This Week in Creativitas: 05/11/13

Things are rolling in the revisions department! Here are links to updated songs over at my art blog, Creativitas:

UPDATE: ‘Dark Horizons’: Re-recorded and remixed with improved sounds, modified instrumentation, and various smaller tweaks.

UPDATE: ‘Death of Innocence’: Re-recorded and remixed with improved sounds (especially piano) and minor tweaks.

UPDATE: ‘Dreams’: Fixed a couple minor issues (equalized violin & flute volumes & fixed timpani).

UPDATE: ‘Guitar Rhapsody’: Re-recorded and remixed with various minor edits.

Remember, folks: Feedback nourishes me. (Hence the name.)

This Week in Creativitas: 05/04/13

Below are links to new, revised and updated works over at my art blog, Creativitas.

SITE: I changed my file hosting service from FileDen to Google Drive … and then to Dropbox. Seems to work dandy for now.

UPDATED: ‘Climax’ – Re-recorded and remixed with improved instrument sounds (especially for brass), added tubular bells, and made various minor edits.

UPDATED: ‘A Morning by the Sea’ – Re-recorded and remixed (again) with improved panning.

Remember, folk: Feedback feeds me. (Hence the name.)

Reorganizing my music; songs offline for a while [updated]

As often happens, I’ve had a sudden change of heart and decided to revamp the folder structure for my music. Which means I have to go and manually rearrange every folder in my FileDen account. Which means changing the MP3 files’ URLs. Which means they’ll all be broken links that I then need to replace (again, manually) across this blog.

I think I hate myself now.

Oh, well. Will update when done. Expect songs to alternate between on- and offline until then.

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UPDATE: 04/14/13 11:00 PM ET —

Okay, I guess that didn’t take as absurdly long as it usually does. All finished, songs fixed, bedtime.

Dreams

This entry has been removed from Preliator and can now be found over at Creativitas. (See here for more info.)

The Epic Scenery

This entry has been removed from Preliator and can now be found over at Creativitas. (See here for more info.)

Inhuman Soundtrack | 01: Escape from the Chartraine [deprecated]

This entry has been removed from Preliator and can now be found over at Creativitas. (See here for more info.)

Adrian Finale

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Musical revisionism incoming

An unexpected opportunity regarding my musical works that I may or may not be at liberty to discuss at some point in the near future may have presented itself recently. As such, I am now entering my usual routine of rushing to revise and revamp my songs in preparation, updating them with improved sounds and other various tweaks. As a result, this means you may perhaps expect a higher number of bumped musical posts on this here blog for the foreseeable future.

That is all.

Man, do I rock this cryptic talk stuff or what.

Inhuman Soundtrack | Inhuman Theme

This entry has been removed from Preliator and can now be found over at Creativitas. (See here for more info.)

Request: Gene Burmington | Softer Dreams

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Taiga Soundtrack | 06: God’s Manor

This entry has been removed from Preliator and can now be found over at Creativitas. (See here for more info.)

Taiga Soundtrack | 05: Meeting Deity

This entry has been removed from Preliator and can now be found over at Creativitas. (See here for more info.)

Taiga Soundtrack | 04: Forest

This entry has been removed from Preliator and can now be found over at Creativitas. (See here for more info.)

I swear this is my last post about my music player [updated]

It’s been a hell of a couple of weeks since my long-beloved embedded audio player (the Google Reader podcast player) suddenly up and died on me. But after a couple of tentative and deeply imperfect solutions, I’ve finally, exasperatedly, arrived at what I dearly hope is the last solution I’ll be making in a long while.

Long story short, I was able to find a copy of the source code for the original Google Reader player, and after re-uploading it to FileDen, I now have a fully functional audio player that works perfectly across all modern major browsers (I’ve tried it in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer – because people apparently still use that one). You can see it in glorious action right here!

By the by, if I sound anything less than totally excited right now, that’s probably because I now need to go and manually revamp all 50 of my music posts. Again. Again.

Seriously, the things I do for you people. Bah! Will update here when done.

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UPDATE: 08/20/12 6:37 PM ET —

Okay, that went rather faster than expected, given that I didn’t need to upload and convert and reupload and reorganize and link several dozen files this time around. All song posts are finalized. And I’m officially done with this player stuff for a while.

Tags: Google Reader • audio players

Changing my audio player again [updated]

I’m still on vacation (though it’s over in a few days – nooooo …), but I’ve managed to kidnap my computer back from my Facebook-addicted friend just long enough to notice how crappy the recently revamped music player I updated my music posts with really is. It turns out it doesn’t work at all on Chrome (at least from what I’ve heard and tried), and only a few specific plugins even allowed it to work with Firefox at all. In addition, it automatically buffers the entire audio file on each page load, which practically overwhelms my already limited monthly bandwidth allowance from FileDen.

So, after a bit more searching and tinkering around, I’ve arrived at the HTML5 <audio> element, which is the most promising so far. It boasts cross-browser compatibility (so no more being left out for you poor Chromians) thanks to the ability to swap between audio sources (MP3 or OGG), a relatively decent interface (though the Firefox version oddly lacks any volume level controls), and (particularly important on my end) the ability to prevent it from auto-loading the audio before clicking ‘play’. Here’s a little comparison (though note that the Firefox player I’ve seen doesn’t have the empty ‘X’ space above the control bar):

[source]

So, yet again, I am to spend the following few hours slowly and tediously converting all my MP3 files to OGG, then slowly and tediously uploading all my songs to FileDen (and re-uploading the ones that inexplicably fail to load the first or second or third time(s) around), then slowly and tediously revising every one of my 50-or-so music posts, then (slightly less) slowly and tediously testing them out to make sure they actually work this time around. Expect some major stability issues with the song posts until this is all sorted out.

Aren’t my vacations just the best?

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UPDATE: 08/18/12 1:43 AM ET —

Okay, so that took even longer than I expected. But I did manage to safely upload all my tunes and update my song posts accordingly with the shiny new HTML5 <audio> with surprisingly few complications (at least for now). The only problem – because of course there’s a hitch somewhere – is that the player interface doesn’t appear to agree with my Firefox (v14.0.1) and has a nasty tendency to simply disappear the second I click “play”. At least, that’s what it does on the random songs I try it on.

So, yeah, instead of screwing over Chromians, looks like I’ve now kicked Firefoxers, instead. W00t.

Tags: HTML5 • HTML5 audio • music players

Found a (provisional) solution for my music player woes [updated]

Here’s an update to yesterday’s announcement that my chosen embedded player for all my song posts had recently gone kaput. It turns out that the player itself, the Google Reader player, has pretty much died all over the place, not just for Little MP3 (the website/service I used to host and embed my songs). So now, I needed both a new host for my songs that allows hotlinking (a feature that’s apparently frustratingly rare in file-hosting sites’ free plans), and a new way to put them on this here blog.

For hosting, I ended up choosing FileDen, a simple and nifty site that offers 1 GB in hosting space and 5 GB in monthly bandwidth as part of its free plan. That’s nice and all, but given that my songs are often anywhere from 5-10 MB each, I get the feeling both are going to max out before too long. (Though, at least there’s now a silver lining to this blog’s lacking popularity, I guess. Hee.) On the upside, though, it does afford me much greater control over the uploaded songs, themselves, which is always swell.

As for embedding, my search for a decent audio player (that works) was fruitless, so I resorted to the basic “<embed>” code that results in a plain and rudimentary little player, which can bee seen in action here for ‘Inhuman Theme’. It should work for most browsers (assuming all the proper plugins are installed and whatnot), but I’ve heard that it might not work for those using Chrome, for instance. In any case, I end every song post with an offer to send my songs directly to anyone who requests them, so that should cover any problems caused by incompatibilities.

Neither of these are ideal solutions, at least until Blogger allows webmasters access to their own blog servers for direct file hosting and whatnot (you know, like WordPress does …) and there magically appears a player that’s compatible across all browsers. So, until then, this is all I’ve got. I’m now in the process of updating all my ~ 50 song posts with the new player, so keep an eye here for an update upon completion.

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UPDATE: 08/06/12 10:33 PM ET —

I’ve just finished manually overhauling all ~ 50 music posts, not to mention dealing with a bunch of glitches on FileDen’s part that damn near screwed me even more royally than before. If I may be excused, I now wish to die for a while. Maybe before a good movie or something. (Or Burn Notice. Whichever.)

Tags: audio players • Little MP3 • FileDen

Music player troubles

I have just been informed by Rob F that my beloved little audio player I’ve been using for my song posts appears to have recently died, leaving naught but an awkward stretch of taunting white space where there once was music. I’m once again a man without a music player and precious little knowledge regarding where else I may find one that’s comparatively simple and easy to use (given that Blogger kindly doesn’t allow server access for file uploads, and the filesharing websites I know of – think MediaFire – don’t allow file hotlinking, which is required by players).

And so, this blog is officially music-less until I find a decent player again. I swore I’d never go back to the traumatic hassle that is creating, editing, exporting and uploading video files to post on YouTube just for the sake of having a playable music file I can post to this blog, but unless I find a way – or some kind, wonderful, cookies-earning soul finds one for me – then yeah, I’m screwed.

Le sigh.

Tags: Little MP3 • audio players

Taiga Soundtrack | Danger (V1)

This entry has been removed from Preliator and can now be found over at Creativitas. (See here for more info.)

Taiga Soundtrack | 07: Music Box (Credits)

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Taiga Soundtrack | 03: Traveling

This entry has been removed from Preliator and can now be found over at Creativitas. (See here for more info.)