Tech: Putting songs on a website. Help me!

Subject: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 02 Mar 00 - 05:19 PM

I want to be able to put clickies on my website next to some of my songs, so that it'll be possible for visitors to hear me sing the tunes; and I think using Real Audio is the best way, so they don't have to download the whole file before listening to the first bar of the song and deciding "!That's quite enough of that!"

But I've been having a few problems with this. (And I know other people have as well.) Anyway.I raised the question on another thread, Help! How Do I Send Sound Files To Max?, and John of Brisbane suggested starting another thread about it.

So here it is, and I hope I can get it cracked this time.

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 02 Mar 00 - 05:35 PM

Sorry, wrong code for there.

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: Mary in Kentucky
Date: 02 Mar 00 - 07:29 PM

Also I have two questions.

1) What is the best code for embedding MIDI files that will satisfy Netscape and Explorer? I thought I knew the answer last year.

2) I can't get the Mudcat MIDI program (I forgot its name) to convert a MIDI file to text, but it seems to work going from somebody else's text to a MIDI. Also, with this program, I don't understand the icons. I seem to start out with a text-to-midi icon and a midi-to-text icon, but then after I use the program, I have two more icons just like the first two but with small arrows in the left corner.

I'm also listening for McGrath's answer.

Mary

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: Áine
Date: 02 Mar 00 - 07:33 PM

I'm so glad that you've asked this question, Kevin. I've been wanting to put some sound files on my site too. I hope someone here on the 'Cat can help us.

Kevin, do you use an html editor/editing program to do your site, or do you use raw html code?

-- Áine

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 02 Mar 00 - 07:59 PM

Áine - I use Front Page Express normally, which is included in Internet Explorer (oh no, I'm using Bill Gates technology...). Except sometimes I use Dreamweaver, and occasionally Word. And I also push the magic button that says Source, and put in a bit of html when all else fails, but I don't understand that too well, and I'm too lazy anyway and don't think that way.

Which pathetic attenmpt at geek speak out of the way, I wait with bated breath for the words of wisdom to come. What is really needed is some person who knows folk music and folkie requirements, and understands the technology involved, and also recognises that it's necessary to speak in words of one syllable to people who aren't really up in this stuff.

I wait in hopes.

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: Lesley N.
Date: 02 Mar 00 - 09:56 PM

Hi Mary!

The best resource for embedding MIDI is Charles Belov's site (http://www.cabelov.com/midi/midixbbm.shtml), which pretty much says it's a muddle. NOTHING works for everything. There are scripts for on/off buttons and for different midis playing each time the page is loaded - but those will not work with several types of browsers and often cause them to lock up the entire system. I've tried everything - and have had to change code several times as Microsoft and Netscape have changed how their browsers read background music. The best bet is to keep it as simple as possible so the most people can use it - and put up with the angry mail from those who can't! Keeping it simple means that when the next time microsoft "improves" their browser, it may not be too hard to change..

As to miditext - I found it works best with midis that are as "clean" as possible - and cut out all but the melody line.

The small arrow in the corner of an icon always indicates that this is a short cut to the file being used when you click on the icon. For instance on my desktop I have an icon to a Folk Song databse which has an arrow - meaning it points to the file in another directory (and so I can delete the icon without deleting the file). There is also an icon to a notepad file listing the search requests - but there is no shortcut because that file is in the "desktop" folder - if I delete that icon I have deleted the actual file rather than a shortcut to it.

I'm not sure I helped clear up any confusion??

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: Mary in Kentucky
Date: 02 Mar 00 - 10:02 PM

Thanks Lesley, back to the drawing board for me.

Mary

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: John in Brisbane
Date: 03 Mar 00 - 09:03 AM

OK Kevin, this is SO straightforward that it can't possibly work properly, but let's give it a try.

Connect your cassette player or CD Player to the Line In/Audio In socket on your sound card. Don't worry too much at this point whether it's mono or stereo - it'll probably end up mono anyway.

From the Start Menu in Win95 use the Run and Browse buttons to find the Sound Recorder in your Windows Directory. My folder was named SNDREC32.EXE. Double click this file to open up Sound Recorder. Go to File / Properties / Convert Now and select something modest such as 8 KHz 16 Bit Mono. I don't know whether it is strictly needed but do the same process by selecting Edit / Audio Properties / Customise.

Once you've changed these settings perform your first Wave Recording for 60 seconds only. Play it back through your normal speakers and check that it sounds OK'ish. Then Save the file to disc. A 60 second recording at the chosen rate will chew up 16 kbits per second or 960 kb in total. (Let's say 1 Meg per minute). You'll then have a pretty good idea of how many minutes of music you can store on your site - at that recording rate.

You can then experiment by going back to the settings in Sound Recorder and record some small snippets at (say) 4 Khz 8 Bits. At this point it won't sound much better than an old Edison phonograph, but you'll be able to store so many more minutes of songs, plus your listeners won't require really fast modems to hear your songs. The converse is clearly going to happen if you select higher bandwidth and sampling rates.

I could go into more detail now about the next steps of converting to Real Audio format (hopefully the easy part) but I figure that you might as well conquer Step 1 first. Let me know how you get on. Best wishes, John

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: Alan of Australia
Date: 03 Mar 00 - 09:26 AM

Mary,
I wrote the MIDItext programs to allow Mudcatters to share MIDI files. Now that Max has allowed some space for uploading MIDIs to the Mudcat site the programs are obsolete (except for converting the red text in old threads).

Go here to see the site. If you have a MIDI file to post just follow instructions on the site.

Cheers,
Alan

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: John in Brisbane
Date: 03 Mar 00 - 09:34 AM

One quick note of explanation about the above. When I mentioned the number of minutes you can store on your site, I should have included the words 'minutes of.WAV' files. The Real Audio encoding compresses these files very considerably. I'm not sure if there is such a thing as an average compression ratio. A couple of the tiny files I tried squeezed the music into 10% of the space - but I believe that this may not be somewhat better than average results. Regards, John

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: AndyG
Date: 03 Mar 00 - 10:44 AM

In my experience RealAudio compresses to about 15% of .WAV at an 8K sample rate. Which is basically telephone quality sound.
As I've only used this low quality reproduction it's all I can speak for.

Kevin does your ISP support streaming audio ? If so how many streams ? You'll need to know before you try to put RA files on the server.

AndyG

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: The Shambles
Date: 03 Mar 00 - 01:19 PM

Does the music need to be in digital format before being converted to Real Audio?

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: Áine
Date: 03 Mar 00 - 01:24 PM

John in Brisbane,

Some of the files that I would like to put on my site are MP3s. Can you use MP3s with RealAudio? And don't you need to have RealProducer to this, and if you do, is it free?

-- Áine

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: John in Brisbane
Date: 03 Mar 00 - 06:58 PM

Hi All, it's Saturday morning here and I'm on the run to kid's cricket games. It'll take me a few hours to get back to you. What I will say briefly is that I believe that we should take a 'suck it and see' approach here, starting with Frank. I know that it works with WAV's, you can convert MP3s to WAVs. I don't believe that it requires an ISP to provide streaming (cos it aint live broadcasting) and Kevin isn't looking to broadcast to the world. I'm keen to see how Kevin gets on with the first step of the process - recording the analogue WAV file. If anyone else would like to try it you can simply plug a microphone into your soundcard (most of the newer ones have mic input) and record a stanza of 'The Boy Stood On The Burning Deck .... Is it in the DT?

Cheers, John

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 04 Mar 00 - 01:37 PM

Thanks John in Brisbane and othersd.

First stage A OK. Well actually not wholly, but essentially - I tried doing it the line-out/line-in way, and it wouldn't work. I sui=uspect I was using the wrong setting or the wring lead. But I also realised that with my tape recorder I wouldn't be able to listen in to it while it was playing, if I did it that way, so I tried playing the tape in fronmt of a microphone plugged into the PC instead, and that worked fine. There didn't seem to be any significant loss of quality. It also means that if I want I can stick on a backing vocal or whatever if I want to.

(But I'll probably get hold of some kind of thingy that will allow me to listen into the sound while I'm using a line-out/line-in connection, to see how that works, and top avoid any problems with sneezing or phone calls while I'm recording.)

However the next stage with Real Audio has so far got me foxed - I was able to get it so that it played back through RealAudio on my computer, but from my hard disc, not from the server, even though I thought I'd kloaded the reklevabnt files on to it. Maybe there are questions I need to ask my Servicice Provider about what they provide in the way of facilities? If so, guide me, oh wise ones, as to what I should ask them.

Subject: RE: Putting songs on a website. Help me!
From: John in Brisbane
Date: 05 Mar 00 - 08:10 AM

Frank, we can get back to some more sophisticated ways of recording your .WAV files later (maybe simply plugging in a set of headphones to the SPEAKER OUT socket on you soundcard would do the trick).

It's late enough here and I've just finished watching the movie 'Brassed Off', so I'll be brief. If you send me an email at [e-mail] I'll mail you a couple of things to get you moving. You still need to transform your .WAV file to a Real Audio file - and then post it at your Web site. Fools rush in, but I don't believe that you'll need anything special from your service provider.

In the interim, if some kind soul could point you to any smallish Real Audio file on the Web, (or send you one) you could experiment. If you can post a photo of a possum to your Web site you should be able to do the same with a Real Audio File - I've forgotten whether they're .RA or .RAM files. Cheers for now, John