RTP-area local music and culture

[grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>]

You make an excellent point. I will confess that I never really read the 
email/usenet-posted version of that list, as in my mind everything still 
revolves around the website, trianglerock.com (which also probably fails 
a host of accessibility tests due to its use of HTML tables for layout, 
although I would hope that a modern screen-reader would be able to parse 
it pretty readily. Plus the palm & RSS versions should be pretty 
digestible to anybody/any machine).

But so yeah, you're right, that format with the bands separated by 
commas, rather than CR/LF, was inherited from the website without much 
thought as to how it would work in plaintext, and adding the URLs, while 
making perfect sense via that internal logic, does make it pretty 
hellacious to parse.

I'll fix that right now.

Thanks!

Ross

Dax wrote:

> All of these points are excellent!  Especially the one about "impaired
> eyesight".  In that same vein, I would suggest that the guy who does those
> "Stuff to Do..." lists be more sensitive to how hard it has become to read
> them.  Compare a 2000 version with a 2006 version:

> --------
> <snip>
> ----------

> It's OK to include hyperlinks (how very 21st century!), but at least he
> might consider left-justifying the name of each artist so it would be
> easier to scan the list to see who's playing this week, even for those of
> us for whom there's little chance we would want to go to an artist's
> myspace page.

> thanks,
> 20th century boy


grady wrote:
> 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
> -- ch-scene: the list that mirrors alt.music.chapel-hill --
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/ch-scene