The Modplug Initiative

[LPChip]

Am okay with that... X)

[psishock]

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.

[LPChip]

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.

[uncloned]

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/

[Saga Musix]

Managing a radio should be easy using Demovibes - the engine of Nectarine Demoscene Radio.

[LPChip]

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.

[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.

[Harbinger]

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!

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.

[LPChip]

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.

[Saga Musix]

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?

[bvanoudtshoorn]

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.
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.

[LPChip]

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.

[Saga Musix]

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.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

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

[bvanoudtshoorn]

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. 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.