Instrumental Music

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 do...

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.

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.

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 ...

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. Unlik...

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.

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This has been our most successful Christmas gift offer yet. Over a 1000 downloads - mostly to the USA but many other parts of the world too. Over the last couple of months I have been working on a lot more Rags using the new Native Instruments Gamelan - so more good things in store for the new year. In the mean time I'd like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Peaceful New Year.

After mulling it over for a while I have decided to tackle the Big Update. Yes that's the complete shop overhaul! OS Commerce has come up with an 3.0 alpha version with a more controllable template CSS and all that and I don't need the outstanding items flagged for later releases. This time I am going to integrate the shop with the rest of the site whilst retaining the existing URLs and take the opportunity to update the overall appearance: colour scheme, Menus - the works. I'm even going to replace the database to remove any wrinkles that may have crept in. As far as I can see I just need to rent a second database and set up a development area in my existing web space to be able to develop and test as I go along. Then I should be able to change over quickly and easily. Never the less I expect this will take quite some time and if I hit anything interesting I'll do more posts. Other wise it has been a quiet summer again while the students are on their holidays. There ...

The new Google Webmaster tools have exposed a new phenomena in Google search behaviour. It has become evident from my results that far and away the vast majority of searchers only look at the first result on the results page. This is a huge change from years gone by when you could get some hits from the second page let alone the bottom of the first page. People don't pay for the 1,2,3 ads in my sector because the is not enough money in it but you can see how effective it must be in other sectors. It would appear that Google's progressive refinements to their algorithms have achieved near perfection form the searcher's point of view. This doesn't reflect some of my own experience as a searcher but perhaps that is a signal that what I am looking for may not be available. This makes the challenge of site optimistation much greater and must have implications for small competitors versus large ones. On the other hand I suppose the constant churn does give more that one pla...

After a major change like the removal of Ring tones from the product range there is a lot of tidying up to do. Dreamweaver comes into its own as a mangangement tool - enabling a site wide search for references across 5000+ files. The on line free site map tool at http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp helps too with identification of remaining site quality issues - some of which still have to be fixed. Broken links caused by typos etc. A little trip down memory lane to the menu files and a follow up today to finish the job. There is an opportunity to revamp the whole side bar now but I'm going to mull that over for a while. Oddly enough the price changes seems to have gone through relatively smoothly. Although there is little in the way of automation to help with the HTML, the back end system is relatively rigourus because the prices are only kept in one database table and that is what get's charged. Because I was editing the table in Excel I was able to use sor...

When we opened this site our declared pricing strategy was to follow iTunes. What we ncould not anticpate was that it would be so stable for so many years. But the dollar a track bulwark is beginning to crack and we have decided to go with the flow. So we have now implemented a new structure based on track duration. 5 minutes or more 0.99$(US) 4-5 minutes 0.69$(US) 3-4 minutes 0.49$(US) The PayPal processing fee has been retained for orders below 3$(US) and the 30% discounts still kick in on orders for 3 or more items. So far there has been no response to these massive price cuts - perhaps price never was an issue and music buyers are not as rational as all that. Oh and by the way we have bailed out of the Ring tone game but they might come back as freebies I suppose because they are quite nice. It was fun to do but never caught on commercially possibly because they only work on phones that can download the MP3 file from the PC.

At last we have got them launched. The production process for these recordings was a joy. It has taken a little while to get familiar with the capabilities of our new set up and the experience with the Beethoven Symphonies was very instructive. I have always loved the Mozart concertos which we have interpreted here and it was great fun working out how to arrange them to best effect. The quality of the MIDI files on which they are based is good and we now have a fairly settled mix and mastering approach which produces repeatable results. We have used the Talking Steel module before to under pin or supplement the steel drums but in the Horn concerto it comes into it's own as the lead instrument. In contrast for the Flute and Harp Concerto we used a Flute and Harp as the lead instruments and a percussion band as the orchestra but the wonders of electronic music mean that we were able to make them more prominent. We don't have complete Mozart Symphonies but the two first moveme...

Here is a blast from the past - Page rankings on Google. Time was many of us watched anxiously for the next shift in Google's ranking formulae because of the dramatic impact they could have on our site traffic. But for some time now things have been very steady on the page rank site. However today I noticed that music Downloads were in the top 10 volatile sites on the latest little excursion by Google. Here are the top 10: #1 www.apple.com... visit #2 www.kazaa.com visit #3 www.rhapsody.com visit #4 www.napster.com visit #5 music.download.com visit #6 www.ez-tracks.com visit #7 www.virtualsheetmusic.com visit #8 mp3.walmart.com visit #9 www.mtv.com... visit #10 www.limewire.com vis To see the chart got to Rank Pulse here: http://www.rankpulse.com/music-downloads?p0=on&p1=on&p2=on&p3=on&p4=on&p5=on&p6=on&p7=on&p8=on&p9=on (Rank Pulse have got a bit more secure on their image copyrigh...