Mar

29

Stream your own mp3s with the Google Reader player

Filed Under how-to | 3 Comments

Many of you will, at some stage of your life, want to host and stream your own mp3 file of some sort. Some of you will want to host a podcast (egads! don’t do that on your own sever! Use a content distribution network or risk having your bandwidth devastated the minute you get popular…), link to a one-off interview or just link to a sound file you think is kind of cool.

There are options, of course. Services like the micro-blogging platform Tumblr support this feature natively. You could also use a free podcasting hosting service such Odeo. However, the true hard core amongst us all (you can spot them if you look - just follow the tell tale trail of corn chip crumbs and hints of wispy neck beards) will want to host their own sound files and damn the bandwidth consequences. If you are an apprentice hard core (don’t worry if you can’t grown a decent neck beard - I feel your pain, I really do), this post is for you.

I am going to make a few big assumptions:

  • you have sufficient access to your own webserver to upload the mp3
  • you have sufficient access to your webpage so that you can either embed flash objects or add javascript
  • you actually have some sort of reason to do this (’Because I can!’ is reason enough)

The file I have chosen to use as an example is 31 Ghosts IV (available under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution, Non-Commercial license).

Note: Please don’t link directly to my mp3 file for your own testing purposes or listening pleasure. My hosting services provider won’t appreciate it, and I could do without the excess usage bill. Thanks.

Using Google Reader Flash Player

A big thank you to Eduardo Salguero for the heads up on how to access the mp3 player used in Google Reader.

This method takes advantage of IFRAMES. IFRAMES have been the cause of a number of web browser vulnerabilities over the years (too many to link to - try this Google search for iframe vulnerabilities). However, don’t let that you stop you!

All you need to do is paste the following code into your site:

<iframe id="musicPlayer" style="border-right: rgb(170,170,170) 1px solid; border-top: rgb(170,170,170) 1px solid; border-left: rgb(170,170,170) 1px solid; width: 400px; border-bottom: rgb(170,170,170) 1px solid; height: 27px" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3247397568-audio-player.swf?audioUrl=XXXXX"> </iframe>

In the above code is the phrase “audioURL”. This is the sound file you want to link to. In my case, this is http://techwhimsy.com/31_Ghosts_IV.mp3. The code becomes:

<iframe id="musicPlayer" style="border-right: rgb(170,170,170) 1px solid; border-top: rgb(170,170,170) 1px solid; border-left: rgb(170,170,170) 1px solid; width: 400px; border-bottom: rgb(170,170,170) 1px solid; height: 27px" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3247397568-audio-player.swf?audioUrl=http//techwhimsy.com/31_Ghosts_IV.mp3"> </iframe>

The final result of the above code looks like this:

This may not work inside of Internet Explorer 7. I’m still investigating why this is the case.

As you can see, the Google Reader player has a minimalist interface - fast forward, play/pause, rewind, a ’scrub’ function to skip directly to where you want to be in the song, a timer and a volume slider. It also has that slick, bubbly Google interface which can be a nice addition to a site that already has a minimalist aesthetic overall. There aren’t any extra features that you don’t need.

One downside is that the interface isn’t configurable at all. There doesn’t even appear to be anywhere in the code that you can fiddle around to change colours. This is not surprising as you are pulling the files for the flash player interface straight off the Google servers.

Coming Up…

Google Reader isn’t the only option. In the coming weeks I will also look at how to use other hosted media players as well as a couple of options for hosting not just your own mp3s but your own media player as well.

If you're new here, thanks for stopping by. If you like what you read, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Mar

13

Server problems

Filed Under housekeeping | Leave a Comment

UPDATE 15/3/08: everything seems to be fixed now, but if you had any bookmarks they might not work. You may wish to bookmark any pages again. Sorry for the inconvenience and I’m looking into setting up some redirects as well.

A quick spot of housekeeping to say that I’m currently experiencing server problems and that everything except for the front page is returning a 404 error. The problem has been logged with my host but it doesn’t tend to respond all that quickly to anyone outside of the US, I’m afraid.

In the meantime, if you want to reach me try email (shane at techwhimsy.com), twitter (smperris) or Jaiku (smperris) and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Mar

12

Mobbing the echo chamber

Filed Under PointOfView | Leave a Comment

Two issues dominated the tech blogosphere this week:

  1. Jason Calacanis dared to suggest that people working for a startup might need a different work ethic to someone punching in 9-5; and
  2. Business journalist Sarah Lacy apparently bombed an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, at the South by Southwest (SxSW) conference (remember when SxSW used to be about the music, man? It’s changed, dude. It’s changed).  The meltdown was fuelled by an angry TwitMob feeding its dissatisfaction to the broader tech community, 140 bilious characters at a time.

Both of these issues took on a life of their own and the dominated the space despite the fact that they are of limited interest and aren’t really that important in the scheme of things anyway.

The conversation around Calacanis’ post can be summed up as:

Jason sucks

I disagree

He’s a prick

Well I think Jason’s right

Well I think he’s just a prison warden, nyer nyer nyer

And I think he’s got it backwards, too

Um, I actually work for Jason. Can I say something now?

… and so on.  It’s hardly world-changing stuff, but I bet a whole heap more people have heard of Mahalo now! (personally, I think Jason sounds like my type of boss - free coffee so I don’t have to leave my desk? Sure thing. Paid for lunch so I don’t have to go outside and get it or brown bag it? Just sign here and initial there? Comfortable chairs, two monitors and a laptop for work at home? Damn straight! All this and I’m a family man.  Try working 9 to 5 while constrained by laws governing public administration and spending of tax dollars and then tell me you wouldn’t work for Jason in a heartbeat …)

As for the apparent ‘crash and burn’ of Sarah Lacy, I feel like I was the only one who thought “Sarah who?” before proceeding to not care that an interviewer misjudged her subject and crowd and had an off night. The only newsworthy aspect of the whole thing is that it was at a tech conference and therefore plenty of people were pumping up opinions live on Twitter (wisdom of the crowds or rampaging mob? You decide.)

The most startling thing for me was that in both cases it was astounding how quickly a mob will turn when the Silicon Valley/Bay Area echo chamber starts feeding upon itself at so spectacularly.  I’m somewhat saddened that from my antipodean perspective in Australia, in a week where Apple releases an iPhone SDK, a Gmail archive program turns out to be a front to scam your login details and REM streams its new album through iLike a week before its release date (I couldn’t care less but I know lots of people who do care), and this insider First World Problem dross is the best people can do.

*sigh*

Mar

9

Local Development: How to install Joomla on your local Windows machine

Filed Under how-to | 1 Comment

Joomla! is a free and open source content management system with just about everything a webmaster could ask for.  Originally created as a fork of the Mambo content management system (see how to install Mambo on Windows for more information on Mambo), Joomla! has since grown to become a full system in its own right including static pages, blogs, polls, RSS feeds, printable page versions and language internationalisaton.

Joomla! is simple to install and can be administered quite easily from the browser-based web interface.

Below is a 17min screencast that will walks through the step-by-step process to install Joomla! on your local Windows machine with the aid of the XAMPP server stack.

Show Notes

Joomla! requires PHP and MySQL.  If you follow the techwhimsy.com tutorial on how to install XAMPP on your local machine, all your bases will be covered.

Official Joomla! webpage

Free Joomla! Templates - listing of “free templates” category on the official Joomla! website

Mar

5

Why Nine Inch Nails is NOT the future model of music

Filed Under PointOfView | 2 Comments

ghosts_400x400_4Trent Reznor, the creative force behind Nine Inch Nails, has caused a stir with the release of the new NIN album ‘Ghosts I-IV‘. True to recent form (including berating record labels over pricing of NIN product and encouraging fans at a concert in Sydney to steal his music [language warning]), ‘Ghosts’ has been released online as an independent release on the mysterious "The Null Corporation" record label (nullcorp.com perhaps? According to whois, it’s a private Dreamhost registration so I’m possibly way off base on this one).

The release is being heralded as the future of music distribution and is available as a DRM free digital download, a 2xCD release (also available in stores in early April), a deluxe version with bonus data DVD of all the audio tracks (perfect for remixing the songs - a similar DVD was made available with the limited edition of the remix album for Year Zero - Y34RZER0R3M1X3D) and the ultra deluxe version with vinyl, artwork, CDs and booklets (which sold out within hours of release at $300 a pop).

Predictably, this development has been heralded as the beginning of the end of the record industry (how many times have we heard that?) as Trent Reznor continues down the "big name" path paved by Radiohead. Leaving aside for the time being the substantial differences between Reznor’s and Radiohead’s approaches, it is still difficult to argue that this NIN release is as important as the blogosphere hype-o-meter would have everyone believe.

‘Ghost’ is NOT the future of music distribution

  1. Nine Inch Nails is already a well established, highly regarded entity with a significant and fanatic supporter base, and was for some time before going independent.
  2. Much of Nine Inch Nails’ success post ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ was due to the support provided by Interscope Records, a record label well placed within the much reviled music industry/record label system.
  3. The previous success of Nine Inch Nails gives Reznor a significant edge when it comes to using brand recognition in negotiating digital and physical distribution deals.
  4. Reznor has sufficient capital to bankroll a high quality professional production with a big name producer (long-time production collaborator and well known producer Alan Moulder). While Reznor has crammed a lot of that capital down his throat, up his nose and in his veins over the years (he maintains he is totally clean now, and you can draw your own parallels between apparent sobriety and relatively high productivity of recent years), he successfully sued his ex-manager John Malm for several million dollars, which gives an idea of the kind of cash that has been floating around the Nails machine for the past two decades.

Trent Reznor has done very well out of this exercise publicity wise, and probably financially as well. The sell-out ‘ultra-deluxe’ version was limited to 2,500 copies, creating revenue of $US 750,000 in just a few hours. Of course, that needs to be balanced against the massive bandwidth costs incurred after the servers copped an absolute hammering in the days after the release of ‘Ghost’.

How easy would it be for an unknown artist to bootstrap their way towards this kind of success?

In my view, not very (if it is possible at all). If the record label/recording industry is indeed on its way out, this could be last era of the ‘mega star’. Perhaps a better indication of the way forward for a lot of aspiring musicians is what I like to call the ‘JoCo Model’.

jonathan_coulton_lab Jonathan Coulton (or JoCo as he is affectionately known to his fans) is an independent musician based in New York. A former computer programmer, Coulton quit his job to pursue a career in music. In 2005-06 he released a song a week for a year on a podcast called "Thing a Week" and is possibly best known for the songs ‘Code Monkey‘ and ‘Still Alive‘ (the end theme for the computer game ‘Portal‘). Having said that, my wife is quite partial to the songs ‘Soft Rocked By Me‘ and ‘Tom Cruise Crazy‘, so Coulton has a wide appeal.

Part of Coulton’s success can be attributed to the way he has released his music. Each of the Thing a Week tracks were released under a Creative Commons license that allowed for file sharing and non-commercial usage including things such as fan videos, non-commercial podcasts and remixes. Using services such as Eventful, Coulton is also able to tour when and where demand permits. Coulton’s music career has reached the stage where he is making more money now than in his last year as a computer programmer, as revealed on the This Week in Tech  podcast (Episode 133 - Jonathan Coulton - Functional and Elegant).

The JoCo Model demonstrates the importance of playing to your niche. Coulton’s supporters are just as fanatical, if not as numerous, as fans of Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. It is not difficult to imagine Reznor’s career having a similar trajectory had he started 2 years ago instead of 20.

Postscript: I should note that I’m a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails and have been listening to ‘Ghost I-IV’ while writing this. It’s an excellent collection of instrumental tracks and I encourage you all to go out and buy it. 36 mp3s fully tagged with individual artwork and encoded at 320kb/s is worth the minimum $5 investment. You can order from here if you like…