ModPlug Central

Hey guys!

We are a music community that produces a large output of recordings. I would like to suggest creating musical compilations on a semi-regular basis, so that Modplug Central would have a certain result of its activity.

We can then host it at my Disc Shelf and at archive.org and similar resources and perhaps have some listeners get interested in what we are doing here. The albums can have cool cover art and the whole thing can be a community effort.

What do you think?

I like the idea.

Hmm, well, I don't think I could really commit to regular releases. My release cycle is too... chaotic for that. :D Still, I do like the idea.

+1!

But my laziness is legendary among... well... me :D

Quote from: "bv"My release cycle is too... chaotic for that

And mine's even more, I still owe you one bears-inspired track LOL :lol:

I guess that frequent here are only you, LV (sort of) and clones and Sam_Zen (due to large amount of oldies he got).

So I'm not sure if the compilation will be at least monthly.

Its the same thing that happened on CTGMusic. I like the idea alot actually, but unfortunatelly, I don't have the time to manage it. I can facilitate in websolutions where necessary, though hosting it on DiscShelve is a very nice idea too.

Support+ from me too.

I have experience in managing compilations and I can take the thing under my control.

There is no need for regular releases and absolutely no need to submit only new material. If we look into our music downloads, there are dozens and dozens of tracks. I say - quite good for a lot of compilations.

Releases can be semi-regular, that is - made the compilation, some time passed and we decided - erm.... let's make another one.

Compilations can be numbered and with no particular themes. Something like "Modplug Vibes #45".

Everything can be hosted at Disc Shelf and such.

This really sounds great.

The only concern I have right now, is if everyone's song that will be used for the mix agrees on having his/her song put in one.

I certainly have no problem if my song ends up in a compilation like this, but it might be best if we can do stuff like: asking the author per song. For instance, I have some songs that are actually licensed. I'll have to see if I want those in such compilation too (and if I am allowed ofcource).

We will do better - I will announce the new compilation. Anyone who wants his tune in it sends me the link to the tune or a tune itself to my email which I will display. As soon as I collect 10-15 tunes, I will upload them to Disc Shelf. Also, anyone who wants can contribute cover art is free to do so. If noone does it, I will make a cover myself.

Will there be any screening? I haven't decided whether that (screening) would be a good or a bad idea...

What I personally would like much more is a musicdisk...

the problem with things like this is that the person performing the compilation invariably colors the compilation with their taste in music.

the number of styles/genres/techniques presented on modplug is very wide and I think a strength hard to capture in a 15 song compilation that would be listenable even with the best intentions.

And the people left out will feel less than warm and fuzzy about being left out.

Is modplug radio still alive? That may be a better alternative.

Well, a musicdisk with totally unrelated modules wouldn't make sense anyway. :)

neither would a compilation of unrelated material imho.

At least that's what I find irritating with the free CDs they used to have at record/cd stores when I actually went to brick and mortor stores.

But... then does that represent modplug?

that's why radio may be a better alternative - everything gets its 15 minutes of fame.

The modplug radio is not online for quite some time now, but since I recently bought a new pc for server usage, I might look into setting up a radio station. The only thing that surelly stands in my way right now, is the fact that I was unable to install the soundcard drivers.

I'm running Windows Server 2003 Standard, and the PC is a Shuttle X27D

what is the error if you don't mind me asking.

well, you don't really need a soundcard for radio broadcast... :)

Chris: I see your concern. However, because there are many styles on modplug, we should not limit ourselves with one compilation. We can, say, make several compilations which would be divided into genres - ambient, dance music, alternative, etc. Noone needs to be left out.

On the other hand, this is why I have raised this topic. If eventually everybody feels that the idea is no that good, we will not do it.

Consider this though: it would really make everybody feel a part of community, make everyone aware that what they are doing is part of a bigger picture and also might bring a feel of satisfaction and pride when we see that there is a result that our community delivers.

It's a good idea, but I haven't released anything in ages.

Quotebut I haven't released anything in ages.

Oh, but that's not a problem, be our guest, release stuff now. :D

Quote from: "Louigi Verona"
Consider this though: it would really make everybody feel a part of community, make everyone aware that what they are doing is part of a bigger picture and also might bring a feel of satisfaction and pride when we see that there is a result that our community delivers.

Quote
We can then host it at my Disc Shelf and at archive.org and similar resources and perhaps have some listeners get interested in what we are doing here. The albums can have cool cover art and the whole thing can be a community effort.

which is why a modplug branded outlet, like modplug radio, as opposed to discshelf, makes sense to me

As you wish. If everyone feels that Chris is right, then we will not do the compilations.

I am not saying not to do compilations though I think radio makes more sense.

However, I do think it would be strange to host Modplug compilations on discshelf. But perhaps I'm prejudice here considering my past experience with you promoting discshelf on SoOn to the dismay of pretty much everyone there.

So for that reason I will bow out of this conversion.

Oh bugger.

Why look at everything from the prism of personality and self promotion? I do not care about these things.

Disc Shelf allows to embed albums, design them and take care of traffic. I made it to be used, not to make money with it or become famous with it. If I do have any promotion in mind - its only for people to be able to use it, just like with Tape Loops. Disc Shelf is a service like YouTube. What's strange in hosting videos on YouTube? What was strange in releasing albums from Disc Shelf at SoOn? I am sorry you do not see it and I am sorry that at SoOn someone decided that I am just a dirty spammer.

However, if each time I am mentioning Disc Shelf everyone thinks I am promoting it "to the dismay of pretty much all modplug", then perhaps I shouldn't mention it at all. I was deeply hurt by the misunderstanding at SoOn and I do not want it to happen here as well.

I withdraw the modplug initiative.

For the reason that every action from me seems to be looked upon as self promotion and realization of my greed and desire for fame, I withdraw any suggestions and apologize for all the nasty things I've done to this community by using my nickname (and thus promoting myself), ever mentioning Disc Shelf (and thus promoting my project that would in turn promote myself), ever mentioning my website, my software and music.

QuoteHey guys!

We are a music community that produces a large output of recordings. I would like to suggest creating musical compilations on a semi-regular basis, so that Modplug Central would have a certain result of its activity.

We can then host it at my Disc Shelf and at archive.org and similar resources and perhaps have some listeners get interested in what we are doing here. The albums can have cool cover art and the whole thing can be a community effort.

What do you think?

I'm saying the problem lies with me.

please carry on.

I still think its a good idea though.

I've always played with the idea of having a system that if you submit your music there, it can be automatically distributed to several music communities.

You want your music to be heard don't you? This is a good way, and if the user himself doesn't have to do it, its even more of a plus.

Another option could be to mix the songs together to one new song and create one album on DiskShelve with all the compilations in them.

Well, I would also find it strange to have discshelf as a primary host for a modplug compliation... :P

Quote from: "Jojo"Well, I would also find it strange to have discshelf as a primary host for a modplug compliation... :P

True, I have the resources to host it myself too.

Maybe what we can do instead is actually host the album in multiple places:

1. For download -- I'm more than happy to provide hosting for these compilations for download, either as individual files or as a single monolithic file;
2. For online play -- Disc shelf would be good here.

That way, it's not that Disc Shelf is 'hosting' the ModPlug tracks, but that it's 'mirroring' them and providing an online playback service at the same time. I think that maybe this would be a good way to a) get the music out there, and b) keep everyone happy. :)

Am okay with that... X)

Am okay with that... X)

Hmmm, i'm with the idea of a modplug radio, were every song will spin, thus everyone could get the same attention, and if people found something really interesting, want to check and/or download them, we can point them to this forum. They will see the additional comments from the author, can follow the development of the actual song (if there's any), can register and comment it, see other comments, and not least download it. They can check all the releases from their desired author (on their profile, also it should be a good thing, if that would be editable, so work in progress releases or any other stuff that aren't full or aren't desired to show could be toggled, not be displayed there), and automatically can access and search the "full" database in our "Free Music Downloads" area. So my idea about this, that it would be better for us (as a community who talks and shares ideas with each other), to gather and focus people's attention to the modplug central, rather than spreading it out, to other sites.
If we would want to make some special compilations and promote it, i'm almost totally positive that it could get the best amount of attention on Youtube (and point listeners to this forum, for additional info, downloads, or anything else). I admit, that i don't have a clue how "popular" is Disc Shelf, but if it's not, it wont help us much imho.

LV:
Uncloned did said what is on his heart, others did it too, i don't see the reason why should you overreact if someone is open with you. You've made a proposition, and asked for people's opinion about it. It can be considered natural that some ppl wouldn't agree with it 100%, or at all. That's why we talk about stuff, to see each other opinion, point of view. It would be surely worse, if you wouldn't receive comments at all, because ppl would hesitate to speak, from the flustration, that they may hurt or make you mad.

I'm having second thoughts about the modplug radio. More because it will be a pain to manage it. My server doesn't have that much free space and I actually have other use for it too. Giving every song a spin in its rotation will be very difficult. First the songs must be uploaded to my server, and secondly it must be added to a playlist. This means that each time someone adds a file, it must be transferred there either automatically or manually. Then a second manual action is required to add the songs to the playlist.

I don't have that much time and there's no other way.

The only alternative would be to have somekind of script stream the files online.

http://center.soonlabel.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=65

this player automatically generates a random order of songs upon each invocation.  All you do is point the player to a folder on your server.

if you wanted you could point to files on another server. the folder where Kim keeps all of the modplug uploads comes to mind since everything there has been vetted for copyright violations.


my host gives me 1024 gigs of space - but I can't have more than a few streams - that's odd because it is unlimited data and I've shoved close to or over 100 gigs out the door per month a few times.


edit

links

http://audiolibres.blogspot.com/2008/10/xspf-mp3-flash-player.html

http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/

Managing a radio should be easy using Demovibes (http://www.assembla.com/spaces/demovibes/) - the engine of Nectarine Demoscene Radio (http://scenemusic.eu/).

If I can run this from my webhost, that certainly would be great!

EDIT: Appearantly I can't. But this have given me an idea.

I might be able to create a script that generates an m3u file that just streams mp3's from my website.

LP, if you're worried about bandwidth/disk space, I have unlimited of both, so I'm more than happy to help host this. :)

I like the idea of a "ModPlug Radio" with streaming radio from our members, featuring tracked music of all kinds.

Addressing the concerns of storage of the music, is it possible that the radio could play a song from a link (whatever the author provides), shifting the responsibility to the sender of the music?

Altho i myself couldn't use this internet radio, i would definitely like to submit some songs and i think Tassel of Blue would be interested. But i'm concerned about users being able to download whatever played with no permissions given. (A user could always "rip" it by recording from the computer as it's playing, but that kind of piracy has always existed.)
You might think this is a bit of a paradox that an artist would submit it to a radio station but wouldn't want it to be taken by others, but hey, i've heard of stranger quirks! :P

If this were to come to fruition, i would envision a site where you could choose a style, and a rotation is pulled up, and it would stream the songs. I would think we would need some sort of ombudsman DJ to verify what gets played and what fits into what category, taking suggestions to what to include in a rotation, etc., or perhaps just trusted volunteers among us to keep the stream clean, as it were.

Quote from: "bvanoudtshoorn"LP, if you're worried about bandwidth/disk space, I have unlimited of both, so I'm more than happy to help host this. :)

Actually, to run the webradio, you'll need phyton and django. I don't have that.

If you're worried about people ripping free music from audio streams (yes, I do that, too!), then you should better not publish your tunes at all, seriously. What is so bad about people liking your music and their wish to listen to it again later?

Well, I have Python 2.4.3. Dunno about Django... installation requires SSH access, and I don't have that, because I'm not on a dedicated server. :/

Maybe the simplest would be to create a little script that would pull back an M3U from the site. I could spend a day writing a nice little ajax web-based frontend for the radio, with all sorts of nifty features, and, working with you, LP, we could give (some*) users of the fora access to upload tracks.

I'm thinking a simple script that will:
a) let users upload a file directly, or specify the URL of a file to retrieve.
b) (possibly) re-encode the file at a standard bitrate, using a standard format -- personally, I'd like OGG, because then I could use the lovely new HTML5 <audio> tag in Fx. :D
c) Put details of the file into a simple MySQL database -- basically, pull the ID3 data from the file so that the playback script doesn't have to touch all the files for such simple information.
d) Create:
 i) a simple m3u with URLs, so that people can play the stream in their preferred webplayer
 ii) a nice ajax web interface, using the HTML5 <audio> tag, because it's awesome, and my day job is doing ajax web interfaces. XD
e) Provide playback access for all and sundry

I'm more than happy to have people hammering my server all day every day if they want to. :)


* I say some because there are an awful lot of users that a) aren't active, b) could be bots, c) I don't know. :D

I like the idea BvanOudshoorn! :)

If required I can even help with somekind of login system that is linked to that of the forum. I already made one for SMF, which we'll swich to sooner or later.

Well, <audio> tags would still be a "playlist" and not really a "radio" that you could for example listen to in your favourite media player.

Yes, but with an m3u playlist... it'd kinda be a radio that you could listen to in your preferred media player. :/

I guess the difference between my proposition and albums is that using my system, we can have a 'generative' music set, rather than a predetermined one. In other words, if we work to 'tag' tracks, with genres, moods, artists, whatever, then I could probably build a system to let people select from a tag cloud, and build a playlist that way.

Using The Wonders of Asynchronous Javascript™, you could make the <audio> tag behave like a radio -- every time the client is nearing the end of a track, they request the URI of the next one from the server, which can be randomly determined, or whatever. We could, that way, also include "Modplug Ads" if we really wanted to. :P That would behave far more like a 'radio', but with the distinction that every listener would have an individual stream.

I kinda like this second idea -- we could go really overboard with it, and give users the ability to 'heart' songs -- the more they 'heart' a song, the more likely it is to appear in their radio lineup. Then we could start adding in restrictions like no song should be played twice within the same twenty-song sequence. I mean, we really could build quite a nice little system, kinda like a hybridised last.fm/t61 thing, but tailor-made for MPC, and without the same extraneous stuff.

Of course, none of this would work outside of the web browser -- but I'm not sure that that's necessarily a bad thing. We could build on the ability to automatically generate a playlist of URLs from a tag selection, which could then be played in a media player, I guess, but the second idea that I put forward in this post wouldn't work outside the context of the browser at all, at least as far as I can see.

I don't know -- personally, I very rarely don't have some browser or another open when I'm on a computer. In fact, I often have as many as five or six distinct browsers (from different vendors, too!) open for testing, so another tab in one isn't killer. And there's always Prism and Chrome's "Webapp" support thinggy if you hate being in the browser that much. :D

this sounds great Barry.

It would rock if I could get it to stream on my blackberry. So far I got the sling box streaming video but flycast for audio has rarely worked. - odd.

Quote from: "bvanoudtshoorn"Yes, but with an m3u playlist... it'd kinda be a radio that you could listen to in your preferred media player. :/

You would constantly have to update your playlist, though.

the radio implementation I pointed out generates a new XML playlist every time it loads.

would that solve the problem?

Progress report!

I've written the basic Javascript and PHP to pull back a new track 'object' as required, using HTML5's <audio> object. In other words, I've got a simple player that will
a) Play a random track from a list of tracks in the database.
b) When that track is nearing completion, find out which track to play next using PHP to query the database, given that that track hasn't been played before in the current session.
c) When the track completes, update the <audio> element to the new track's URI and start playing it.
d) Lather, rinse and repeat. :)

I should note that when you've exhausted all tracks in the database, your slate is wiped clean, and it all starts over again.

The actual interface at the moment is, well, non-existent. :P

Because I figure people will be interested, and will probably want input, here's a mockup (http://barryvan.com.au/temp/mockup.png) of the design I threw together. Bear in mind that this is a mockup, and probably looks nothing like what the final design will. :P

The basic idea of the design is that you can see what's just played, what's currently playing, and what'll play next. Dunno about the 'next' feature -- I may well leave that out, or put a great big '?' if you haven't moved back in the list. :) Artists will be able to include the following information:
* Track title
* Artist name (composer)
* A comment
* URL for coverart (or I may make this an upload, dunno yet)

At the moment, I think I'm going to limit support to OGG Vorbis audio, because I just don't currently have the time to delve into getting PHP to convert between audio formats. So for now, when the system is up, your browser choices will be Firefox >= 3.5 and Chrome >= 3B, unless Opera can get its act together soon. (Don't hold your breath for Safari -- Apple is loathe to use anything but AAC and h.264 for <video> and <audio> tags, and I doubt that IE will see support for either <audio> or <video> before version 10.) Yes, I know that nearly all of the browsers support wave files, but seriously, who in the world would want to spend the bandwidth listening to a wave file? Seriously.

Of course, if I really get excited, I might investigate going down the path of a Flash or Java fallback mechanism for dodgy browsers, so we'll see. :D

+1 - looks nice and your implementation ideas great!

can someone tell me how to embed cover art in ogg?

thanks,

C

I'm not sure if it is possible with Vorbis Tags but MP3Tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/) can embed cover art in ID3 tags at least, and it supports OGG Vorbis, so it might be possible.

MP3Tag is nice. Especially since it can be made portable. I used Audio tagging tools, but it doesn't offer that much features.

With a concept like this, it sure would be nice to have a specific coverart embedded with every track.

The way I foresee this working (for now at least) is that for every track you upload, you can separately specify or upload coverart for that track. The actual system isn't doing any sniffing in the OGG file at all -- you enter all of the data into the system nicely for me. :) Yes, it's a little bit more work for you, but it's substantially less work for a) my webserver, whose only restriction is the number of running processes (hence also my reluctance to transcode on it), and b) me, because I would have to install the PECL oggvorbis extension, and I don't want that headache right now. :)

So Sam_Zen, with this system, yes, you can have distinct coverart for every track you put up.

Its a nice idea barry.

You're doing more work than I actually would spend on it.

For a streaming service, you would just have a playlist that plays the songs for you.

But hey, if you want to spend this time on it, sure. :D

Well LP, it gives me a chance to play with some of the new fancy HTML5 goodies, and I also get to make something pretty. :) It scratches a very big itch of mine, I guess -- which my work does too. :P

Basically, I'm enjoying it, so I'm doing it. :)

Great :D

I haven't read the entire tread, but I look on this with very positive eyes. I'll make sure to contribute music if such a project is ever realized. :D

There has been a project called Re:tracked (or smthng) where people
were taking oldies and doing them up nicely releasing them as a music
disk eventually.

It took an awful long to complete, over a year as far as I remember, also I
didn't agree on the choice of the tracks as well as on the way of
retracking them but overall the project had been successful and people
seemed to have a lot of fun doing it.

I think they even decided to continue with the project but I haven't been
following and don't know if they are doing anything.

Actually, two reTracked musicdisks have been released already, both with some nice remakes.

ooo I *love* being ale to embed a graphic in the song!!!


thank you thank you!!!!