For some reason, Digg has recently revived an old Rolling Stone interview with Justin Frankel called "The World's Most Dangerous Geek."

Frankel is a serious heavy hitter. Here are some reasons you should care about him:

• He created Winamp, which is effectively the audio equivalent of Firefox -- light, fast, powerful, and surrounded by plugins that can implement any functionality you can imagine.
• Frankel created Gnutella, which has been the world's third-largest P2P network since shortly after its release in 2000.
• After Winamp was bought by AOL in 1999, Frankel retained his geek credibility by releasing WASTE in 2003. AOL flipped out, because WASTE was a a secure, encrypted file sharing program that enabled creation of small networks among trusted circles of friends; in a way, it was a precursor to the private BitTorrent trackers we have today. But other than reclaiming their server space and chastising Frankel, there wasn't really much they could to about it -- he had released it as an open source project, so development continued even after he was sent to his bedroom without supper.
• Frankel's latest project is one that has the Monkeyclaus audio brains excited -- he's been working on a recording platform called REAPER. We haven't tried it yet because we're still waiting for the Mac OSX version expected later this year, but it looks very promising -- it's powerful, ridiculously cheap, and supports wide range of audio codecs as input, output, and recording formats; we're excited about recording directly to FLAC, for example.
• NINJAM was initially composed as a standalone application but is now also available as a plugin that can be integrated into most audio recording programs. It allows realtime collaborative music creation over the internet by compressing your performance, shooting it over to your friend's computer, and then decompressing it. Ordinarily the latency associated with this process using current technology would be musically disruptive, so Frankel worked up a very clever non-solution: instead of scrambling to decrease the latency, he increased it by several orders of magnitude. The "lag" is instead timed to match perfectly with the beats of the performance, so each hear's the other's parts one bar later than played. The music theorist in me has to assume that this leads to a lot of modal jams and harmonic movement in thirds, but I won't know for sure until I try myself. Anybody up for it?
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Tagged as: File Sharing, Interview, Justin Frankel, Winamp