Blogs, tools, technology and Raja's music

I thought of getting views and recommendations from members on blogging related problems with Raja. Though one can extend this as something that is 'Anything about Raja on the Net', this is not about Raja, but about tools and techniques in presenting Raja's music to the world.

The music on my site does not play, thanks to Divshare being down. This is the fourth occasion this is happening. Every time a site like this goes down, I have at least a solid 100 hours of work in finding an alternative and changing every post of mine which has embedded audio.

Vicky and I used to exchange emails on how these free hotlinking mp3 sites keep coming and going.

Initially, I used google sites and found that it has a 100 Mb limit. I moved to fileden and was with them for a while when they started going down. OneDrive does not allow hotlinking,

I have a huge issue as I have more than 500 clips that can be played on my blog. Embedding these on blogs is such a pain. Even when my site was working properly a few weeks ago, I got tired of updating every post of mine (there are 151 posts and about 520 clips), when I moved to Divshare.

I cannot recollect the number of sites I tried to get my site up and running. Divshare and Fileden offer 2Gb for free which is sufficient for my needs.  Not to mention the number of web based music players I have changed.

Soundcloud has a playtime limit of 60 minutes, I guess.

Can someone suggest a site that is reasonably priced, guarantees uptime and provides a decent amount of space for hosting and playing these files? I need to hotlink them as they need to be played from the post.

Vicky got frustrated with these sites and he started posting stuff on youtube.

I do not allow commercial stuff on my blog and I do not want to have a financial commitment for something that is read by about 3,000 people every month.

Thoughts? Recommendations?

If Divx guys screw around for some more time, I am going directly to HTML5. I know it is a bit of effort, but I think I have a solution with HTML5.

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/html5/client/native-audio-with-html5.html#fbid=oyq6DeWWqXK

Soundcloud has a 60 minute limit, yes. But what folks use to circumvent this is they create multiple soundcloud accounts and manage. That is what Navin Mozart does. I think he has 2 accounts (though for the quantity he uploads, unless he's a paying premium member, I don't see how he can manage even with 2 accounts). You may create 4-5 accounts on soundcloud with different user names and try uploading. This is 1 alternative.

I researched HTML 5 for some time, and boy, after 25 years of the internet, the browser confusion does not seem to stop. I do not think this industry is growing up after 2.5 decades.For someone with a solid technical background, I found this not just intricate, but very confusing. All in the name of being user friendly.

Simple embedded HTML audio tags will work only in Safari, Android's native browse and Chrome. IE and Firefox will not support it due to legal, ego and other maddening reasons. Apparently, playing MP3 from a browser has some legal copyright violation as the MP3 format is owned by a German company.

I have decided to stick to basic HTML5 and screw those Flash players. No fallback, no sweat. BTW,  Fallback is an option within the HTML5 <audio> tag to point the browser to a flash player if the browser does not support embedded audio. If I have to program fallback for 500 clips and test, that's a solid 3 months of work.

Bottom line, limited browser support only. I feel pretty bad to be in an industry that can't get its act together after 25 years!

Finally got 99% of the clips on my blog site converted to simple HTML5 embedded audio tags. With more than 500 clips, it was another marathon effort (this is the fourth time I am doing it). I know of a post related to Techno music where I have lost a couple of clips I posted. The rest of them are working. However, I may have missed some due to sheer volume. Feel free to leave a comment on the post, if you find an audio clip not working. Remember, no IE, no Firefox!

I want to share two unconnected points:

1. HTML5 conversion of my blog - I noticed that one of the readers who is visually impaired commented that HTML5 helps him read my blog. I did not know about this side of HTML5. Though I was reluctant to move to HTML5 as I was alienating readers with IE and Firefox browsers, it does help in some other way. The readership has not gone down significantly after this migration. It has stayed at the steady rate that I have observed in the last 8 years. Surprising that in this age of 'watching music', there are a few who still 'listen to music' and also read analysis on good music.

2. Barracuda screwed me over and copy.com is going under. I found an alternative with dropbox and I am in the process of manually converting about 500 clips that need to be hotlinked - it is laborious process that takes at least 2 man months. This is the 5th time I am getting hit - I am not giving up. I have lost track of all those names as they are no longer in business.

If anyone is interested, I can document the technique of MP3 hotlinking using dropbox. Nothing that I discovered. It is available on the internet.