Mon Apr 23
It’s a shame that despite the hoo-hah over different online music formats that a completely free, high-quality and extremely versatile format is being overlooked somewhat. Maybe it’s just that a lot of people haven’t heard of Ogg Vorbis, but the fact is it could be the answer we’re waiting for.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not without it’s problems, but Ogg is certainly the strongest glimmer of hope for the increasingly beleaguered digital music format landscape. Which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is only going to get more complex as time goes on.
Wed Apr 11
Here’s something that’s sure to ruffle a few feathers (pun very much intended). Yesterday while searching for an open-source player for a particular music file format I stumbled across this tuneful Songbird. It’s basically half-iTunes, half-Firefox. Intrigued? I know I was, and not just by the great design and illustration of the site.
After installing the developer preview (it’s currently in alpha, not even beta yet) and taking a look around I found that when you navigate to a website it automatically scans the page and puts all the music files linked from the page into a playlist ready for listening and/or downloading. Fantastic, and not unlike my very own Greasemonkey script for playing MP3 files on 3Hive. Except better. Much, much better.
I think it looks pretty cool, and you get even more great illustration in the program itself (is that bird pooping?) as well as a load of configuration options - and even add-ons, just like the fantastic ‘Fox. It says it integrates with iPods as well, and while it certainly recognised my iPod and showed all the playlists on it, I couldn’t create or copy a playlist to the iPod itself. Hopefully there’ll be some decent documentation somewhere that will help me out.
So if you’re into the musical web, this could well be the most useful software you get this year.
Fri Mar 23
One of my favourite free music site is 3hive, although these days I rarely get a chance to download much stuff. The problem is I have to download something before I know whether it floats my boat, so to speak. Even with broadband that’s a few seconds per song, which soon adds up.
Not any more. If you’re a user of the greasy monkey for Firefox, you’re in luck. Just download this GreaseMonkey script and you’ll get a little Flash player below each download link. You can preview each track before you download with a mere click of the mouse. The Flash player was written by Jeroen Wijering and he’s kindly giving it away free. In this version of the 3hive player the Flash file is run from my website, but you can easily amend the script to run the file from somewhere else.
Happy listening!
Thu Mar 8
Things are continuing apace with BeatsBase - the online community for DJs and I hope we’ll soon be able to start opening some of the doors (and maybe a window or two) to the crowds waiting outside. But first I wanted to show off a few of the features I’ve been hard at work building.
Firstly is the Hot List, where people can see the tracks, playlists and mixes that have got a lot of positive votes. Let’s face it, I wouldn’t be writing a true Web 2.0 application without voting, would I?
The Hot List will also be RSS-enabled, allowing people to subscribe using an RSS feed reader so they can be notified of the movers and shakers on the site.
And speaking of voting, we’ve got a really neat and simple way for people to vote for items. Just click to say whether you love it, think it’s OK, or don’t find it so hot. You can also leave an optional comment with your vote, and you can see the difference your vote has made immediately with the Vote Bar (I’ve yet to come up with a snazzy name for these horizontal stacker bar charts).
So you want to put a few tracks together into a playlist and share that with the world? No problem, just click, choose and build your playlist. And what if you’ve created a mix using some tracks in our database? No problem too, you just choose the tracks you’ve mixed and we do the rest.
So now we know what tracks are in what playlists and mixes, we can do some really fun stuff. Like tell you what are the most mixed tracks, the most popular tracks in playlists, and what two tracks nearly always go together. We can also tell you what playlists and mixes any particular track appears in when you view it’s details so you can discover other users that like the same music as you.
Remember, we’ve already got over 30,000 tracks in the database (yes! it’s true! I counted ‘em!) in a wide variety of styles, so there’s bound to be a pile of stuff you’ll love. And with our lovely users adding new tracks (hopefully) every day, we’ll be The Place To Be when it comes to track data on the web. The beat is getting louder.
Tue Jan 30
The last few weeks have been, to say the least, hectic. As well as the new projects and job I’ve started we’ve had a couple of special events happening.
It’s not often you get the opportunity to throw a really BIG party, and we didn’t waste our chance when our youngest chgild Reuben was baptised/christened (call it what you will) and our marriage blessed at our church a couple of weeks ago. It was, to say the least, a fantastic day. We had over 140 people at the church service, and about 60 came to a restaurant for a meal afterwards.
We really tried to make it a special day, and many people have said to us since how much they enjoyed the church service. And, of course, the food went down well, too. Rather than plaster pictures of us here which would no doubt lead to cries of consternation, here are a couple of pictures of the cakes that people very kindly made for us.
The other event we went to was a friends 40th birthday party. He’d booked one of his all-time songwriting heroes, Boo Hewerdine, and had got a band together. However a few days before the drummer broke her wrist, so he called me in as backup. It was a really enjoyable gig, and I highly recommend downloading the free MP3s from Boos site - and buying some of his CDs, too. Here’s a little picture of my view of Boo from behind the drums.
So after the excitement of Reubens first Christmas and all those parties, it’s nose to the grindstone to get projects finished in time for deadlines. Which means I shouldn’t sit here any longer writing this. Toodle-pip.
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