Skip to main content

Streaming Samples

Having seen the volume of sample downloads compared to purchases we have looked again at our approach and selected some streaming software to replace the straight forward sample mp3 downloads. We are aware that recording is possible but streaming is widely used by major sites and should reduce casual collection and misuse of our work.

The software relies on Flash plugins for delivery of the sound but that seems to be pretty much ubiquitous. We are also going to take the opportunity to increase the availability of HiFi samples for those with broaderband connexions.

There is obviously a clash here with our podcasting activity. It hadn't really occurred to us that our samples would be that useful but when you compare our LoFi clips with polyphonic ringtones you can see that there might be some attraction. No rash decisions - we are going to test this out gradually as we convert the site and see what we can be include in blogs.

In the meantime today's former podcast is the oddly named Bink's Waltz (now a retro fitted streaming sample) by Scott Joplin - enjoy!

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.

The Mobile Update

Wow - good job it was a long weekend so that I could complete the Mobile website update. The software I have been using to design and build the site is not really geared up for even medium sized sites like this one and there is a lot of copy and pasting involved followed by quite a bit of correction especially of download links. On the other hand the graphic design functionality is brilliant and it has been a lot easier to produce a consistently high quality visual image. However the internet does provide some very prompt feedback and Android is now the pre-eminent operating system used by site visitors for the first time.  Some of the download file sizes may be a bit big for some mobile users and we might need to restore file sizes for the mobile version. There are undoubtedly outstanding issues to resolve but I'll get to those in due course. I have taken the opportunity to update some of the text but the basic structure of the site has been retained there is just a mobile...