New jukebox coming soon

[Gnasty]

I like this thread a lot. Great ideas here, and no one gets cyberly hurt.

Pick your own songs. Makes total sense!

[64Guitars]

The idea of "Songcrafters Radio" has been suggested several times before. On the surface, it sounds like an interesting idea. But when I start thinking about how to implement it, I realize there are many problems that would need to be resolved. There has to be some database table or master file from which the radio jukebox makes its playlist. And there has to be a way for songs to be added to that list without my intervention. The most obvious way is to have the jukebox select songs randomly from the existing database table of message attachments. But we already have a player that does that. Just click the Member Jukeboxes button at the top of the page and it will pick 12 songs at random and start playing them. After you've finished listening to those 12 songs, you can reload the page or click the Random link at the top of the member list to select another 12 songs randomly. I don't think a Songcrafters Radio based on random selection would be significantly different from this existing Random Dozen player, so it wouldn't be worth doing.

So that leaves manual selection of the playlist. I don't have time to do it myself but maybe we could have some volunteer DJs who create a playlist of a dozen or so songs that they want to recommend. So we might have the Henwrench Radio Show, followed by the Oldrottenhead Radio Show, followed by the Gnasty Radio Show, and so on. My biggest concern with this idea is that there would probably be a lot of enthusiasm in the beginning and many members would like to have their own radio show featured. But how do we handle all of the submitted playlists in a fair and efficient manner so that everyone gets a fair chance? And what about when enthusiasm fades and/or life gets in the way, and the DJs stop submitting playlists? Does the radio just sit idle?

There would be a lot of technical problems for me in creating such a radio. The biggest one is that I'd have to find some way that the volunteer DJs could upload their playlists and have the software automatically process them and add them to a yet-to-be-created database table or master list. It's not impossible but I'll have to give it a lot of thought and it will take a lot of my time to create the software that's needed. And, if the idea fizzles out after a while because life gets in the way and nobody's uploading any playlists, then all my time and effort will have been for nothing.

I don't know. I'll try to think some more about this and maybe I'll come up with an idea that solves some of the problems. But I doubt that a Songcrafters Radio will be seen in the near future. If it happens at all, it will probably be quite a while from now. In the meantime, I suggest that people use the Random Dozen playlist of the Member Jukeboxes.

One feature I personally miss, was the Song Of The Day. I loved that. I don't know how each song was chosen but I'd been an active member for a long old time before the honour was bestowed upon me and I was really proud when I finally achieved this. It was a Good Day.

That one's easy. The computer just selects a song randomly from the database table of message attachments at the start of each day. There's no room to put it at the top of the page like it used to be, but I could put it on the front page. I wonder if it's worthwhile though. Would many people actually listen to the Song of the Day? I know that when we had it before, I might glance at it occasionally to see what that day's song was, but I seldom actually listened to it. It's not a new song, so I've most likely already heard it. There are so many new songs being posted every day that I'd rather spend my time on to try and keep up with all the posts.

I have my doubts about the Song of the Day being a popular feature, but if people would like me to bring it back I will. As I said, it's fairly easy to do. I think that one of the nice things about the old one was that it was at the top of every page so everyone at least saw it, even if they didn't necessarily listen. But I'm not sure how many people will even bother to look at it if it's only on the front page. I suspect it will be a feature that goes largely unnoticed. But I could be wrong.

[T.C. Elliott]

A few thoughts.

RE: Radio - Is there a way that a jukebox can be playing 24/7 and when you click on it, or load a certain page, it picks up wherever the jukebox is currently playing (even in the middle of a song?) In other words, why not use a jukebox as a radio with two versions, the favorite songs (as selected by the songwriters themselves) and a player that plays all the songs posted (or at least uploaded) over and over again.  The radio doesn't have to be programmed in a the usual sense. I could actually see using a jukebox as the radio and just changing the jukebox. Play the Beatlesfest for a few weeks then switch to the favorites or to the Neil Young fest (which I hated to miss) etc... anyway, just a thought.

re: Compilation - Having been through the FAWM compilation process I'm a bit wary of it because the problem that popped up most wasn't that a particular person's song wasn't included, rather the complaints were because a person's favorite songwriter wasn't included. I bet that a community such as this one would have similar issues.

However, I've brought this up before with limited response, how about a bandcamp release of submissions? If the jukebox is small enough (and everyone who submits gives permission) you could make a bandcamp release of everyone's favorites. You could even do multiple volumes so if there were 200 songs you could do 10 20 song releases. If there were only 20 songs you could do one release. It would take some work and a curator, but it isn't THAT intensive. I've been part of these things before and they sometimes work out REALLY well.

re: minimum number of songs posted - I think this is super necessary, but I also agree that a very small number is adequate. Three sounds nearly perfect but I could see four or five or so. The idea is that it should be a reward for ACTIVE members. And a new person that remains active can be included on the next juke so they aren't being excluded.

re: Blooby's underwear - enough information is currently available, I will move that we put this issue to rest.

oh, and re: random - I would love to have a truly random juke. I've seen one where it took a set number of songs at random and played them in order it populated the juke. So out of say, 5000 songs it would pick 100 songs and play them. If you clicked the link again it would randomly pick another 100 songs (or 50 or whatever) and play them. So the shuffle mode still worked, but you didn't really have to use it. It's a decent work around if it were to work.

[64Guitars]

I've been thinking about henwrench's Song of the Day request and I thought I could solve the problem of having nowhere to put it at the top of the page by increasing the height of the header.

Currently, the header looks like this:



But I could expand it to add a new empty line for the Featured Song of the Day and the Songcrafters on the Radio button. And there'd still be some room left to add buttons for any future jukeboxes or other ideas.



The side effect of this is that there's slightly less room left on the page for the messages, etc. For people using large monitors, it probably won't even be noticed. It might be noticeable to people using smaller screens, but it's probably not enough to worry about.

[64Guitars]

RE: Radio - Is there a way that a jukebox can be playing 24/7 and when you click on it, or load a certain page, it picks up wherever the jukebox is currently playing (even in the middle of a song?) In other words, why not use a jukebox as a radio with two versions, the favorite songs (as selected by the songwriters themselves) and a player that plays all the songs posted (or at least uploaded) over and over again.  The radio doesn't have to be programmed in a the usual sense. I could actually see using a jukebox as the radio and just changing the jukebox. Play the Beatlesfest for a few weeks then switch to the favorites or to the Neil Young fest (which I hated to miss) etc... anyway, just a thought.

An interesting idea but I can't think of any way to implement it. The jukebox runs in your browser, not on the server. So the software running on the server would have no concept of the current song or the position within a song. If the length of each song was known and accessible by the software, it might be able to fake it by adding up the times of all of the songs and calculating which song in the list should be playing at a given time. But that would be a lot of work and it's not a job I fancy tackling anytime soon.

re: Compilation - Having been through the FAWM compilation process I'm a bit wary of it because the problem that popped up most wasn't that a particular person's song wasn't included, rather the complaints were because a person's favorite songwriter wasn't included. I bet that a community such as this one would have similar issues.

However, I've brought this up before with limited response, how about a bandcamp release of submissions? If the jukebox is small enough (and everyone who submits gives permission) you could make a bandcamp release of everyone's favorites. You could even do multiple volumes so if there were 200 songs you could do 10 20 song releases. If there were only 20 songs you could do one release. It would take some work and a curator, but it isn't THAT intensive. I've been part of these things before and they sometimes work out REALLY well.

re: minimum number of songs posted - I think this is super necessary, but I also agree that a very small number is adequate. Three sounds nearly perfect but I could see four or five or so. The idea is that it should be a reward for ACTIVE members. And a new person that remains active can be included on the next juke so they aren't being excluded.

I've come up with a compromise that addresses all of these points. But I don't want to say more about it until all members of the admin team have had a chance to read it and give me some feedback. They might think of some important points that I've overlooked, so I don't want to say more in case it turns out to be flawed and we decide against it.

I know almost nothing about Bandcamp except that it's a commercial site. They exist to make money. For that reason, I'd rather not use their services. I know that some of their services are free but I'd rather just host any CD we might do in a public folder on my SkyDrive account and provide a link to it here.

oh, and re: random - I would love to have a truly random juke. I've seen one where it took a set number of songs at random and played them in order it populated the juke. So out of say, 5000 songs it would pick 100 songs and play them. If you clicked the link again it would randomly pick another 100 songs (or 50 or whatever) and play them. So the shuffle mode still worked, but you didn't really have to use it. It's a decent work around if it were to work.

That's exactly what our Random Dozen jukebox does. It only plays 12 songs but that's about an album's worth. If anyone has time to listen to more than an album's worth of songs in one sitting, they can simply reload the page to get a dozen different songs selected randomly. Or they can click the Random link at the top of the member list which is on the right side of the jukebox to select another random dozen.

Support for HTML5 MP3 playback in Firefox was added in the last release, but only for Windows 7 and above. The next release, scheduled for the week of June 24th, is supposed to offer similar support for Vista. And support for Linux and Mac is supposed to be coming very soon too. When HTML5 MP3 support is available in all of the major browsers on all major operating systems, I plan to use it to build a better MP3 player and jukeboxes with a shuffle mode that actually works. The reason I can't do anything about it right now is that many Firefox users (including myself) can't yet play MP3s using HTML5. So we have to rely on the Flash player which was written by someone else and I have no control over it, so I can't fix the shuffle mode bug. But when HTML5 support for MP3 becomes nearly universal, we won't have to rely on Flash anymore and I can create better players using HTML5, and design my own shuffle mode that works properly.

The Random Dozen jukebox is a separate case because it doesn't use the shuffle mode feature of the Flash player. Instead, it randomly selects 12 songs and creates a playlist which the Flash jukebox then plays.

[T.C. Elliott]

Did I not know about the dirty dozen jukebox or did I just forget this awesome bit of juke? TY for the link. If it's on the front page already then I feel rather embarrassed. If it isn't then I think it should be (but it's only my opinion, feel free to ignore as I've the link bookmarked now.)

re: Bandcamp, yeah it has free services but there are two.. erm... advantages? 1) it's public so it could work as an advertising/marketing deal for songcrafters. I'm not sure that is what we as a group or you as a group of moderators would want, but.... and 2) It forces you to get your metadata in order. I absolutely detest faulty or nonexistent metadata. Of course, that's not really an issue if someone takes the time to do the dirty editing work.

I do see your point and respect your opinion and even agree with your motive. For the record I'm good with whatever you decide.

[64Guitars]

Did I not know about the dirty dozen jukebox or did I just forget this awesome bit of juke? TY for the link. If it's on the front page already then I feel rather embarrassed. If it isn't then I think it should be (but it's only my opinion, feel free to ignore as I've the link bookmarked now.)

The Random Dozen isn't really a separate jukebox on its own. Rather, it's a feature of the Member Jukebox. Normally, this jukebox takes a member ID # as a parameter and plays only the songs of that member. But if the member ID is zero (which is not a valid member ID), then it randomly selects a dozen songs to play.

So the easy way to get to the Random Dozen jukebox is to click on the Member Jukeboxes button at the top of every page. It looks like this:



Or you can open anyone's personal jukebox via the link below their avatar or in their profile and select Random from the top of the member list at the right of the player.

I suppose I could put the jukebox on the front page too, though it's pretty crowded as it is. I'll think about it.

[64Guitars]

We've decided to call the new jukeboxes "Songcrafters Sampler" rather than "Best of Songcrafters". There will be no song post minimum. As I said before, one of the reasons I wanted to have a minimum was that it would be wrong to call someone's song "best" if it was the only song they posted for the year. Even if it was one of 2 or 3 songs posted that year, it's a bit weird to call it their best. So we decided to call it a sampler jukebox rather than a "Best of". That way, everyone can submit a song, whether it's the only song they posted that year or one of many. It's a sample of their work for that year.

Also, I think we might as well accept submissions for each year (2008-2012) right away rather than just doing 2012 as I'd previously suggested. That way, you can post all of your submissions in one message if you like. If you prefer, you can still post just your 2012 submission first, then post the other years separately later. Whatever is more convenient for you.

I've created a new topic with details of the jukeboxes. It will also serve as the place to post your submissions.

https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?topic=18778.0