RTP-area local music and culture

[grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>]

I'm pretty sure he meant for local *bands* to tag their *own* stuff 
correctly & post it. I'm not sure that the folks in Superchunk, Marat, 
or Thad & Caitlin would be all that thrilled to see entire albums posted 
online like that, even if you *did* get the ID3 tags completely correct.

On a side note, since this is something which seems to come up a lot 
lately, particularly with band websites (and since the most recent Flash 
player available for Linux is Flash 7, and more & more folks are 
generating Flash that (often pointlessly or inadvertently) isn't Flash-7 
compatible, half the time I see garbage, or nothing at all, or my 
browser crashes--in your case, I see NOTHING AT ALL and have to view 
source to see the list of urls embedded in your flash movie, which I can 
then type in manually to open):

What on earth is wrong with plain old HTML?

Where is the value-added from your use of Flash? If I open the page on a 
windows box I see four lines of text, three of which are URLs which 
change color on mouseover. I'm pretty sure a little HTML and JavaScript 
could handle that, and if you're so concerned about font choice and 
kerning, you could (uggh) use images in an HTML table instead.

Ah, I see on more poking around your site that you don't seem to have 
any HTML at all that wasn't auto-generated. Could I perhaps suggest that 
you consider the following:

1) Not everybody is using a browser for which there is a Flash plugin. 
The browser on my PDA, for example, which I use a lot, has something 
resembling a Flash plugin, but it tends to choke on most of the Flash it 
sees. My main machine runs Linux, for which there is a Flash 7 plugin. 
The Flash 9 plugin is due out sometime in 2007, near as I can tell.

2) Some people don't like Flash & have it turned off by default. (Some 
people don't like Flash and only *wish* they could turn it off, but 
unfortunately too many people rely on it for basic page layout nowadays. 
Grrrr.)

3) In many cases, if you're browsing in a tabbed browser, and you've got 
multiple tabs open with Flash movies on each, at a certain point some 
kind of saturation-point is reached, and the whole thing pukes & locks 
up the browser.

4) Some people have disabilities, including impaired eyesight, and they 
use screen-reading software. Try viewing the source on one of your pages 
& tell me what the screen-reader is going to read to you.

cheers,

Ross

tommy Gibson wrote:
> Chris,
>
> I put 3 of my favorite "local" albums online.
> I'm pretty sure they're tagged appropriately (ID3v1, not v2).
> Song titles are links to the actual mp3s.
> If any of these files look like they might be useful, please
> feel free to help yourself.
>
> http://tommygibson.com/mp3s.html
>
>
> -tG
>
>
> Chris Calloway wrote:
> > i need your help. all the cool kids are doing it. you
> > may as well, too.
> >
> > in less than a couple of weeks, i teach (yes, i know,
> > hold your laughter) a computer programming boot camp
> > for research scientists in a number of disciplines.
> >
> > for one of the first lessons, the class walks through
> > a nearly trivial program which parses ID3v1.0 tags out
> > of MP3 files and prints them. like so:
> >
> > album=you win
> > comment=http://www.thestrugglers.org
> > title=the cascade range
> > artist=the strugglers
> > year=2005
> > genre=255
> >
> > we'll do that because it's easy and fun compared to
> > what we normally do all day. ID3v1.0 tags are the last
> > 128 bytes of an mp3 file if those bytes begin with the
> > string "TAG" and then the data is positional from
> > there. whoo-hoo. that's is about as easy as metadata
> > gets.
> >
> > because not only local folks, but people from all over
> > the country are coming to this class, i thought it
> > would be fun to populate the example mp3 directory for
> > testing the program in this lesson with tunage from
> > some of my favorite local bands.
> >
> > so i went to trianglerock.com and spent way to much
> > time downloading mp3s made by many of you kind people.
> >
> > this despite deadlines are looming large quickly and i
> > really don't have time to spend skipping through mp3
> > gardens. i mean, sleep is entirely out of the question
> > for awhile. like, i've been meaning to write this
> > email for three months now and i can't wait any
> > longer.
> >
> > so after spending this time downloading, what i find
> > is that very few of us tag our music files. the
> > strugglers, as shown above, are a very fine exception.
> > thank you, strugglers! the moaners, veronique
> > diabolique, vibrant green, and jett rink also get
> > merit badges for having at least partial tag data.
> >
> > and you should tag your files. embedded tags are what
> > allow you to see what's playing in your player without
> > having to attach to some creepy file signature service
> > on the net collecting data about what you listen to.
> >
> > so to finally get to the point, what i'm asking is, if
> > your local band has mp3 files you'd like a captive
> > audience of geeky science nerds to hear, tag 'em with
> > complete and informative ID3v1.0 tags and send 'em  or
> > a link to 'em to me via private email at the from
> > address of this email. i'd be pleased as punch to plug
> > your tunes in return for a good sampling of complete
> > tag sets.
> >
> > There's a whole crapload of freeware, shareware, and
> > otherware tag editors here:
> >
> > http://www.dailymp3.com/id3tagging.html
> >
> > and still a bunch more not listed there all over the
> > web.
> >
> > also, i'm looking for id3v1 tags and not id3v2 tags.
> > id3v2 tags are more complicated and less suited for
> > this nearly trivial lesson. pretty much all of those
> > tag editors will let you choose which tag version you
> > are applying to your files and some are smart enough
> > to do both.
> >
> > ok, thanks. that is all.
> >
> > 3
> >
> > -- ch-scene: the list that mirrors alt.music.chapel-hill --
> > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/ch-scene
>
>
> -- ch-scene: the list that mirrors alt.music.chapel-hill --
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/ch-scene