Vixy and I have finished our new album.

It's been done since the beginning of this month, but CDBaby has been dragging their feet about getting the online store working, so I didn't want to crow about it here until there was actually a place to buy the thing. Anyway, it's all up and working now, so yay!

Anybody got a torrent set up yet?

Some notes on the "play buttons".

In Firefox2 (Linux), they appear to the left of the text, not to the right as suggested by the on screen help.

And it seems to allow clicking/playing multiple tracks simultaneously, which is kinda cool..

They should appear to the left of the track titles, but to the right of the little "help me debug" blurb.

If the formatting isn't working the way I've just described it, I'd like to see a screenshot, then I'll put a Linux distro onto a machine here for debugging it.

Thanks for that heads up.

And by the way, the "torrent" joke got made by someone here at work on the *day* I got the printed CDs delivered here to my office. I did an email to my coworkers saying "hey anyone want a copy?" and they were like "no thanks, I got it last night from bittorrent."

I'm considering going the Jonathan Coulton route and making a few of the tracks free for download. I won't be going the Radiohead route and making them all free, though. Anyone got a preference as to which tracks they think should be free?

Tony, I don't know what this means, but it seems that AdBlock is suspicious of your play buttons, which seems odd to me. I can't click on them because every one of them is covered by the "Block" button.

I'm not sure of the reasoning involved in which songs to make free... do you make the best ones free in hopes that listeners will be impressed and buy the CD? Or do you give away the "lesser" songs on the theory that you can't afford to give away your best work?

In any case, my favorite is the Siren song.

tanstaafl.

That is just AdBlock behaving the same way it does with any Flash controls, it is just that more obvious when you have a column of small flash controls.

I can't get the tracks to play on FF on XP (it just keeps spinning the "loading" animation), but they do play in IE7 on the same machine.

Tools->AdBlock Plus->Options->Show Tabs on Flash and Java

The single track flash player on CDBaby however works fine.

Great choice with the Nick Cave Cover.
Let's see what is 16$ in €? Oh you're allready giving it away for free

Yup, those are my findings, too. I've now got a whole page set up where I'm reporting the data on this, including exact Flash version numbers.

That's true! Which is very interesting to me. That's a "pay" flash applet that seems to have found the cause of this bug and managed a work-around for it.

Gonna add this data point to that page I'm keeping on the topic.

As was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, that's a feature of Adblock that can be turned off. But I find it interesting to note that I don't get that on any of my Adblock'd systems. Everything looks and works the same whether I have Adblock installed, deinstalled, enabled, or disable. I guess what you're seeing an extra feature that's turned off by default.

Hey thanks. We like it because the performance is so different from the original version. On the album we wanted it to sound exactly like we do it live, very raw and unprocessed, so we recorded it together at the same time, no overdubbing or editing, no reverb or effects. That pleased our fans, I'm glad to see we made the right choice there.



To answer you seriously: CDBaby does do international, including currency conversion, something I was pleased to discover.

Ok, here is another data point for you. If I load the JC page and start playing one of his songs, then open your music page in another tab then at that point your Flash player works fine.

If I then close the JC page your music player will continue to work fine, until I reload your page at which point it is broken again.

If I load your page and try and play some music and also then load the JC page in a tab the JC page is then broken.

Fun eh ?

I suspected the behavior was something along those lines.

This is with build 115? Or 124?

And interestingly - I can't get anything to work on your page, but at cdbaby every song sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks. It does it with all songs there so not a vixyandtony problem, but odd nonetheless

124

You wouldn't happen to be running on a Macintosh with its default sampling rate set to 96khz would you? I remember a problem with my Mac when I first got it where I had audio troubles all over the place (for example, no sound in MAME) until I went into the control panel and set the sound preferences to 48khz instead of 96khz.

And... What about other flash based MP3 media?

For example: Songs on people's pages at MySpace.com. Songs at Jonathan Coulton's music page.

Do those sound like chipmunk, too? And if they *don't*, does CDBaby still sound like chipmunk *after* you have successfully played a song from one of the other sites?

This is important for me because I'm thinking of paying for the button applet they're using at CDBaby. It's cheap, and if it works with the latest Flash, I'm happy.

Okay, this is odd. When I use the Wimpy Player on my own page, it just Sits'n'spins with Flash version 124 installed, just like the other player did. When I play audio at CDBaby (which uses WimpyPlayer) it plays fine with Flash version 124.

Gah.

I could possibly guess that WimpyPlayer version they have for 10second demo download is possibly a different version than the full version they have up at CDBaby. Wonder if that's why.

Arg.

No, that's not why. I ganked the version of Wimpy from CDBaby's site and I get the same behavior.

But there is progress. Some versions of the HTML induce this behavior, and some versions do not. I wonder what it is.

Now I'm sorry I split this into two threads. I thought the two were unrelated, now it's looking like they're related somehow (strangely).

Working on it...

Aha. Seems to be a quantity thing.

If I put enough of them on a page (more than about 15-16), then it starts breaking under Flash 124.

Oddly, with the big-complicated HTML code, they don't break. Only with the simplified HTML code do they break. Narrowing it down...

Okay, here's what I've got so far:

If you use the <EMBED> tag to put the thing into the document, Windows Firefox works with build 124 and any quantity of applets on the page.

If you use the <OBJECT> tag to put the thing into the document, Windows Firefox will begin to choke after about 15 applets on the page.

That's the behavior I get. And to confirm, I went searching for a CDBaby artist with more than 15 songs with samples. here's one. Whenever I try to play songs on his page, I get silence. Whenever I play songs on any page with fewer than 15 song samples, I get sound.

The dilemma is that you can't provide a proper version of alternate link text with <EMBED>.

Please tell me I don't have to dynamically fill out my page content with Javascript.

For the record it is easy to do the alt text when using just embed as the matching noembed tag works just fine. When you combine it with the object tag however you end up with the alt text displayed in IE even when the player loads.

It almost certainly is the way to go I'm afraid.

The only other thing I can suggest is splitting your three albums out into separate pages as none of them have more that 15 tracks individually.

And when you try to do it the other way around, surround the Embed with an Object tag, then you get the alt text displayed in Firefox even when the player loads. You can't win. Arg.



I'm trying to go off of Coulton's very successful model of having every song on one page so they are easily find-able.

I'd happily use Coulton's MP3 player, which works (he ganked it from delic.io.us), but it's one of those Javascript/CSS players (which I'd like to avoid), and it only seems workable if you do it as a WordPress plugin, and I don't use WordPress.

I could choose not to do alt text at all. In that case I could do an ActiveX Object tag surrounding an Embed tag. But then that means anyone with an iPhone or an iTouch is out of luck because they won't see any links with which to download the MP3s.

Yeah, I could do Javascript. But I'd rather go to bed (3:17 AM here now) now, and then wake up and spend my weekend doing more fun things, like putting bamboo shoots under my fingernails.

Wait, hang on a sec I just had an idea.

You're saying that the noembed tag is responsible for seeing alt text in IE even with the applet loaded?

But what if we used IE conditional comments?

I might experiment with that. Could be worthwhile...

Gah, it's 3:21 am and I need a life.

I thought I'd try and help you out with some Javascript to make it all easy for you. But I'm afraid I can't get even the most simple of their Javascript examples to actually play a track

Hmm - in tracking things down, my PC (running XP sp2) does it with any site. WMP and VLC both do the chipmunk thing, but Winamp works just fine.

Oh - and Teamspeak has gone all weird too. Hahahaha - playing Call of Duty and my team all sound like Alvin!

Definitely an issue with my machine...

Yeah. Assuming you only want people who run Windows to be able to listen to the tracks.

And people wonder why I want to avoid Javascript.

Anyway, over in the other thread about using the "object" and "embed" tags, I'm going to do another post asking about the <noembed> tag and other stuff. Join me there.

Oh good, glad to know it's not my stuff. Sorry you're having an issue, good luck with solving it.

The del.icio.us play button may work?

Delicious player does in fact work and allow you to serve up more than 15 files on the same page. I knew this already because that's the one Jonathan Coulton's web site uses, and his site works.

I didn't, however, know how to implement the Delicious player until you sent me that link. That's a good one and the actual coding required on my side is incredibly simple. Thanks for that link.

One of the issues, though, is that it doesn't meet my specific needs. It's one of those javascript/CSS players that I don't want to use, because, when you hit a button, the page shape and layout has to change because of the extra text that appears next to the button. There might be a way to work around that by copying and editing their Javascript code, which might be interesting to try some time.

I wonder if that Javascript trickery is how it's able to do its magic? Perhaps it's not loading one flash object for each song, maybe it's a single flash object active at any one time, and the javascript trickery is what feeds each song to the single flash object. That would definitely work around the bug since the bug is only if you have more than 15 or so flash objects up at a time.

Incidentally, the delicious player does not work on an iPod Touch or iPhone. The work-around that I implemented for my web site *does* work on those platforms, something I specifically targeted for supporting.

The Delicious player does indeed only have a single instance of the Flash object per page.

I have to say I prefer the live version over the CD :-)

Thanks, Tom! It was great seeing you this weekend. I'm glad you had a good time. Sorry I missed you when it was time for you to head out from Betsy's house. The thing we did at the MOHAI tonight went really well, too. Hope your vacation has been a great one.

And also I just ordered my iPhone 4. heh.

Our freind Sandy posted a fun set of pictures from the evening, by the way:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/damianaswan/sets/72157624524378166/