I studied the course linked to below at University of Sussex, which is a combination of Computer Science, AI and classical Music.
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/courses/music-informatics/overvie...
1,207 karma · joined July 2, 2007
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/courses/music-informatics/overvie...
http://rfw.posterous.com/how-nodejs-saved-my-web-application
At present: 128kbps MP3 (near-CD quality), both streaming and stored. This is much higher than most streaming services but lower than SoundCloud. Both numbers may change in future depending on a number of factors.
> Do you plan to convert to a paid service in the future to support yourself financially
It is already a paid service, with free credit for new users. I haven't settled on the exact business plan however. A lot of people have suggested a free option at low bit-rate, which is an idea I find interesting.
I will be building a search/discovery mechanism when there is more music to search for and discover :-)
Don't do either, then. If you don't want to give money, just give a polite and firm "no". I can't believe that anybody takes such a response personally.
To be honest, it's no wonder this guy is harassed by the homeless if he is handing out $100 to them inside a week.
There's an interesting reason for that.
Although English contains elements from numerous languages, it's two primary ancestors are French and the Germanic Anglo-Saxon.
In the middle ages, most of the English peasantry spoke Anglo-Saxon. The nobility, however, all spoke French for several hundred years after William the Conquerer invaded in 1066.
To this day, that ancient split in languages is still obvious. Everyday words in English, including words for animals, household words and swear words, tend to be Germanic: short, guttural and abrupt.
Words to do with civic society, culture and the ruling class are usually from French. They are usually longer and sound more refined. Examples: parliament, judiciary, government, etc.
My problem is that the contract, whether legal or implied, that I had with Facebook offered me a certain level of privacy, and protection of data. This is what Facebook built their reputation on. Because of this contract, I uploaded a lot of personal photos, notes and information and generally became deeply involved in the service.
Every time Facebook have a new API release or re-design, however, I became familiar with the uneasy awareness that another slice of this personal information was about to become available to businesses, friends of friends, the general public and goodness knows who else. The final straw for me was the realisation that my friends list was going to be made public, and there was nothing I could do about it. There is no way I want the list of my personal friends and acquaintances being made public: it is just beyond the pail. In hindsight, I should never have put that information on the web at all, but there you have it -- I trusted Facebook to look after that information, and Facebook repeatedly broke my trust, and that's why I've left.
I believe that there is very good reason to protect the basic tenets of our privacy online, and Facebook have shown themselves singularly incapable of doing that. As well as that, I am highly unimpressed with the direction and quality of the product, particularly the UI which has devolved from one of the best on the web to a cluttered, unpleasant mess.
I haven't missed Facebook once. Nowadays, I stick to Twitter, where the contract is clear. Everything is public, and we all know where we stand.
I take your point though. I only know EventMachine a little, and I've never used Twisted. And there's other solutions too. Pick the right tool for the job.
I'd love to see how far NodeJS could cope without the use of a queue though. I'm still something of a NodeJS novice but I'd guess that reading/processing every chunk inside a process.nextTick() callback would cause more disk IO problems than memory ones.
When I get the app running I might do some load-testing, the results would be very interesting.
Before I switched, I would typically have to log into the server several times a week to restart the Workling processes. I switched to REE a couple of months ago, and I just did a 'ps aux' on my server: the processes have now been running for over a month without a problem.
Also there is something rather appealing about using Javascript on both sides of the server/client divide. It's really very natural feeling.
I agree though, that EventMachine is potentially another option.
Whatever the motivation of this acquisition, Facebook simply doesn't appear to do enough to look after my privacy, especially given the personal and sometimes sensitive nature of the data they are handling.
The notion that they want to expand into online payments and banking is laughable without a dramatic rethink of their approach to data.
For a company which built their reputation on protecting their users' privacy to follow the path it has is tantamount to business suicide.
This website has all the attributes to become a viral Facebook/Twitter hit, and it's clearly been designed to achieve this.
But why not give it a miss, and focus on what you're doing in your life instead of on what other people think of you. Especially when they don't even have the courage to say it to your face.
After he had finished mixing the record and used a lathe to cut the lacquer, he showed me the grooves which has been cut using a microscope attached to the lathe. Not quite as much detail as the photos above, but more than enough to see clearly how the shape of the grooves creates the resultant waveform.
Really, really incredible feeling.
Vinyl records are, without a doubt, one of my favourite pieces of music technology.
* Planning laws in the UK exist largely to protect the countryside from being over-developed by often powerful building firms.
* Surrey (the county where this man built is castle), being directly south of London, is one of the most difficult and expensive areas to buy (or build) property.
* The English countryside is under threat, especially in the south-east of the country where urban growth is a constant threat to communities.
* Planning laws are well known and understood here. This man tried to circumvent them at every opportunity, for his own benefit, and got caught out. Big time.
You can argue that this is only one little castle, or that it shouldn't apply to individuals, or whatever, but the fact is that the laws exist and (generally) do a good job at making sure that the beautiful countryside doesn't turn into an over-developed shit-hole.
I understand the reasons these laws exist. There's no reason at all to call them out for being either over-bureaucratic, or an example of the over-arching state. They exist for a reason, basically the good of the wider community, and this guy tried to circumvent them for his own selfish (presumably financial) benefit.
I've absolutely no sympathy for him at all.
The fact is that audio latency, hardware support and plugin support (amongst many other factors) are always likely to be severely limited when running in a browser environment of any kind, let alone on top of the Flash run-time.
This is a great toy, and huge respects to the creator, but if you're even remotely serious about making music, you'll be ditching this within minutes and picking up a custom-built music environment which goes nowhere near a web browser at all.
Sorry, but anybody implying that this is a good reason to retain Flash is going to have to come up with a much more convincing argument.
There's some further information as to how it's achieved in the comments, as well as link to the academic paper the product is based on.
Slightly more useful (in every sense) would be to write a script which did this to code automatically.
I often think that there exists a clear analogy between electronic music and video games. The computer games of the 80s and early 90s possessed a simplicity and level of fun - often characterised as playability - which was to a certain extent lost when the exponentially-increasing power of hardware in the late 90s led to programmers to concentrate on all encompassing 3D effects at the expense of simple fun.
Likewise, I feel that many musicians today get too caught up in the neverending technical possibilities offered by their software (and digital hardware) at the expense of good, simple music which hits a spot close to the heart.
All the gear, but no idea - to coin a phrase.
I'm not sure what you'd call the musical equivalent of playability, but I think more musicians should bear it in mind. :)
It works well, there's a ton of options to allow users to sign in (Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, Yahoo and others, and I recommend it.
I didn't see any monetization in my (admittedly brief) visit. Do you have any plans to make money from the site?
Actually, I'm a bit surprised that this article has been voted to the top of HN. It's not particularly interesting or challenging from any perspective that I can think of.
But for most tech stuff: Twitter.