Instrumental Music

With the advent of video clips served by YouTube like this Buck Due Rag:
I have had to review and modify the way selections of samples are offered from various pages on the site.

Mostly I had switched off the automatic player to avoid the risk of intereference. The controls on the player are wquite small and I suspect that visitors would not know how to stop it.

Eventually I had the idea of creating a separate clip player page - it's small so I made it a pop-up and now I've put it behind an image in the side bar. I am hoping that this will give me better visibiliuty of the usage and I will be able to experiment with the playlist and monitor the results more easily. You can get it here.

This has already dramatically reduced daily bandwidth consumption and set me thinking about my hosting arrangements and I realise that I have not been keeping up with developments here. More on this later.

Here is the first video featuring a clip from Grenwich Whitch - one of our Ragtime Novelty tunes which have been arranged on Gamelan and Marimba:

Find links to the rest on our ragtime novelties page.

There is clearly an opportunity to completely change the way our 300 clips are delivered but that is going to take some time.

Our site has now been Panda'd but there is lttle evidence of changes to the page rankings so I'm wondering where the traffic has gone - let's hope added video helps with both human and robotic visitors appreciation of our site.
Link

Here is my first You Tube upload


I hope to be able to publish a reasonable number of clips in this way as a new avenue for promoting the business and as a way of adding video to the site.

Just a quick post to mark the new year.

The launch of our splendid Gamelan Ragtime recordings has passed with very little reaction if you ignore a brief surge of interest from Indonesia - we now have over 300 recordings available for sale on the site. The new pricing structure seems to have had very little impact with very few customers taking advantage of the very generous discount for second and subsequent orders.

We had the usual surge of interest over the Holidays as people tried to learn how to use their new MP3 players and iTunes. Interest in the nutcracker suite also peaked in the run up to the Holidays while things like the Danse Macabre fell back. Yet again our recording of Carol of the Bells proved to be a popular free download with about 1000 copies being taken again this year.

Partly because of the larger size of the samples offered on our more recent recordings and the automatic player on most pages the volume of sample data streamed from the site continues to grow with a few individuals apparently listening to them for hours.

The Download2MP3 brand continues to build steadily with both direct visits to the site and its emergence as a key word in Google searches.

Adsense continues to perform reasonably although some of the banner advertising that appears is a bit odd. Our ISP has been taken over but the new company is contiunuing with existing packages and seems to operate quite efficiently so no one should notice any difference there.

Adding 93 new produsts to the website is no mean task - not least the complex of files and code that deliver the streamed samples.

There are still a couple of outstanding issues on this front but we should be able to resolve them soon.

The remaining task is to individualise the catalog products for each product - this is not critical to the operational performance of the site but hopefully will encourage more sales and improve our Google rankings.

The development of the Face book page is also proving a bit of a challenge but I am concentrating on the website at this stage.

Native Instruments launched the Balinese Gamelan Orchestra last year and I juast couldn't resist.

It took a while to develop a suitable ensemble arrangement for ragtime music but once we had found it there was much pleaure in it's repeated application. Essentially the three main componenbts are arranged on the right hand part and separated on the stereo map with the highest frequency on the outside and the more mellow tones near the centre.

The marimbas varied rather more depending on the piece but many of them emplyed a version which runs short seqences for each note - producing a rippling effect in the left hand to add interest and body to the arrangements and improve the balance.

In many tracks - particularly the Rags and the Marches a base drum was added to the centre of the mix.

This has been great fun to produce.

We tried to contact John Cowell who produced most of the midi recordings on which these were based but none of the email addresses produced any response. Unlike some other MIDI recoders he has not placed restrictions in the MIDI file and he dosen't have a website that I have been able to find where this could be clarified. So we have decided to take the risk.

Adding 93 tracks to the site in one go is a significant enterprise but we have got there - I suspect that there are still some small errors. Testing has been hampered by some errati behavious by the system this week and upgrading the database software to MySQL 5 provided some challenges but the OSCommerce support forum came up trumps.

We have tried a price per duration structure for the last year or so and it hasn't made any difference so now we have gone for simplicity.

The Low Value Order Premium has gone for good.

A 50% discount now aplies to all orders for two or more tracks.

All tracks are now priced at $1.00.

So the minimum order value is now slightly higher for a single short piece but multiple orders at Download2MP3 are even better value than before.