The Modplug Initiative

[uncloned]

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.

[Saga Musix]

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.

[uncloned]

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

would that solve the problem?

[bvanoudtshoorn]

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.

Because I figure people will be interested, and will probably want input, here's a mockup of the design I threw together. Bear in mind that this is a mockup, and probably looks nothing like what the final design will.

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.

[uncloned]

+1 - looks nice and your implementation ideas great!

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

thanks,

C

[Saga Musix]

I'm not sure if it is possible with Vorbis Tags but MP3Tag can embed cover art in ID3 tags at least, and it supports OGG Vorbis, so it might be possible.

[LPChip]

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

[Sam_Zen]

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

[bvanoudtshoorn]

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.

[LPChip]

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.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

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.

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

[LPChip]

Great

[maleek]

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.

[Rxn]

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.

[Saga Musix]

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