaches. The system architecture is readily scalable to the largest enterprise network environments. It accommodates differing levels of collaborative capabilities available to individual users and permits high-quality audio and video capabilities to be readily superimposed onto existing personal computers and workstations and their interconnecting LANs and WANs. In a particular preferred embodiment, a plurality of geographically dispersed multimedia LANs are interconnected by a WAN. The demands made on the WAN are significantly reduced by employing multi-hopping techniques, including dynamically avoiding the unnecessary decompression of data at intermediate hops, and exploiting video mosaicing, cut-and-paste and audio mixing technologies so that significantly fewer wide area transmission paths are required while maintaining the high quality of the transmitted audio / video.

There is provided herein a method of defining and storing remixing of existing musical and video works. As a first step, various segments of a digital song or video work are identified, preferably in terms of their starting and ending times. Given the defined loops or video clips, the user next forms a remix of the selected song / video work using those components. The final product, i.e., the resulting remix, can then be completely specified in terms of the loop / clip definitions together with the time at which each of the defined loops / clips appears in the final mix. The remix can thus be compactly stored as a computer file.

An apparatus and method for effecting sophisticated telephony services using hybrid POTS and VoIP transport without resorting to central servers or PBXs is provided. Key to the system is the use of on-phone processing capabilities comprising several A-D / D-A, memory and addressing, audio-mixing, program memory and programmable computing circuits or components. The system performs required IP and VoIP protocol stacks (UDP, RTP, and SIP for example) and POTS functionality. Optionally, fail-over from set-power may be provided using POTS line voltages.The phones of this invention self-configure dependent upon the network environment to which they are attached, and direct call and other functionality digitally under programmed computing control, thus being highly configurable; redundancy between networked phone devices adds robustness.The telephone system is comprised of independent telephony devices operating on a LAN and / or WAN TCP / IP-based connection The inventive concept allows for greater system scalability with lower cost, reliability and flexibility.