Alternate star rating by Bret Victor

Summize approach

For US keyboard layout it is:

Cmd + ` or Cmd + ~

But for german keyboard layout it comes down to:

Cmd + <

The Rules

• Play only songs which are available on MySpace user pages
• The next song to play has to be on a friend’s page of the former user
• Log the URLs of songs played from

The Idea

What seems to be a corset for free selection of tracks and good dj flow in playing music for the crowd leeds to some interesting points:

• Limitation of Means Leads to More Fun: I’m good in playing tabletop football and I like to play it a lot. But from time to time playing gets boring, not making any progress at having the same style and tricks for too long. Limitation of means – play with one arm only, don’t score midfield player, .. - increases my fun by giving me a new challenge.
• Few and Strict Rules Boost Ambitions: There are many different intentions to DJ - make people dance, feel good, give them new impulses - just to mention a few. But there are no written rules. Games in contrast have to give a clear goal and a set of rules to care about. Well defined rules as a frame for the game help me to be more ambitious.
• Music as Social Factor: There is nothing new in claiming music as an import factor for group-building processes. Using MySpace as a DJ-tool is about exploring the music of a friend and his friends.
• Reverse last.fm: One part of last.fm is to bring people with similar music tastes together. Using MySpace as DJ is kind of a reverse last.fm: Not using songs to connect people, but using people to connect songs.

Tecnical Barriers

To get this idea work it needs some hacks to get rid of technical limitations:

• Songs are played automatically: MySpace Flash-based audio-player starts playing songs immediately after opening a new page in most cases. This will mess up the currently played song by mixing both tunes together when exploring the friends pages to find the next song. A tool thats allows to turn off the sound of a certain window or tab would help a lot. For now the FlashBlocker extension does a good job.
• Complicated Surfing: Most MySpace pages are bloated with many embedded Flash files and too much graphics, which increases the download time of a page and makes my computer slow. It might get annoying to visit a bunch of friends before finding a new song. The selection of the next song would be much easier having the information if a user has a song on its page or not before surfing to that users page. For now I have no solutions how to access this information earlier.
• Dead Ends: Users with no or few friends might end the music session early in case they link to no new songs. It would be great to see the number of friends a user has, before surfing to his profile page. I hope the party won’t stop in an early dead end.

The Result

I’ll post a playlist - better - a list of user names after the first MySpace is my DJ Session.

HTTP

The classic: Build a web form, instert a browse…-button, submit, process data and your done. While beeing great in uploading a couple of files it becomes pretty undhandy when dealing with large files or mass uploading. Even at MySpace they use it to upload your songs and it feels quite cumbersome.

• Great when dealing with small and single files.
• Horrible when it comes to large files. The browser needs to stay open.
• Even worse in mass uploading: Did you ever tried to select a hundred files manually from your computer? I don’t think so.
• Users need feedback on the upload progress.

Zip Archives via HTTP

Zip archives are great: They are part of most modern operating systems and the de-facto standard for file compression.

• Good: File sized can be reduces dramatically.
• Good: Merge multiple files in single one.
• Bad: Complicated workflow. Search your files locally, archive them and upload. Seems to be too many steps.
• Bad: One has to implement server side zip extraction. Okay, it’s quite easy, but it will cost time.
• Worse: It’s still HTTP (see above)

FTP

FTP sounds like an obvious candidate for uploading files. But when going the web app route you have to remind yourself chances are, your audience has never heard about FTP.

• Most people – even tech savy – are not comfortable in using a third party programm.
• Configuration: entering server, username and password is way too much.
• It will not feel like their trusted operation system environment.
• People will mess up: special characters, slashes, permissions.

A Drop Box

The most promising approach. Flickr uses it and now also Fluxiom. A simple Application where you throw your files at and everything else is done automatically.

• Must-have: Zero / Easy-Configuration. Enter username/password and you’re done.
• Great: The easy road. Let users work in their existing OS, process data when user logs in next time.
• Bad: 2 Steps. Uploading and giving your data context are seperated.
• Of course one would have to build it supporting Windows and OS X.

Conclusion

When building a web app you have to consider different scenarios when it comes to uploading files.

• HTTP is good when you have small chunks of data,
• ZIP files just don’t feel right (in terms of workflow),
• FTP is good (but geeky),
• Drop boxing is best (Drag’n Drop, and you’re done), but might be overkill in implemtation.

So what do you think? Did i miss a point here? Are there other ways one might think of?

It’s alive – in English

Most obvious: The hole site has been translated to English. As we are planning to update our weblog more frequently it just didn’t feel right to have some parts in German and others in English. So in the meantime Leo is our friend. Any help on finding misspellings (there are plenty, I bet) is highly appreciated.

Restructured and realigned

Mi casa, su casa: Personal, interest-driven projects like Playmemusic and the del.icio.us network explorer are now part of our business site. And it feels good. The rest of the website has been streamlined to better readability – And our logo now features a smooth highlight. Any bugfixing tips regarding the new site are also more than welcome.

The future’s not ours to see

We had some inspiring talk about music business and web 2.0 apps with the nice people of Precious this week. Who knows where this might lead. For now, welcome 2007.

Del.icio.us is one of the most famous web 2.0 applications. It keeps your bookmarks on the web and lets you share them with your friends and discover new things.

In August the del.icio.us crew added a new feature: Network Bagdes allow users to display information about their network on their own website outside del.icio.us. On the announcement page I found JavaScript inclusions to JSON-feeds with detailed information about a users network. This information available for each user is the data-base for the network relation.

The nework explorer uses a force directed graphs visualization, which is based on the particle system form the traer.physics library for processing. Nodes repel like magnets. The egdes between the nodes act like springs. New nodes start from a random position and run to convergence.

Enough the words, explore your relations with the del.icio.us network explorer.

1. Provide a productive way to create audio excerpts.
2. Integrate it seamlessly in the established workflow.
3. Ensure that id3 tags are setup fine.

We did a quick google on that, but the results turned out not to satisfy us:

• There’s a bunch of free encoding/ripping tools, but they lacked support for creating excerpts.
• Other software solutions were way to expensive (approx. 300$) for beeing used solely to solve this specific problem.

One other thing to notice was that the whole label is dealing with Macs in their daily business, so we started considering iTunes as it ships with every new mac. Some searches later we noticed Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes, a fine ressource if you consider extending the functionality of iTunes.

So we started hacking our first iTunes AppleScript Plugin using Mac OS X Script Editor: MP3 Prelistening Maker.

What it does

1. Extract 45 seconds from 0:45 to 1:30, if your songs are shorter than 1:30, the markers are moved to the start of the song.
2. Convert to mp3.
3. Append the word prelistening to the the track and the album name in your id3 tags.

Installation

1. Quit iTunes.
2. Unzip the archive using the built in Mac OS X unzipper.
3. Copy its contents to yourusername/library/iTunes/Scripts/
4. If the folder Scripts doesn’t exist, create it.

Usage

1. Select the songs you want to process:
2. You’ll notice a new AppleScript icon in your iTunes menu bar, click it and choose Mp3 Prelistening Maker:
3. The scripts starts processing your tracks:

Further thinking

The script is far away from beeing finished, but for now it does what it’s supposed to do. One could improve it’s functionality in several ways:

• Process the songs at once, copy them to temporary playlist first. That finished converting sound becomes pretty annoying after a while.
• Ensure that Filenames are websafe for further usage.
• Ensure that the Bitrate ist set to 128kps/static so they are usable in other applications, e.g. a flash movie that makes them playable on the web.
• Delete the Prelistenings from your library and move them to a specified directory. In our case that’d be an internal file server at our office network.

Download

Use at your own risk and have fun. If you have any suggestions, modifications or improvements we are lucky to hear from you.

• Download MP3PrelisteningMaker

	
<h2>Upcoming Shows</h2>
<?php if($ld->have_upcoming_livedates()) : ?>
  <?php while($ld->have_upcoming_livedates()) : $ld->the_livedate(); ?>
    <strong>$ld->the_artist() ?></strong>
    <?php $ld->the_date() ?>,
    <?php $ld->the_country() ?>,
    <?php $ld->the_city() ?>, 
    <?php $ld->the_location() ?>,
    <?php $ld->the_info() ?>
  <?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
	

All Template functions

• $ld->have_upcoming_livedates()
  livedates in the future, next livedate first
• $ld->have_todays_livedates()
  livedates of the current date, order by artist
• $ld->have_past_livedates()
  past livedates, youngest livedate first
• $ld->have_livedates()
  all livedates, oldest livedate first

Adding new livedates supports you beeing lazy: Dates are auto-completed by JavaScript.
In version 0.1 the plugin only supports the german date format d.m.Y for editing.

The plugin adds a table “ta_livedates” to your datebase when you first activate the plugin.

Download

You may download the plugin right here:

• ta-livedates-v0.4.zip
• ta-livedates-v0.2.zip (installation bug fixed)
• ta-livedates_v0.1.zip

Additional hints

Copy the whole ta-livedates folder (not just its content) to wp-content/plugins, then activate the plugin via the wordpress admin panel.

If you want to use the plugin in your sidebar you will have to define the $ld variable as global in your sidebar.php like this;

<?php global $ld; ?>

This is our first Wordpress plugin. Don’t hesitate to give us some feedback.