How I discover new music in Streampad
August 9th, 2006At this point there are not too many tools in Streampad to help you discover new music. They are coming. A few more important things have to be done first.
That said, I have discovered a ton of new music in Streampad. Here is what I do. It is not very technical. Basically anyone can do it. I go to the Hype Machine weblist under the “Web” section and randomly click on a song. I listen. If the song is good in the first 30 seconds I allow it to play. If it is still good, I listen to the whole thing. If I think I like it, I play it again. If I still like it I save it to a weblist.
My friend Jay asked me how I have the time to discover all this new music. The answer is I don’t. I randomly click on like 3 songs a day. Some days I find nothing. Usually I find something.
Here is the latest great song that I discovered. It’s by a husband and wife duo called Mates of State. After I heard the song, I went to emusic and bought one of their albums.
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…zzzUNE (or Open Source Hardware)
July 27th, 2006Last week’s announcement that Microsoft is working on an iPod killer shouldn’t be garnering the press it has been. Microsoft has been working on an iPod killer for 4 years. For those of you who think they could not get it right because they didn’t have an end-to-end solution, think again. Microsoft made all the parts! They wrote all the software, so give me a break.
What’s more interesting to me is how they completely shit on their partners. iRiver, Samsung, Napster, etc must be pretty pissed right now. They are now buying software from their Number 2 competitor! How does Microsoft still pull this shit off? If anyone out there believes that Plays For Sure will compete with Zune head-to-head, get real.
Hopefully this event will teach something to the hardware vendors that us software vendors have know for a while. Bet your life on Open Source. Don’t bet it on another software company. I would imagine Toshiba and Sandisk are probably thinking about what comes next. They are probably thinking about starting a “consortium” of 4 other companies to create the software they need (and then try and license the hell out of it). Hardware vendors need to enter Web2.0 (did I just say that?!!). They need to look at the Open Source software that is already out there. They need to support this software and look to develop standard APIs to access this stuff. And they need to make it accessible to developers.
This post is going to start a series of posts on Open Source hardware. I am going to talk about some companies that are innovating in this space as well as what I would do if I was a hardware company.
Posted in streampad, Microsoft, hardware, open source | 1 Comment » | Save to del.icio.us
Keyboard shortcuts
July 26th, 2006Just added some keyboard shortcuts. Here they are:
p - play
q - pause
n - next track
b - previous track
This works very well if you have an ir receiver. I use the evation irman and it works very nicely.
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Add web music to Streampad
July 25th, 2006This has been in there for a few days now but I wanted to let the dust settle before I blogged about it. You can now add a podcast, website, or mp3 file into Streampad. If you enter a URL ending in .mp3 it will prompt you for a weblist to add it to. If you add any other URL it will try and figure out if there is an RSS feed attached to it. If so it will grab that. If there is not an RSS feed found, it will scrape the HTML for mp3 links. These are also auto-updating so when a new mp3 shows up on their end, you’ll find it in Streampad.
To add a URL, go to the Web section and look for the Add URL link.
Posted in streampad, rss, mashup, streampad-application, new features, podcast | No Comments » | Save to del.icio.us
Slim Transporter (wow)
July 24th, 2006Before the days of Streampad, I was an aspiring audiophile. I bought a low high-end amp, decent pre-amp, and salvaged some pretty decent speakers. In retrospect it was a mistake buying expensive (relatively) gear because I live in a studio apartment and have 2 cats. Not that it was their fault that I blew up some of my equipment, but anyway…
It was always difficult to marry the high end with the convenience of computer audio. I went as far as my budget and the stuff available would allow me. I bought a good soundcard, and set it to bypass the Windows k-mixer debacle using ASIO output. I ripped all my music using Monkey Audio lossless compression.
I got an iPod around the same time I started working on Streampad. I converted all my music to mp3 (obviously saving the ape files). MP3 definitely sounds worse on my system. I have a completely different system now than I did 3 years ago (I wasn’t kidding, I did blow it up). But the convenience mp3 offers me far outweighs the sacrifice in quality from lossless. Many people believe audiophiles are exaggerating a bit about the way they obsess over good sound. I am not sure if this is true, but some of it definitely lied in my head because now that I listen to music through my creation (Streampad), I don’t mind the degradation.
I did actually have a point to this post. Slim Devices makes the best networked audio devices out there. They also use open source software to power it (I’ll post on this soon). Many high end manufacturers have started to mess with networked audio but as you can imagine their software and UI’s all suck. There still is not a great solution for people that want high end sound with computer audio convenience in an easy to use (read: not a computer) device. Slim devices just announced a new device that looks like it may have finally hit the sweet spot. Just look at this baby (drooling on the keyboard)…
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What’s really going on with MySpace and Flash 9
July 21st, 2006After I wrote yesterday about MySpace, Techcrunch also covered the issue and was little over-dramatic. They basically reported that Flash widgets no longer work in MySpace which is just plain wrong. They do still work. But they have to be embedded with some parameters and that is where the trouble starts.The correct way to embed a Flash movie into HTML is like this:
As you can see, you should include both the object and embed tags. Internet Explorer uses the object tag while every other browser uses embed. When I paste this code into MySpace and hit Save, here is what is does to it:
![](\"http://www.streampad.com/images/blog/myspace2.png\"/)
As you can see, it chops off the object tag and makes the movie unplayable. This is just plain retarded. After seeing this, I decided to chop off the object tag myself. The latest version of Internet Explorer can also use the embed tag. So I tried this in MySpace:
![](\"http://www.streampad.com/images/blog/myspace3.png\"/)
After I hit Save, MySpace turned it into this:
Look at the src tag. They cut the url in half inserting allowscriptaccess=”never” allownetworking=”internal” in the middle of it! As you can see, they completely screwed this up and made it unplayable. Again, absolutely retarded. Next I tried this:
![](\"http://www.streampad.com/images/blog/myspace5.png\"/)
I inserted the allowscriptaccess=”never” allownetworking=”internal” myself. This worked. MySpace did not alter the code and the Flash movie played just fine.
But here is the problem. MySpace is forcing all of their users to upgrade to Flash 9. Flash 9 is the only version which supports the allownetworking=”internal” parameter. This param makes it so that any link on the Flash movie must be of the same domain as the parent page. If it is not, the link will not work. This means that the “Share” link on YouTube’s videos will not do anything.
Here is the real dilemma. If you include allownetworking=”internal” in your own code, then your links will not work on every blog that copies and pastes your code to embed you widget (assuming the user has Flash 9). If you do not include the code, then MySpace will insert it for you, but break your widget! So you must decide against working in MySpace vs. having links back to your destination site on every blog. A pretty horrible choice.
For now I chose to include the parameter. Flash 9 just came out and will not be widespread for quite some time. So most users will be able to click on the links on your widget. Hopefully by the time Flash 9 is ubiquitous, MySpace will have fixed their problem.
UPDATE: Just tried:
and it worked. So it seems that it handles it correctly when I put the .swf extension at the end. I am going to make this change as it means I do not have to put the allnetworking=”internal” in, so every blog but MySpace will be able to click on my getURL link.
Posted in streampad, flash, MySpace | 8 Comments » | Save to del.icio.us
Microsoft, Adobe and MySpace (die die die!!)
July 20th, 2006It’s been one hell of a day. As a web developer you get used to testing your site in 4 browsers - Internet Explorer, Firefox (PC & Mac) and Safari. It’s pretty much a certainty that it won’t work in one of them. If it’s IE, you just punch the desk and scream “why do you suck so bad Microsoft!!”. If it’s Safari, you scratch your head, try a few fixes, and then finally give up mumbling something about how it’s only 5% of your users anyway. If it’s Firefox, you go through your code for 5 hours until you find out why it’s broken.
I also rely on another company - Adobe. For the most part Flash works universally in all browsers. Today I came across a bug that is so annoying that I want to throw many things against the wall. If you try and embed a flash swf in IE with a url ending in .html, it just will not work. Of course this screws up the embeddable player as many url’s end in .html. I figured out a fix, but am left wondering why MS sucks so badly. They probably patched a security threat. And by patch I mean put in a quick fix that really doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
My newest company that I have to deal with is MySpace. Since I would like for the embedded player to work in MySpace, I have to play by their rules. Unfortunately, since I have started looking into this a week ago, their rules have changed 3 times. If you try and embed using the object tag it will not work. Their latest thing is to add allowScriptAccess=”never” allownetworking=”internal” automatically to embeds if they are not in there. Of course they screw this up and it renders the swf unplayable. I fixed it by putting the code in myself.
I just visited MySpace today and they are forcing all users to upgrade to Flash 9. Flash 9 has been out for about 2 weeks, but apparently it has some security features that MySpace requires. It also has some new “features” such as not being able to read ID3 tags from mp3 files that are not in your domain. Of course this screws with Streampad. Currently, Streampad grabs the ID3 tag and puts it into the database. This happens the first time a song is played, and then everyone gets the tag from the database. So for a while I will be okay as all it takes is one listener to have Flash 7 or 8 and all users benefit. But eventually when all users have Flash 9, I won’t be able to grab ID3 tags from web songs. I figure I will find a fix by then but still - it is damn annoying.
I guess this is what happens when companies get big. They do whatever they want (in the name of security) and break whatever they please. All other companies are left scrambling to fix their stuff. I noticed that YouTube has not fixed their player to be compatible with MySpace for a few days. YouTube is pretty big, but losing MySpace would be huge even for them. While I got my fixes in quickly, I am left wondering if I am going to have to play by MySpace’s, Adobe’s, and Microsoft’s rules forever. I only hope that Streampad gets big enough so they can play by mine. 
Posted in streampad, browser, Adobe, MySpace, Microsoft | 5 Comments » | Save to del.icio.us
Bloglines adds flash mp3 player
July 17th, 2006As regular readers of this blog know, I am a huge fan of Bloglines. Firefox is open 24/7 on my PC with 3 tabs - Streampad, Gmail and Bloglines. I recently started noticing that Bloglines added a flash mp3 player to all posts that inlcude an mp3 enclosure. I know I have seen that player before and believe it is open source but can’t seem to find the link.
Much of my inspiration for the web section of Streampad comes from Bloglines. When the web section was still in the planning stages, I thought long and hard about how I was going to structure the database to alert users when they had new songs in their lists (as Bloglines does for rss items). I ended up deciding that a model that alerts you is not very important for music as compared to blog posts, news, etc.
Listening to music is unlike reading a blog. When you read a blog, chances are you do not read a single post more than once. With music, you probably listen to a sinlge song many times. If you are subscribed to someone else’s weblist, and you enjoy it, you are probably going to go back to it at some point and play it. If there is a new song there, you’ll find it.
That said, all weblists do have RSS feeds (with enclosures) if you’d still like to subscribe in your reader and be alerted when new songs appear.
Posted in streampad, rss, podcast, bloglines | 3 Comments » | Save to del.icio.us
Share your weblists
July 12th, 2006As promised, you can now share your weblists on your blog with an embeddable flash player. I embedded my “Rock” weblist on the sidebar of this blog. To get the embed code, look for the red share image in the weblist details pane.
Posted in streampad, flash, streampad-application, new features | No Comments » | Save to del.icio.us
Share the love
July 9th, 2006If you would like to play a song on your blog or an entire playlist that you create, you can now do that easily. You can also play any podcast feed without first setting it up inside Streampad.
To share a single song look for “Share” on the context menu (little blue arrow next to songs). Clicking this will bring up a menu that will give you some links to share songs.
There are 3 links -
- Links back to Streampad and starts playing the song.
- Allows you to embed a flash player in your blog or myspace that plays the song
- Direct link to the mp3 file
Here is the embedded player for a single song. You can set it to start playing automatically or not. Check out the right side of this blog for the multi-song player.
Posted in streampad, flash, web2.0, streampad-application, new features | No Comments » | Save to del.icio.us
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Streampad blog is written by Dan Kantor. It is mostly about Streampad - an online music app that allows you to stream music from home, listen to podcasts and create, remix and share playlists. It is sometimes about my music industry thoughts, and other random tech stuff.
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