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  • From: grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: your help with local mp3s
  • Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2006 08:37:25 -0400

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

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