Instrumental Music

Two phase operation for site wide update completed.

In phase one links to 30 second LoFi clips and to complete HiFi MP3 file downloads were added to all the relevant pages - about 60 of them.  The clips are playable by the Yahoo! Media Player but the full files are not so they are available to save or play on the users media software once they are downloaded. This makes the 300  individual product pages pretty redundant but they are not pulling their weight from any point of view these days so we are concentrating on front of house. At the same time a new emphasis on the Donationware aspect of the site was incorporated. Several approaches have been tried and we hope that results will guide subsequent refinement. Also the video windows were increased to full size on as many pages as possible. The You Tube channel is looking pretty good so we are also starting to emphasise that.  I suspect that is responsible for much of the recent growth in keyword searches on our brand name.

Phase two involved the Search Engine Optimisation of the site. These days we use the Google Webmaster Toolkit to see what is going on.  There is a lot of noise from our iTunes Help page in the standard presentation but downloading a CSV file and editing it provided an actionable data set. The key word aspects of each page were reviewed and the best opportunities for success were emphasised. Some pages were just tidied up to reflect the new donationware status of the site while others are targeted on specific keyword combinations where we already have good or reasonable positions. Naturally we hope the donationware status will make a difference but there are so many people competing on the word free we are not holding our breath.

Just sitting back and waiting for a few days to see what effect all this has.

I've taken the UK Gift Aid link off because it was broken and I'll come back to that when our Rotary club has registered it's charitable fund and set up an online donation facility.

I have summarised the results of my Apple compatibility research on these pages and tidied up the meta data a bit.

Trying the iPad again last evening I'm even more convinced that the Free Music Downloader for iPad App is the way to go with the opportunities for play lists et cetera to organise and shuffle your downloads.

There is also a paid for version "Free Music Download Pro" for the iPhone and iPod which is available in the App Store.

To be honest the very simple filing system on the iPad is a bit of a culture shock to some one who cut their computing  teeth time sharing on a mainframe with a telegraphy terminal - paper tape and all. But I guess it is good for what it is intended for and mobile users are likely to become a progressively larger part of our audience.

It has been an interesting few days exploring Apple compatibility issues for video and file download.

For video HTML5 seems to offer the best hope in the long run but the current confusion makes for a very laborious process to publish videos that can be seen on all the main platforms. At the moment I think I'm going to wait a while and see if You Tube's developments deliver the goods.

In the meantime I'm going to recommend iPad users buy the mobile iCab browser which enables MP3 download and also plays my YouTube videos with the reservation that they may need to be resourceful users since the help files are only available in German.

More interestingly there are also free iPad Apps for MP3 download storage and playing which I can recommend - still exploring how to get them across to iTunes but I'm reasonably hopeful.

I've still got to check out the Mac itself @ younger daughter's house but I'm guessing that iCab will be useful there too.

In our family Apple computers, iPhones and an iPad have been adopted by the distaff side which is the majority which does it's best to overwhelm me. I bought an Apple IIe and a Mac once but that was in another century.

So having eliminated Flash streaming software I am now exploring how to make the site more accessible to them.

I was a bit shocked to find that the Google Ads on my site don't show on the iPad and neither do the embedded videos.

I have identified a potential solution for downloading and so I'll be getting the app and testing it out.  The embedded videos will require more research.

In the mean time visitors from Windows platforms have started to download in some numbers - just waiting for the donations to kick in!

With the move to a free download site we have introduced requests for donations from those who enjoy the music.

This is a step in the dark but the advertising revenue now pays for the ISP service we have moved to and sadly OS Commerce has become more difficult to maintain.

So we have adopted the Rotary International End Polio Now Fund as our preferred charity. We have waited on tenterhooks for India to complete a Polio Free Year and that has been confirmed in the last few weeks. So we are really close - with just Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan to go. It was particularly encouraging to hear this week that Afghanistan and Pakistan have agreed to work together to tackle this problem - no doubt Rotary and the other NGOs involved will get in behind this with the relevant financial and technical support.

Our existing Business account with PayPal means that we are able to offer the Donate button and associated facilities. For UK tax Payers we offer an alternative route where their donations can be Gift Aided.

So we shall see how much enjoyment we generate and how trusting and generous our visitors will be.

A dramatic shift in direction for the site was implemented this week.

From now on the full HiFi MP3 recordings of our original arrangement are available to download free of charge. Some visitors have already spotted this opportunity and started to down load their favorites.

This change has also seen the elimination of the two Flash based players for the clips published on the site and their replacement with a Yahoo! player. This seems to works across all the platforms I've identified so far but deploys cookies to identify what is going on.

The other new feature is an updated Downloading Tips page which goes into the right and left click options on the four main browsers.

The next job is to work up advice for Mac and iPad users who have been hindered by the flash used previously.

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.