introducing a new way to enjoy music!

Mix your favourite music blogs with your social bookmarks, add streaming radio and folksonomy… integrate with new music web services plus the latest web trends and what do you get…?

Social Music for the masses

Mixtape Democratic Radio Ver 0.8

What is it?

A fancy new website that collects your favourite music blogs, MP3s and net playlists into one universally accessible site. Read about music, discover new music, and listen to & download the latest songs based on your web-based bookmarks and the social bookmarks of thousands.

What does it do?

The use of a social bookmarking service allows you to bookmark practically any music service. You can save simple RSS or ATOM feeds from your favourite music blog, your XSPF playlists, even M3U radiostreams! The volume of music services is growing by the day, so you can aggregate all your favourite music from sites such as Imeem, IJig, The Hype Machine, BlogDigger or any blog from the thousands collected on el.bo.ws.

Furthermore, if you use last.fm webservices – which I highly recommend – you can save your recently played songs, find out which songs you already have in your collection and get advice on music that you would like but just haven’t yet heard.

How does it work?

The channels are saved in your favourite online social bookmark collection. If you don’t have one, look no further than Del.icio.us…

Simply save the RSS feed from your favourite music blog using the tag mp3blogfeed and your music-blog will be automatically available to everybody in the world on the home page with the most recent at the top. If you prefer to only see your own bookmarks, simply enter your del.icio.us username in the settings box, or if you are using another service, the correct RSS URL.

Playlists are automatically saved onto your hard disk as shared flash-cookies along with such useful things as volume and the last page you visited – dive back in from where you started!

What’s in store for the future…

• Better integration & support for M3U streaming audio files.
• Actionscript 3 version with interactive music controls, pitch, cue, crossfading between songs.
• Integrate last.fm radio stations for each user!

Technical details

Written entirely from the ground up in actionscript 2 – no components, no templates.

Uses Shared Local Objects to save xspf playlist, volume and recent browsing history.

Features javascript data api to allow bookmarking and the emailing of blog links.

Uses your existing social bookmarking services – imports RSS, XML & OPML.

Intelligent caching of data and pre-empting of user desired information.

Features a scrolling data window with mousewheel input, inertia and variable speed scrolling.

Check it out, tell me what you think!

music meet art / east meets west

A fascinating hybrid of electro J-Pop and classical cello, the Stereo Art project is still in its early phase, but thanks to many live performances, the word is spreading!

As the idea is to combine music & art, I was commissioned to put together a clean but ‘scribbled’ style Flash website to show off the music and display live news. The end result is a scruffy but-not-too-shabby gallery and news reader all wrapped round a live music streamer. You can check it out here.

The design process was refreshingly quick with this project…After five minutes of sketch ideas, Producer Pop lifts up the most basic looking sketch and finalised,

Less is more! … Complete!

and so within a short space of sketching (and a few months of actionscript coding!) the site was launched and began picking up popularity. If you want to check out the Western J-Pop sounds, see it here!

Technical details

Full Screen 100% actionscript 2 – no components, no templates.
Uses Shared Local Objects to save volume.
Imports web services from Flickr and Blogger.com.
Intelligent gallery module with thumbnail zoom and comments.
Designed as a widget to be entirely embeddable into any site with just three lines of html.

Ajax Multimedia webshop!

Dripping with high-tech features, this new music label offers free previews, podcasts and chances to buy digital songs or vinyl! This one stop site will cater for all your eclectic dance needs. Don’t forget about the secret button!

This new music label that cut its teeth releasing party vinyl has gone digital with a fresh new music website and shop!

Play music whilst shopping for music, previewing any track live. That was the main objective… well that along with high quality music delivery using Web2.0 features such as podcasting and rss feeds.

With a stark graphic style by Vacant Design we needed some strong visual animations as cue points for actions. The Flash-based music player is autonomous and animated as it loads an artist’s playlist or swaps between songs. For those not of a nervous disposition, there is always the secret hyper mode (*top dial on the left) if you find it too tame.

Speaking of the music player, let me mention a few unique features:

• automatic saving of your volume preference for when you come visit us again
• communicates with the artists’ pages so that songs can be selected outside of the music player
• wholly animated to reflect the party music is playing with regards to the volume
• super secret party mode for fast processors

If you would like to attend any events, join the mailing list and check out the news and live pages.

Technical details

⊗ ActionScript 2.0 Custom music player code with intelligent internal music database.

⊗ Flash mx compatible with ActionScript animated GUI.

⊗ Music Player loads XML, RSS and XSPF playlists from the netcast.

⊗ Javascript html music controls and feedback – communicating between flash and html.

⊗ On-the-fly xpsf and xml (atom or RSS) playlist creation with scraped coverart

⊗ Based on the Opensource CMS WordPress. Yes really!

⊗ SEO super optimised with analytical software to determine most important records.

⊗ All Artists and channels have relevant RSS and ATOM feeds.

⊗ AJAX page requests into dynamic html.

⊗ Down-gradeable to simple html shop.