Category: .

Audiotool as kustom chopper

In October I wrote about the Flash 10 sound API from the point of view of audio file formats, reading the event as pure AJAX audio formats are now a reality. I said that innovation related to audio file formats was over in about 1998 and that the ability to do audio hacking in the browser would restart it, leading to the appearance of freaky Big Daddy Roth audio files with chromed metadata [and] embedded blenders.

The Hobnox Audiotool in-browser digital audio workstation that *I described as an amazing and wonderful piece of work is made possible by the Flash 10 sound API. And you could indeed think of it as a kustomized and hot rodded version of the MP3.

Check out the Audiotool dev blog for the American Chopper reality show of their shop.

client-server

So what’s the flaw in Apple’s move to start selling guitar lessons in Garageband? It’s not the web. It’s a proprietary client that would have been exactly the same, as far as the internet goes, in the client-server hype cycle of the late 1980s.

packaging notes for “Widow’s Plea”

What you see in the series of posts about Victorian mother songs on the blog for my own music is the realization of an idea about music packaging on the internet. I had a song to deliver, and I wanted to use packaging to give it a better chance in the world.

So I wrote up the context.

In the first post I described the genre as a whole, and included an MP3 of a parody of the song to show what the music sounded like. In the second post I described the music I learned from and included an MP3 of that recording. In the third post I put up interactive supplies — lyrics, chord charts, and sheet music — to help people have a direct interaction with the tune on a musical level. And in the fourth post, when I finally released my own recording, I also did notes about the recording process.

If you think about this in terms of digital music packaging, I didn’t try to replicate the specific doodads that come with a physical CD or vinyl record. There’s no one piece of album art, there’s no booklet, there’s no place in the series where you can say “this is it.” What there is instead is everything and anything I could find that would develop the music. What I didn’t want was a measly scrawny little MP3 file. What I did want was a human experience carrying meaning and emotion.

sampleswap.org

At first glance sampleswap.org seems like a cross between Freesound and CC Mixter.

This 100% free AIFF/WAV collection contains 5.5 GB of sounds — including 2,198 techno, hiphop, trance, and drum ‘n’ bass drum loops / breakbeats, 1,254 drum hits, 77 drum kits, 2,198 sound FX, 1,207 instrument sounds, 1,200 vocal samples, 1,047 melodic parts, fruity loops and more.

Their page on Creative Commons licensing:

The following pre-cleared music has been uploaded by artists at sampleswap.org under a variety of Creative Commons licenses. Please be sure to read the licensing information for each track carefully before using any of this music. (Click the license ‘badge’ next to a track for details.) While all of this music can be downloaded, transmitted and shared for personal use, only some of this music can be used for free in films, TV commercials, video games, etc.

When in doubt, contact the artist. And if you do use one of these songs in your project, please tell the artist so that s/he knows the work is getting ‘out there’!

But about the music? Is it any good? Well, here’s a hip hop number from there that’s right in the pocket from this forum post. (Here’s more good stuff by this guy, who’s a Quebecois).

bizeps.or.at goose hacks

The German version of Yahoo Media Player aka goose is live in a news story titled Molterer: ORF ist keine private Einrichtung, er kassiert Gebühren.

There’s a striking degree of customization, which was done by a guy named Eric Eggert.

You can read their Javascript at http://www.bizeps.or.at/ymp-german.js. This is all concerned with translating the player into their users’ language, which of course is a necessity for a big league commercial site like this.

You can read their CSS at http://www.bizeps.or.at/artikelnew.css. Search for #ymp to find the customizations.

The most interesting CSS issue is that they override the sprite master for the graphics, but *only* for the buttons. The master sprite includes a bunch of other graphics that they apparently didn’t want to disturb.

Here’s the standard master sprite:


Yahoo Media Player sprite master

Here’s their button-only sprite:


bizeps.or.at sprite master for Yahoo Media Player

Here’s* the part of their CSS which inserts the button sprite:

(*At least, I think so. This is from quickly eyeballing the CSS.)

They also changed the default album art, which they did by putting an img element in each of their audio links. For example:

<a href="/multimedia/molterer081121orf.mp3">
<img border="0" align="right" alt="Bild von Kopfhörer" src="http://www.bizeps.or.at/hpbilder/audio.GIF"/>
Zitat anhören (1.744 KB / mp3)
</a>

The broad lesson is about how making widgets with Javascript rather than Flash is good for your project.

Big league commercial shops like this web site must be able to customize their widgets. It’s not the same kind of personalization that drives Myspace users to change their background image, but it’s make-or-break. And big league sites like this are the ones who get your widget into big numbers.

These guys were able to do this degree of customization specifically because the player is made of open standards. By definition, open standards are APIs and hooks for user code.

So using open standards for your widget or tool is to your own advantage. Don’t invent an API, adopt internet standards and let them be your API.