The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Hey folks,

I've been sitting on this for a bit, but I'm not really sure why I didn't put it out there earlier. I whipped up a little site that lets you slice and dice the archive a bit and has an iTunes-like Flash MP3 player built in. You can do things like listen to the current fight(s) on a page, load a page with a list of every song in the entire archive (almost 8000 now!) and shuffle play the whole archive, listen to all of an artist's entries on a page, etc. You can also do some limited searching and ordering of songs/artists/fights if you're curious about some statistical trivia about the archive. There's also a few fields on the main page, like for searching for fights and artists with autocomplete, and for searching for songs by artist name and/or title. Oh, and it has some keyboard shortcuts, described on the main page.

http://www.bozos.com/sf/

At this point it requires Firefox. The JavaScript I used originally worked in IE but I had to do some hacking on it to get it to work on the full song list page, and somehow in there I think I broke IE compatibility. I'll be working on fixing that at some point. I have no idea if it will work in Safari or Opera, etc. One other issue is that the Flash MP3 player doesn't properly support variable bit rate encoded files. That's my theory anyway. Some files have strange audio artifacts when playing, but it seems to be a pretty small number of them.

Some day I'd like to make it something where you could sign in and have some preferences about favorite/blocked songs/artists/fights/etc., and custom playlists. Maybe also make it so logged in users could comment on songs/artists/fights/etc.

Lunkhead wrote:One other issue is that the Flash MP3 player doesn't properly support variable bit rate encoded files. That's my theory anyway. Some files have strange audio artifacts when playing, but it seems to be a pretty small number of them.

You mean like mad stuttering? I think that's what happens when you use a non-standard sampling rate like 48 KHz (isn't that extremely non-standard?) in your mp3 file. I think the Flash mp3 player doesn't like that. VBR seems fine.

Ah! That's probably more likely to be it, considering the small number of songs that have problems. I had thought that probably more people used VBR, but odd sample rates would be less common. It does sound like mad stuttering, but also wildly varying playback speed, which made me think of VBR.

OK, this is awesome. That's all I got so far

So, thinking that this is a neat idea, which it is, I checked it out. The select random song is perfect for me so i clicked it and the first song that came up was "Big Success" by...Paco del Stinko! Omen? Strange coincidence? Spooky tracking apparatus? I dunno, but I thought it funny. Anyway, great work there, Lunkhead.

Thanks for checking it out guys. I'd love to get some people using it and providing some feedback and ideas for what to do with it.

mad props, Mr Lunkhead. i think an additional feature that would make me use this more often would be a song rating system (1-5 star) yes, on top of the SF voting rating. like that over time, i can filter out songs that got a 4-5 star rating.

I have very mixed feeling about your proposal, dre.

I have always found applying an after-the-fact standard to the archive to be problematic (see http://www.songfight.org/ratings.html). If YOU rate the songs, and it filters them out for YOU, I have no problem with that.

What I want to avoid is a new listener coming to this thing and getting only what a select group of reviewers have found to be the "best". If that can be avoided, great.

A few more nits, while I am here. Lunkhead, I would prefer if you didn't call this thing "radio". It's clearly not broadcast in real time, but on-demand. If there was to be a SongFight! Radio, I think it should be in broadcast format, not user-selectable, and I would like to leave that designation open for someone to provide that service.

Also, JB has expressed that as the person paying for the server bandwidth, he has an issue with an interface that allows a user to queue up the entire archive and then walk away from his computer, leaving the thing streaming for (theoretically) weeks at a time. Bandwidth IS limited to some extent, and the current "official" interface only allows that to happen with a single fight. Does this interface allow that? It seems that it might.

I am not trying to be a party pooper here, I love this thing, and I love that Lunkhead went to the trouble to make it. I just want us to think about these things.

SPUD

I was going to respond about ratings but Spud basically said what I was going to say. I was thinking more along the lines of "users who added this song as a favorite also added these songs:" or "users who like this artist also like these other artists" as ways of pointing people toward new songs they may like.

I will take "radio" out of the name, if that's something you want to reserve for some official radio that may happen. Don't forget, this is also "unofficial", and not meant to compete with or replace any official functionality, just supplement it. (Should be done by the time I post this.)

It does allow you to stream songs in a loop. You could play the same song over and over, or the whole archive over and over. (The bandwidth usage is the same either way, right?) The current archive UI does make it difficult to listen to lots of songs, and to search the archive in all but a few ways, which was part of my motivation for making this mp3 player. It didn't occur to me that the difficulty may have been partly by design, to limit bandwidth usage. Of course it's up to you guys, as the ones footing the bill, how much you actually want people to listen to Song Fight! To me making the music more accessible to more people seems like a good thing, but I'm not paying for it so it's easy for me to say that. Perhaps there is such thing as "too accessible".

I will explore ways to try to limit the number of songs someone can play per hour perhaps. The one issue there is that it's all happening client side, so somebody could hack my JavaScript with Firebug and undo any such throttling I try to put in. Also, since all the mp3 links are public, really anybody could scrape the archive pages and set up something similar. If you want to throttle the bandwidth usage of the archive, one way to do it would be to try to throttle it at the server, on a per IP address basis somehow perhaps.

Lunkhead wrote: I have no idea if it will work in Safari

I can see the page in Safari but the songs don't seem to play.


BTW:
Can it have a "Genius" button like iTunes? The "Genius" button rules.

It could tell you things like:
"People who like the Primitive Screwheads, also like Neil Thrunn and the Doom Faeries", or
"People who like Billy's Little Trip, also like having their testicles squeezed in a vice"

Caravan Ray wrote:"People who like the Primitive Screwheads, also like Neil Thrunn and the Doom Faeries", or
"People who like Billy's Little Trip, also like having their testicles squeezed in a vice"

Heyyyy... I like p++, and I also like Neil Thrunnn... by Jove, it works!

Even though your spelling of "vise" is correct for your locale, the unintended (?) pun (from how it reads to this North American) is delightful.

Lunkhead, I am not intending to aggressively limit the listening or squeeze the bandwidth. I just want to prevent the accidental or thoughtless use of bandwidth without purpose. If the person is actually listening, great!

I was always under the impression that if you looped the song over and over, after the first time it was probably cached. No?

SPUD

Ah, yes, I forgot that. It does cache the song. I misunderstood your point, too, sorry about that. Maybe I could put in something where there's an event listener for mouse movement, and a timer, and if there isn't any mouse movement on the page for a certain amount of time, it pauses playback and displays an info box telling the user to move the mouse to resume playback? Like I said, whatever I do will have to be client side, so it won't stop malicious people, but it might resolve issues with absent minded people.

Interesting. Pandora has something like that, where after a while it will ask you if you are still listening. I never thought about how it is because it costs them money to stream their songs. Also, now I know how to mess with people on the internet more. Thanks!

Ken

Caravan Ray wrote:It could tell you things like:
"People who like the Primitive Screwheads, also like Neil Thrunn and the Doom Faeries",

Oh God, if it really told you that, then that is truly Genius.

I miss Neil Thrunnnn. That guy was a God to me.

Yes, Pandora, I knew I had gotten that idea from somewhere but couldn't think of where. I can probably do something like that pretty easily. Next time I have a few minutes to work on it I'll tackle that.

Lunkhead wrote:Like I said, whatever I do will have to be client side, so it won't stop malicious people

Don't worry about malicious people, they'd just run wget in a loop instead anyway. If anyone monkeypatches your code and abuses your interface, it's hardly your fault.

jast wrote:

Lunkhead wrote:Like I said, whatever I do will have to be client side, so it won't stop malicious people

Don't worry about malicious people, they'd just run wget in a loop instead anyway. If anyone monkeypatches your code and abuses your interface, it's hardly your fault.

Malicious people are much less dangerous than ignorant people. It's the latter we have to be careful of/for, where our bandwidth is concerned. Nobody's going to gleefully let the player run all day and all night to get us in trouble with the hosting company. But somebody might have it playing in the background and forget that it's on, maybe click "mute" to take a phone call and get distracted by other things. Meanwhile all our data transfer goes out the window.

Dude, this is awesome! I checked out your current fight page - and the mp3 player linked to there - and I'm definitely going to use that for writing reviews - it's really convenient. Sweet stuff, Lunk.

Question - could we link to that current fight mp3 player on the main page instead of the stream all button? It seems to have greater functionality (with the download button and cover art). Just an idea, I guess.

Like it says on the main page of my site, it's very unofficial and very experimental, so I don't think a link from songfight.org would be appropriate. It's really just a demo of what's possible these days with free open source JavaScript and Flash code.

Lunk, I just listened to "Sold Out" on your interface. It's like a dream.

In fact, it more than fits the profile of something I suggested nearly a year ago.

You rock.

Also, re: the nomenclature. If we can't call it "radio," then what about "jukebox?" That seems to more accurately describe what it is, anyway.

Wow, rereading that thread was fun. 5 pages of actual discussion, with no flaming and with nearly every post right on topic! That's awesome. I would like to reiterate that I really really enjoy the new multi-voting system and that I really appreciate Spud coming up with that. You rock, Spud! Also, I had actually already written the site I mention in this thread before I started that thread you linked to, Jon. That was how I was able to come up with those CSV files with the archive data.