« You might also like | Main | Most popular Magnatune search terms »

April 06, 2010

Comments

David Schlachter

Perhaps chapterized m4a (AAC) files would enable jumping between songs in the album. I really like the standard—I join together all my sonatas and suites so that I can skip to individual movements, but I always have the entire work in one file.

Joerg Sonnenberger

Nice! Does the detection code from http://pipwerks.com/2010/03/19/html5-video-minus-ogg/ work? If not, you could offer a simple Flash/Ogg/MP3 box and store the choice in a cookie...

PS: The Ogg streams for members have wrong tags. They still contain the PREVIEW ads.

John from Magnatune

re: AAC files

I'm unlikely to switch the "you don't have flash" fallback to AAC files as very few web browsers can play them, and I don't have an easy way to detect AAC support. Also, I'm pretty sure that the chapterized AAC format is apple-exclusive, as I've never seen a way to create or decode them on Linux, which is another negative.

John from Magnatune

re: Does the detection code from http://pipwerks.com/2010/03/19/html5-video-minus-ogg/ work?

Yes, I think the trick that javascript code is using for video-capability detection might also work with audio. Thanks for that, I'll definitely check it out further.

re: PS: The Ogg streams for members have wrong tags. They still contain the PREVIEW ads.

Whoops, sorry about that. I'll fix the code for new OGGs and in a few weeks I'm hoping to get the new super server up, which should have enough spare capacity to re-encode all the OGGs on the server to fix the existing tags.

-john

Joerg Sonnenberger

The trouble with AAC is that just like MP3 it is a patent mind field, which result in many Open Source systems not being able to ship with the codecs by default.

John: If you are redoing the tagging anyway, care to also check that the length restrictions for MP3 tags are not applied to the other formats? At least the AAC versions of a number of albums had suboptimal tags. The genre field tag should be checked too. A nice bonus would be to include to the album cover in the files. Makes playback with the iPod much nicer and 600x600 JPEG compressed to 60KB or so doesn't increase the file size too much.

Mario Morales

Excelent the Quicktime idea for the iphone/ipod! Cheers!

Anonymous

As far as I know, you can simply specify alternative sources in the audio element - the browser will then try to choose the one it can play back.

Riccardo Iaconelli

As far as I can tell, i see no tags in the page (also looking in the source)... do you have a clue about why?

I'm using Chrome on Linux, and other audio and video HTML5 elements on other pages play perfectly fine.

John from Magnatune

As far as I can tell, i see no tags in the page (also looking in the source)... do you have a clue about why?

You have to have Javascript enabled for our pages to work. I use a bit of Javascript code to test for the presence of Flash. If no Flash is found, then a simple tag is returned, which should work fine.

If you're looking at the source to see how this works, look for:
if (!hasReqestedVersion) ...

this is Adobe's own javascript code for detecting Flash (they provide it for this use by web sites).

-john

The comments to this entry are closed.