Thomas Ballard - MusicOnce upon a time I thought I'd be in a band. (P.S. I'm an idiot.) Finally I realized I suck, but nonetheless I find enjoyment in my sucking. It's fun to get creative--at least I think, I think it's fun. Long story short, here's some of the output from fiddling with various synthesizers and MIDI software. There's a web development angle here as well. Namely that there are various means of making audio content available on the web, each with it's own pros and cons. I'll explore a few below. My Music
From a web development standpoint, these examples are included using basic HTML techniques.
They are HTML anchors described in an unordered list, and styled using css to allow them to wrap horizontally
to fill up the available space. Clicking passes a reference to the href to a function named launchMusic which
uses the href property of the passed object to populate the src property of an iframe that occupies the right hand
side of the UI.
Exploring In-Page Music Players -
Sometimes the browser doesn't do a good job of handling audio files. More about that later.
There are some great flash based players that can help you get music playing in your web page.
I'll explore some here:
Google Reader Audio Player - I love Google, so I thought I'd lead off with their audio player. It's included using the standard HTML mechanism for including flash. It has some issues with the way I do my development (see below in the notes), but it's a great plugin nonetheless. Yahoo Media Player - I'm a fan of Yahoo as well, and this one is interesting in that it's simply a line of script that you include--super easy! That script scans your page finding HTML anchors automatically, and appends controls beside them to launch the link using the media player. It has two issues with how I'm doing my dev. First, it wants to hijack all of my audio links. But in my case, I'm using the href to contain the url to the file, and the onclick to target an iframe in the page and load the href into it's source property (an old-school-ish way of launching the audio in-page, if your browser is set up to handle the links using a plugin). The other problem is outlined below (same issue that afflicts the Google player). Some notes about web based audio players. So here's a fun little problem. I tend to develop without a web server, just using my local file system. This is common for many front end web developers, as we don't -need- to have a web server running to ply our trade--at least until we need to interfacing with a database or involve a server-side parsing language for swapping variables in HTML. The browser generally accommodates everything via local file paths without any problem, until you slurp in an application from the web. The Google and Yahoo players above live at urls on the web, which isn't an issue as long as we're requesting this page over the web. However, when you render this file locally, the audio players that are loaded from urls on those other servers, cannot access the relative links to songs that live on the local file system. This is actually good for security reasons, but problematic for troubleshooting without a web server running. An alternative is to download a player (such as the dewplayer example) which lives locally and runs locally as happily as it does when loaded from a different domain. Anyway, it's an interesting caveat that can complicate you own QA efforts if you test locally via the file system. Dewplayer - To solve the problem of testing via FILE and HTTP protocol, I found this player which you download and store along side your files. Because it gets loaded via the same protocol, this works via FILE and/or HTTP seamlessly.
Music and Development Notes -
The "music" was created on a Roland U-20 midi keyboard.
I recorded using various midi programs (I'm not married to any specifically as at the time these were recorded I was just trying to learn how to do this).
The midi files where then exported from MIDI format to MP3.
This was done by opening the midi program, and a separate program which handles the conversion.
The midi files were then played out through the keyboard (in order to use the onboard sounds from the keyboard) using the midi program,
and recorded by the MP3 conversion program which was used to save the MP3 files.
Once you have MP3 files, at that point you can basically feed those to any MP3 player and they'll play.
In order to put these on my website, I simply included links to them (the mp3 (and in one case "wav" files) and included them with the files I uploaded. When I click these links, they launch my audio player (media player in the case of the mp3 links, and quicktime for the wav file). This is handled by the browser using whatever application is mapped to the mime type. Visitors experience with this behavior ranges as each computer is different and depending on what's installed, different applications may be set up to handle these audio files. For example, where I see these open in the web page are start playing, I've seen other cases where a download link is opened (giving a visitor the opportunity to save the file to their own computer, and launch it separately, or to send the file directly to the application (open) in which case it downloads and gets stored in a temporary cache while the file plays through the application. It's a bit confusing sadly as normal people don't need (or want) to know all this detail--and get bored or angry when it doesn't just work seamlessly. An alternative to relying on the browser to manage the play, there are various media players which can be used in the page. For example, I'm test driving one called "DewPlayer" which is written in Flash and is included in the page using HTML. Results can vary as it depends on the visitor having the flash player installed, but in my experience, this tends to be more often the case than having the audio application in working order.
Inspiration - Sadly, I'm too infrequently reminded what a crucial role music has played in shaping my thinking and temperament.
William Orbit and Peter Gabriel.
I can't say thanks enough to these folks for the influence their music has had on me.
I aspire to overcome monkey hands and melodic impediment to reflect even a part of that inspiration before my socket to earth.com closes.
Perhaps monkey hands are better for typing that for plucking.
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