Ear-Drum.org has been through a lot of changes recently, here's an overview of what's new.
The website is ajaxy now and we've adopted Flash for the audio player. We made the switch to Flash because currently HTML5 audio playback is not supported on mobile devices, Safari, or Internet Explorer, and the HTML5 spec doesn't include anything to directly access the audio data (although Firefox is working on some neat stuff) to do the cool UI tools we have planned like visual spectrums and crazy cool interactive environments for discovering new music and performers on the site. We're still using OGG Vorbis files to keep the Desktop app free, we're just playing them with a technology that's supported on more platforms (~99% penetration) and plenty of mobile devices.
Version 0.5.6 of the Desktop App is out now. A lot of improvements and new features have been added including Drag and Drop importing from over 25 audio formats. Now, if you prefer a more complex system than the built in recording/editing interface, you can use Logic, Cakewalk, or Audacity and import from most lossy, lossless, and uncompressed formats by just dragging files into the app. Once imported you can edit as usual, save it, and share it on Ear-Drum.org.
There's a new Desktop App video tutorial that shows you how to get the Desktop app, record and post to Ear-Drum.org. You can watch it in full screen below.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
A Rethink - With a Dash of New Perspective
I woke up one day and realized I was doing this wrong.
The Ear-Drum.org Beta was going great, lots of deep feedback, bug fixes, new features; but what was taking shape was starting to stray from the core concept. Up until now the entire community and "thing" was in the desktop app. It was all about music collaboration and as I added to it I noticed that for what it was it needed complexity. It flat out required it.
The recording, collaboration, theory editing, and community features were turning into this big beast of a thing. Just the concept of an entire community in a desktop app was already too high of a barrier for most people I showed it to to really get what I was doing - never mind what it actually did. I was getting caught up in creating some kind of complete solution for collaboration; it got to the point where I was coding built in p2p torrent-like features for sharing raw files with other users. It was moving in a direction where members needed to be literate musically, be a sound engineer, and a tech wiz just to participate. That's not what Ear-Drum.org was supposed to be about.
To distill the notion of Ear-Drum.org down to a sentence: It's about lowering the barriers to music as an art form and exposing what is a profound experience to any musician, to people that otherwise wouldn't be able to experience it.
I ultimately want to enable someone who's never picked up an instrument and wasn't normally artistically inclined to be able to easily post something and get involved. But more importantly for that post, and that person, to have as much value in the community as anyone else - no matter the degree of experience.
Partly not ready to just delete what was now over 10,000 lines of code and 2 years in the making, but more for the sake of holding onto the concept I'd cultivated over the years I wasn't ready to take the plunge in a new direction. I'd put everything into this project and I didn't want to have to deal with starting fresh. I found myself in a rut between a rock and a hard place. Looking back maybe it was a necessary reboot, at the time it felt like half my brain had just turned off and gone on standby.
A few months later I was reading a transcript of a court case where the founder of 4chan was called in to testify. I already knew about the site and how it worked but there was something cathartic about reading that transcript that jumpstarted the other half of my brain. The lawyer wanted to clarify what kind of logs they kept and walked through in extremely vivid detail every bit of the layout, function, and user experience of the site. The web is such a permanent place now, things get indexed a million times over and propagate to a thousand levels of cache in a million physical locations around the world within minutes. Gmail offers a continuously growing amount of storage and you can instantly acquire terabytes and petabytes with a few mouse clicks if you feel like it. It's too easy to think in terms of permanence.
I didn't realize it until a week or two later but I was thinking about Ear-Drum.org again. I didn't know how or why, but I knew I had to base a new Ear-Drum.org on a model of impermanence. It was kind of like how you can look over a cityscape and know there are people in the buildings. Over the next couple of weeks I'd evolve that elegant truth into a basic blueprint I could act on. It all centered around HTML5 Vorbis support, the tech to pull it all together from the various browser makers et al. was brand new and recently released in many cases. The new Ear-Drum.org simply couldn't have existed back in January.
The next 4 weeks were spent writing a lot of code. On the project but also other stuff I was working on. I had the privilege and opportunity to work with someone whom I respect a great deal and quite frankly is a role model in every sense. The experience was incredibly influential and late one night coding I realized something that would take the new Ear-Drum.org to an entirely other level. Music is about a lot more than just holding a beat under a melody. It's about expression; the expressing of emotional, mindful "things" into a format that can be universally understood and transfered to another human being. It's about art, creativity, and sharing an experience on an entirely different perceptual plane than everyday life. There's no reason to limit that expression to music.
The new Ear-Drum.org is an open-mic. A regular website with profiles and html. You get a set number of minutes which you can fill with 10 recordings or 1 long one, accounts are free. Express yourself however you want, there's a section we'll fill up with lessons and a reference of various art forms and styles for when you get stuck or need a bit of inspiration. If your profile is full an old post will automatically get removed to make room unless you mark it to keep it online for a while. The desktop app is now just a cross platform recorder. It's really easy to use and lets you save all your recordings for as long as you want. Record and upload something with a couple mouse clicks it takes care of everything. Play an acoustic ballad you're working on, practice scales, recite poetry, learn, get inspired or do anything else you feel like.
This feels right, I hope you like it.
The Ear-Drum.org Beta was going great, lots of deep feedback, bug fixes, new features; but what was taking shape was starting to stray from the core concept. Up until now the entire community and "thing" was in the desktop app. It was all about music collaboration and as I added to it I noticed that for what it was it needed complexity. It flat out required it.
The recording, collaboration, theory editing, and community features were turning into this big beast of a thing. Just the concept of an entire community in a desktop app was already too high of a barrier for most people I showed it to to really get what I was doing - never mind what it actually did. I was getting caught up in creating some kind of complete solution for collaboration; it got to the point where I was coding built in p2p torrent-like features for sharing raw files with other users. It was moving in a direction where members needed to be literate musically, be a sound engineer, and a tech wiz just to participate. That's not what Ear-Drum.org was supposed to be about.
To distill the notion of Ear-Drum.org down to a sentence: It's about lowering the barriers to music as an art form and exposing what is a profound experience to any musician, to people that otherwise wouldn't be able to experience it.
I ultimately want to enable someone who's never picked up an instrument and wasn't normally artistically inclined to be able to easily post something and get involved. But more importantly for that post, and that person, to have as much value in the community as anyone else - no matter the degree of experience.
Partly not ready to just delete what was now over 10,000 lines of code and 2 years in the making, but more for the sake of holding onto the concept I'd cultivated over the years I wasn't ready to take the plunge in a new direction. I'd put everything into this project and I didn't want to have to deal with starting fresh. I found myself in a rut between a rock and a hard place. Looking back maybe it was a necessary reboot, at the time it felt like half my brain had just turned off and gone on standby.
A few months later I was reading a transcript of a court case where the founder of 4chan was called in to testify. I already knew about the site and how it worked but there was something cathartic about reading that transcript that jumpstarted the other half of my brain. The lawyer wanted to clarify what kind of logs they kept and walked through in extremely vivid detail every bit of the layout, function, and user experience of the site. The web is such a permanent place now, things get indexed a million times over and propagate to a thousand levels of cache in a million physical locations around the world within minutes. Gmail offers a continuously growing amount of storage and you can instantly acquire terabytes and petabytes with a few mouse clicks if you feel like it. It's too easy to think in terms of permanence.
I didn't realize it until a week or two later but I was thinking about Ear-Drum.org again. I didn't know how or why, but I knew I had to base a new Ear-Drum.org on a model of impermanence. It was kind of like how you can look over a cityscape and know there are people in the buildings. Over the next couple of weeks I'd evolve that elegant truth into a basic blueprint I could act on. It all centered around HTML5 Vorbis support, the tech to pull it all together from the various browser makers et al. was brand new and recently released in many cases. The new Ear-Drum.org simply couldn't have existed back in January.
The next 4 weeks were spent writing a lot of code. On the project but also other stuff I was working on. I had the privilege and opportunity to work with someone whom I respect a great deal and quite frankly is a role model in every sense. The experience was incredibly influential and late one night coding I realized something that would take the new Ear-Drum.org to an entirely other level. Music is about a lot more than just holding a beat under a melody. It's about expression; the expressing of emotional, mindful "things" into a format that can be universally understood and transfered to another human being. It's about art, creativity, and sharing an experience on an entirely different perceptual plane than everyday life. There's no reason to limit that expression to music.
The new Ear-Drum.org is an open-mic. A regular website with profiles and html. You get a set number of minutes which you can fill with 10 recordings or 1 long one, accounts are free. Express yourself however you want, there's a section we'll fill up with lessons and a reference of various art forms and styles for when you get stuck or need a bit of inspiration. If your profile is full an old post will automatically get removed to make room unless you mark it to keep it online for a while. The desktop app is now just a cross platform recorder. It's really easy to use and lets you save all your recordings for as long as you want. Record and upload something with a couple mouse clicks it takes care of everything. Play an acoustic ballad you're working on, practice scales, recite poetry, learn, get inspired or do anything else you feel like.
This feels right, I hope you like it.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
EDO Desktop version 0.4.0 and Public Beta
We're finally in Public Beta. For the last few months Ear-Drum.org was only available to a select group of brave beta testers(Private Beta). We're now opening the doors, you don't need an invite anymore, just download the Desktop app and register a new Free account.
During the Public Beta everyone will get 200MB of storage to play with, so hurry up and join while we have space on our current servers. First come first serve.
We've also started accepting donations to help fund the project. If you're interested in helping out and sponsoring development make sure you fill out your name, Twitter, and website so we can add you to the Sponsor list on the donation page.
Version 0.4.0 of the Ear-Drum.org Desktop app has been released.
Here's a list of what's new:
During the Public Beta everyone will get 200MB of storage to play with, so hurry up and join while we have space on our current servers. First come first serve.
We've also started accepting donations to help fund the project. If you're interested in helping out and sponsoring development make sure you fill out your name, Twitter, and website so we can add you to the Sponsor list on the donation page.
Version 0.4.0 of the Ear-Drum.org Desktop app has been released.
Here's a list of what's new:
- Completely redesigned the app architecture.
- Added Search, Play History, and Clipboard.
- Added more drag and drop support.
- Added multiple file download manager.
- Bug fixes
Sunday, January 24, 2010
The Launch - [from my personal blog]
Check out the Ear-Drum.org Launch post over at my personal blog YoavGivati.com
"Ear-Drum.org is the current face of a project I've been working on for years. It's an RIA(Rich Internet Application), which is just a trendy and faster way of saying a powerful web enabled desktop application.
Ear-Drum.org is a music community in a desktop app. I've been searching for the ultimate online music community for a very long time and while a very few have come close to that before being seriously sold; hacked; or turning evil, none - and absolutely none that are currently available, come close to having any soul. It's as if the people behind them are robots in suits, anti-groove people worrying about a bottom line and completely detached from the depth of experience of connecting with another person through music. Ear-Drum.org differentiates itself with a heavy focus on collaboration, learning, and immersion, while also letting you promote your music and meet other musicians. It's for pros as much as it is for beginners and everything else in between. We can always learn from each other and expand on our abilities. Ear-Drum.org strives to be the rich and engaging environment that's required for that kind of deep interaction."
Read the rest of this entry on YoavGivati.com
"Ear-Drum.org is the current face of a project I've been working on for years. It's an RIA(Rich Internet Application), which is just a trendy and faster way of saying a powerful web enabled desktop application.
Ear-Drum.org is a music community in a desktop app. I've been searching for the ultimate online music community for a very long time and while a very few have come close to that before being seriously sold; hacked; or turning evil, none - and absolutely none that are currently available, come close to having any soul. It's as if the people behind them are robots in suits, anti-groove people worrying about a bottom line and completely detached from the depth of experience of connecting with another person through music. Ear-Drum.org differentiates itself with a heavy focus on collaboration, learning, and immersion, while also letting you promote your music and meet other musicians. It's for pros as much as it is for beginners and everything else in between. We can always learn from each other and expand on our abilities. Ear-Drum.org strives to be the rich and engaging environment that's required for that kind of deep interaction."
Read the rest of this entry on YoavGivati.com
Monday, December 21, 2009
Launch
I've watched social media platforms evolve over the last few years. Everything from MySpace to BandSpace. I'd springboard between sites as they got cool features, when they'd disappear and go out of business, or get sold to some corporation who suddenly claimed excessive rights to my content.
It's frustrating when all you really want to do is get your music out to fans. Knowing your tunes, beats and rhythms are reaching ears, hearing aids, speakers and headphones around the world instantly via the internet is a profound thing. But to have the rights the music you made taken away from you or "shared" through loopholes and hidden clauses is a shame, and necessitated a rethink.
Some of them would change their Terms in ways which irked me. I started becoming more aware of copyright and realized that if I wanted to have the kind of safe, rich, and engaging virtual creative playground I wanted - I was going to have to make it myself.
My first real foray into programming I built the Creative Commons Music Collaboration Project or CCMCP for short. It started out as a simple web app that allowed you to upload music or individual tracks into an online meeting space and assign each one a Creative Commons license. It would be rebuilt several times and take on various forms as people started paying attention and getting involved. The response was more than I expected although not huge compared to a social media platform, but I realized then that this project would be one of the main focal points of my life.
I also realized that I needed to think bigger. I began obsessively thinking about how to create the ultimate music community and as I did I realized that I needed to come at it from a bunch of different angles. It all had to make sense as a musician - most importantly, but also from a programming and business point of view. It had to be sustainable, and back then deciding to host music on a whim with no funding was a nonstarter.
Problem was back then that what I wanted to create wasn't feasible from a financial perspective. The kind of setup I had envisioned could not be setup due to server and hosting costs. I could start small, or be huge, but there didn't seem to be a middle ground - no stepping stone from a to B. The other problem was software based. I needed a platform that was OS ubiquitous and had a very specific feature set. It was all or nothing, if I couldn't implement certain features there just wasn't a point, and it would have been hugely inefficient to recode the site every time a new browser was released.
I took an indefinite break from the collaborative music community idea as a whole - although the obsession was still very much there. I decided to wait a few years for technology to catch up and focused on immersing myself in the business, culture, and code of the web. So when I could come back to it, I'd perhaps have gained a deeper understanding of what and how.
Every now and then I'd come back to it, build a prototype and show it around. It was during this time that I had a series of eureka moments. One of the more recent ones with the announcement of Adobe AIR 2.0. That among other things gave me the tools, and the knowledge that the doors I needed opened would be as what I envisioned took form. I dropped everything. Once again my overwhelmingly top priority in life became this project, which now had a name "Ear-Drum.org".
This is my baby, in more than just an emotional way, I've excised a chunk of my heart and soul and baked it into the code.
The Ear-Drum.org Desktop app is currently in its infancy. It's in a private beta, so if you want in fill out the invite request form. Then download it and start collaborating.
A lot has gone into this and a lot more will in the months and years to come.
It's frustrating when all you really want to do is get your music out to fans. Knowing your tunes, beats and rhythms are reaching ears, hearing aids, speakers and headphones around the world instantly via the internet is a profound thing. But to have the rights the music you made taken away from you or "shared" through loopholes and hidden clauses is a shame, and necessitated a rethink.
Some of them would change their Terms in ways which irked me. I started becoming more aware of copyright and realized that if I wanted to have the kind of safe, rich, and engaging virtual creative playground I wanted - I was going to have to make it myself.
My first real foray into programming I built the Creative Commons Music Collaboration Project or CCMCP for short. It started out as a simple web app that allowed you to upload music or individual tracks into an online meeting space and assign each one a Creative Commons license. It would be rebuilt several times and take on various forms as people started paying attention and getting involved. The response was more than I expected although not huge compared to a social media platform, but I realized then that this project would be one of the main focal points of my life.
I also realized that I needed to think bigger. I began obsessively thinking about how to create the ultimate music community and as I did I realized that I needed to come at it from a bunch of different angles. It all had to make sense as a musician - most importantly, but also from a programming and business point of view. It had to be sustainable, and back then deciding to host music on a whim with no funding was a nonstarter.
Problem was back then that what I wanted to create wasn't feasible from a financial perspective. The kind of setup I had envisioned could not be setup due to server and hosting costs. I could start small, or be huge, but there didn't seem to be a middle ground - no stepping stone from a to B. The other problem was software based. I needed a platform that was OS ubiquitous and had a very specific feature set. It was all or nothing, if I couldn't implement certain features there just wasn't a point, and it would have been hugely inefficient to recode the site every time a new browser was released.
I took an indefinite break from the collaborative music community idea as a whole - although the obsession was still very much there. I decided to wait a few years for technology to catch up and focused on immersing myself in the business, culture, and code of the web. So when I could come back to it, I'd perhaps have gained a deeper understanding of what and how.
Every now and then I'd come back to it, build a prototype and show it around. It was during this time that I had a series of eureka moments. One of the more recent ones with the announcement of Adobe AIR 2.0. That among other things gave me the tools, and the knowledge that the doors I needed opened would be as what I envisioned took form. I dropped everything. Once again my overwhelmingly top priority in life became this project, which now had a name "Ear-Drum.org".
This is my baby, in more than just an emotional way, I've excised a chunk of my heart and soul and baked it into the code.
The Ear-Drum.org Desktop app is currently in its infancy. It's in a private beta, so if you want in fill out the invite request form. Then download it and start collaborating.
A lot has gone into this and a lot more will in the months and years to come.
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