Poppy, clicky, high-latency onboard soundcard wrecking your music production times? ASIO4all to the rescue

There's a scourge that messes with poor music producers everywhere: the crappy onboard sound cards that come with Windows laptops and desktop computers. They're ultra-slow. So when you hit a note on a midi controller or whatever, it takes forever for that note to get processed by your software synths and come out the other end. And the pops, clicks, ticks etc that interrupt your sound, wrecking your concentration. So you absolutely must spend at least $300 on an external USB soundcard or something.

Except that the problem isn't the crappy soundcards themselves, it's the crappy drivers written for them. So why not just have a good driver? Well, that's what ASIO4all is: a low-latency, universal audio driver. So now you can keep your crappy onboard soundcard and use your laptop as an autotune box. Or whatever kind of pedal you want. And you can leave your expensive external extremely buggy soundbox that crashes your laptop at home. Let it gather dust.

Ableton Live's Inconsistent Video Import Capabilities

Installing QuickTime will allow Ableton Live to import video files in .mp4 format, on your Windows computer.

The Ableton Live support site doesn't mention it anywhere, I couldn't find the info anywhere, it was just a hunch of mine, Ableton Live's manual won't explain anything to you... you're welcome.

Awhile ago, I got used to being able to drag .mp4 video files into Ableton Live.

MP4 video files are what you get if you use Firefox Video Download Helper to download YouTube videos.

Then, I installed Ableton Live on a different computer, and it wouldn't accept any .mp4 files. And Adobe Media Encoder was no help in converting the mp4 files to .mov files.

So I tried installing the K-Lite Codec pack, and that didn't make any difference. But installing QuickTime did! Yay for QuickTime on Windows!

Music Recommendations based on band members

Allmusic is a great website. Because it shows you who's in what bands. And you can see what other bands they were in. Same with the producers, labels and other stuff. So what about providing music recommendations based on questions like:

"What is it about this song, which you already like, that makes it so great?"
It's the songwriting.
"OK so the guy in the band who wrote a bunch of songs for this other band. And one of their albums was put out by the same record label as the album that your original favourite song came out on."
Oh wow, this album is amazing!

Or it could generate some interesting mismatches.

This is a process I've been meaning to do manually. But it would be so nice to have like a "music cloud" of recommendations that mapped the connections between the people who contributed the things that make your favourite music special to you.

Is your page too "heavy"?

Heavy pages are like heavy people. They have to pause every once in awhile and when they need to move, they gotta take a second first. They were born agile enough... but over time, bit by bit, they got fat and slow, and then they started feeling crappy about themselves.

Load time is one thing, but some pages are slow after they load, too. Some pages are kind of jumpy when they scroll, or when they're loading up, your computer freaks out a bit, like you're launching a production program or something.

I realized the other night that my music website is obese. I kept bringing it up on my friend's laptop, and when it was open, everything else was slow. This is a modern MacBook, and granted they never ship those with enough RAM and my friends don't upgrade their RAM, but still. It's just a simple site.

It's a simple site with embedded fonts, a fixed background, a ton of embedded videos and audio players of about three varieties, and let's face it, it's a blogger site with a whole bunch of CSS that's being loaded and then cancelled out and then replaced.

Here's what I shall try in order to "optimize" my page:

1. Limit the posts that load on the first page.
2. Make the background scroll with the page. Every time I try a fixed background, I end up going back.
3. Remove text shadows from body copy (what was I thinking?) and save 'em for headlines
4. If all that isn't quite enough, (sigh), I'll consider using a "normal" CSS web fonts stack for the body text.

Luckily, my best buddy (Google Chrome) is on my side with its very own task manager. I find it in the "tools" menu. The task manager reveals some fun things about my music site:

• scrolling it uses 30% of my CPU power (somewhere between my facebook news feed at 20% and my gmail inbox at 50%)
• loading the page spikes the Shockwave Flash Plugin's CPU usage to 90% during loading and then it rests around 15% higher than normal
• even just sitting around, these flash movies consume CPU cycles - 15% of them!
• the flash plugin grabs about 50MB of RAM just to sit there with only gmail, facebook, and blogger open, and when I load my music site up, it jumps up to 80MB, so that's a 30MB difference

The effect of all this "weight" is that:

• when I load the page, it can cause music to stutter, and the system to pause
• when I forget about the page in the background, it becomes one of those "heavy" pages that makes me wonder why my computer is so super slow
• I have to only have it open when I really want to use it
• It's embarrassing because I should be on top of this, being the kind of designer who always says that users care more about their own time than someone's fun design sense
• the purpose of the site (to play back and discuss music) is actually impacted

I don't have the heart to start ripping my page apart just yet, but at least I know I have a problem. That's the first and hardest step.

The Deal With MySpace FAQ - aka How to Deal With MySpace

Everyone loves to hate MySpace:

This user study found only 20% of users could successfully upload a new profile picture and only 30% could figure out how to post a status update!

How's "LOZ ... MYSPACE IS TOO HARD TO USE, LOL YGM" for a profile name?

"MySpace is really Hard to use for me....."

"MySpace wants me to delete my account it seems. "

MySpace Employee: "[T]he primary failure of Myspace was usability."

"We need not look much further than the horrible user experience of the average MySpace user to find out why the crown is gone."

"facebook = Everything you want, Easy to use. MySpace = music, Emo's, Hard to use & navigate. [...] Myspace runs way too slow"

"If you’re able to use Myspace with no trouble at all you’ve gotten yourself into some really bad habits. Working around Myspace is really difficult, holes need to be jumped through over and over again."

"MySpace is messy, hard to use and impossible to even find new music with."

"What makes me mad is how can you save the changes you made on the Mypace editors. I tried to publish it but it'll just take me back to my old page."

"I hate the new myspace. it's to much and it's hard to work with... whats myspace if you can't edit it like you use to be able to?"

1. Why do MySpace profiles suck so much? Because people in bands are lazy or bad at customising stuff?
   
   No. Anybody with a MySpace profile knows how hard it is to customise it, even with a profile editor.
2. Do I really need to use MySpace?
   
   No. I recommend using it for the Friends feature - don't even get a music account, just use Blogger along with SoundCloud, PicasaWebAlbums, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and use your MySpace account to link to them. You can embed your music, videos, pictures etc, and then MySpace never gets control of your tracks.
3. What's wrong with trusting MySpace with my music?
   
   MySpace shuts artists out of their profiles all the time, claiming bullshit copyright violations. One of my MySpace profiles got locked, and now I can't do anything with it - can't update or remove tracks, change my layout or anything... and it's the one with my completely original songs! The one that contains tracks that are so sample-heavy that they're illegal got left alone. Go figure. Anyway, when you use embedded playlists from other sites, even if your MySpace profile gets locked, you can still keep control of your materials.
4. Isn't it kind of a pain to maintain all these different accounts?
   
   Nope. MySpace is so terribly designed and hard to use that it's less work to maintain your Facebook, SoundCloud, Twitter, Flickr/Picasa and YouTube accounts. Plus, with each one, you reach a whole new audience, and when you bring them all together with your Blogger or MySpace account, you get so much power to present media all in one place.
5. But isn't MySpace changing and improving to become more modern?
   
   Yeah, but because they don't do any user testing, analysis or Information Architecture work, it's just getting worse, not better.
6. Won't the MySpace people clue in at some point and start doing user testing?
   
   They've had a decade to figure this out. It's not going to happen.

Who wants to help me build a DJ mixer?

So I want to start on this pretty quick, it's my design for the simplest possible DJ mixer ever, running on batteries, no crossfader, just a switch, and the cueing and master channels are both controlled by the switch, so when you switch it to put channel A into the speakers, channel B goes into the headphones, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I still have to find a place for the audio outs. This is something I actually think I can accomplish with a bit of help at Sketch Studios.

Flash MP3 Player with Level meter and special FX?

I just got an idea for displaying visual information from audio waveforms in Flash. First you get a waveform analysis of the audio file, and convert it into an image. Then you trace the line in illustrator to make a proper vector path. Import that into a 3D program or 2D animation in Flash and then map particles to bounce along it as it travels out, and it would indicate the movement of air in response to the speaker. Or you can just have a bar that follows that bath as it moves through the stage. I'm gonna do it right now. Bye.

Audio & Sound Production & Reinforcement in the Boston New England Areas - See our Client List of Well Known Artists

This prominent sound production company's website used to suffer from a big iframes problem. This is something I see on the web all the time. Too many scrollbars, and it's unclear which one to use.

Now that they're using Weebly, they don't have to worry about those kinds of technical things. Sometime between late 2007 and early 2013, they ditched their old site and did a redesign.

Hypemachine gets yet another Flash player

The Hype Machine people have been going crazy since they released their 2.0 update to their popular music discovery site. The new player, which presents as a slick black transport bar at the top of any page with songs displayed on it, offers some improvements and some drawbacks over their previous systems, but I think it's definitely a general improvement.

Problems solved:

• The new player will go through an entire playlist in Firefox without stopping, even in inactive tabs. This is great for Firefox and Flock users, because in the previous version, once a song would finish, the next one wouldn't load unless it was visible at the time.
• The return of a transport bar lets users once again skip to any part of the song that's loaded at the time, and see where they are in the track.
• By making use of a hard-to-see scrollbar on the bottom right of the "widget," it's possible to scroll around in the playlist. Unfortunately only one track is visible at any given time.

Problems created:

• The main problem with the new player is that the player element is divorced visually from the tracklisting, necessitating excessive scrolling between the player and the rest of the page. I have to say it was nice to have a player for each song. Keeping the player and information elements working together well has been a long-standing technical challenge for the Hypemachine people.
  
• Some users have commented that the black player kind of stands out from the colours in the rest of the design. While this is true, I don't think it's enough of a departure to be a problem.

Improvement opportunities:

• If these dudes added a "pan" button to the player, it would actually be possible to use Hypemachine as a DJ tool. Here's how: open two hypemachine windows, pan one left and the other right, hook the left and right audio outs into seperate channels in an outboard mixer, cue up a track in one of them and put it out to the mains, and then find another one, cue it in the headphones and use the crossfader as with a pair of turntables. Think of the possibilities! If somebody could make a flash plugin that could slow down and speed up mp3s by increments, basic beatmatching would also be possible. Imagine that - DJing from your web browser.
• Making the player follow the track it's playing in the track list, or making the player's track list expandable, would allow for tighter integration of info and song playing features.

What I'm happiest about though is that they stuck with proper, non-proprietary internet technology. The flash mp3 player they're using is a free, open-standards-based thing that anybody can add to their site, supports RSS etc. Nice choices as usual from the hype machine people. This open approach to programming has been one of their real strengths, unlike sites like last.fm, myspace, facebook etc.