New player in the works! will Aug. 31

Our current "Instant Preview" was designed so you could quickly work your way through tunes you were interested in, without the hassle of clicking and waiting for the clip to load somewhere. I came up with it because when I was a vinyl addict I knew how important it is to quickly get an impression of a tune: lets face it most people are picky motherfuckers (I know I am) and over 90% of what you stumble upon you can decide if you are gonna like it or not after a few seconds of listening. Now in this respect the instant preview player was nice, you could fast as fuck go through all the latest releases. The problem is, when you do hit upon something that sounds like it might be interesting, you have to do some mouse hovering gymnastics in order to listen to the whole clip: if you move the mouse pointer away you'll have to start all over again. This is kind of a pain in the arse, and you can't jump to the middle of the tune.

So for the new player two things were top priority: it has to be fast as fuck, with the absolute minimum of waiting required (if you are on a modem still then you are screwed anyway of course...), and you should be able to skip into any part of the clip you want. With the skipping feature, I thought it would be really nice to be able to visualize the waveform you are listening to. For a lot of electronic styles in particular it's usually pretty easy to spot the "drop": where the intro ends and the main tune kicks in. So with these requirements in mind I set to work on the new player, with a browseable waveform. The current dev version looks like this:

This is a screenshot from a release page, which is pretty much finished. The list views still have to be done, which should take a week or two if I pull my finger out :D The waveforms have been added right into the page, so you can just click on any part you are interested in right away : no waiting for popups to load. Also the player will start playing the following clip automatically, so if you click to listen to the first clip you can go and write an email if you like while the thing plays. The release page has also had a bit of a make-over: the cover art is larger, and the details have been re-arranged so all the geeky metadata is all in one place. Also the Similar releases/ Similar artist / Fans boxes now fit down the right hand side if your screen resolution is 1024 x 768, which last time i looked was pretty much everyone. Haven't quite decided where to stick the banners yet, probably insert it under the breadcrumb trail (home // releases // from_sunflowers_and_papayas )

Computer love with the SoundCloud will Oct. 11

I'm sure you've heard of SoundCloud by now, and if you havent well there's this cool search thingy called Google.

Anyhow they seem like a nice bunch of groovy guys with a very nice site and sexy technology so I decided to get Digital Tunes all loved up programmatically and embarked on a bit of API intercourse.

The result of this love-fest is that our labels will soon be able to grab the music they uploaded to SoundCloud and sneak it over to Digital Tunes at the touch of the button, nifty eh? It's all pretty much up and running as we speak, although there is one teeny problem we have to iron out before we can properly get down to it, so to speak. That's the problem with being promiscuous in a beta world...

Getting rid of iTunes on the Mac will Feb. 14

I've got a bit of a pet hate with iTunes (the audio player software that is). One thing I can't stand is that every clip you listen to on the web goes into your library. Thats not so cool if you go shopping a lot for tunes and have thousands of those little clips filling up your library:( Then the m3u playlist support is totally broken. For example on Digital Tunes, if you click on the play button for a whole album, any normal audio player (WinAmp, XMMS...) will read the m3u playlist and then you get to listen to all the clips from the album. But iTunes just imports them all into your library, so once the first clip stops playing the next thing played will just be some random tune in your library, argghhh.

VLC is a pretty decent audio player for the mac, its free and open source and supports pretty much every audio/video format out there, including FLAC and OGG, sweet. Unfortunately getting Firefox to use it to play mp3s and m3u playlists is a bit of a bugger, even after I changed the OSX file associaions so mp3s played using VLC, not iTunes, it still kept loading up iTunes. Being known for occasional geek tendencies I decided to track down the config file for Firefox and fix this once and for all. Read on if you want to see how you can configure Firefox to only use VLC:

Using spotlight, search for 'mimeTypes.rdf'

Probably the top hit will be the right one. Check its in the Firefox Profiles directory by clicking the little information 'i'.

Open this file with some text editor like TextEdit. This is actually a bit of a pain in the arse: First right/control click -> 'Reveal in finder'

From the Finder right/control click -> 'Open With' on the file highlighted

You might want to back up the file now, before you make any changes ;)

Using Find/Replace replace all 'iTunes' with 'VLC' (apple-f to bring up the find dialog)

Now save the file, reboot Firefox and you should be done :)

Busy year ahead! glenn Jan. 21

Lots of big things lined up for this year! Looking forward to do some big things in the coming year with loads of interesting projects lined up. On the production side of things there is a fair few releases lined up so stay locked. I will be posting up some info as things becomes more clearer. Also the Beatniks nights in Helsinki has found a new home so we will be seeing some more action regarding that aswell, starting in march, just in time for my birthday. Also going down in the beginning of feb,2nd to be exact is the Vibez rec night that will feature myself, DJ Buzzby, Subject 13 and Resound for a night of DNB @1001, Brick Lane in London so if you`re in the area make sure to come down for a pint or two.

If you are a promoter and intrested in a night, don`t hesitate to get in touch for more info, press etc. contact me at physics@midnightsunrecordings.com

GlennPhysics