Magnatune blog

Pinterest and Magnatune

I've added "Pin it!" buttons to the share pages on artists and albums. It looks like this:

There's also a Pinterest Magnatune board now, at:
http://www.pinterest.com/magnatune/

Many thanks to Marcel Aubron-Bülles, aka "The Tolkienist" for nudging me to do this, and also for doing the pinning on the Magnatune board.

New: links to songs and tabs, IE11 fixed

I've added a new feature at Magnatune, to give you URLs that link directly to a song or a specific tab.

This makes it much easier to blog about a specific song, since people who click on that link will now hear the song you linked to, and not the first song (which is what it used to do).

So...every time a song plays, the URL on the page will change to have a song= on the end of it, like so:

http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/dbautista-symtwob?song=1
http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/dbautista-symtwob?song=2
http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/dbautista-symtwob?song=3
etc...

If you go to this URL, song number 3 will play.

The same thing is now also true for tabs on the artist page.

If you click the URL for a download tab, the url will have "download" on the end:
http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/dbautista-symtwob/download

and going to this url will automatically load the download page.

This new feature doesn't work for IE6, but worked for every other browser I tested.

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In other news, those of you using Internet Explorer 11 have been having problems playing music at Magnatune. This should be fixed now. The problem was caused by IE11 identifying itself as Firefox, which can play OGG audio files. IE11 definitely cannot play OGG audio files, and that's what caused the problem.

-john

Magnatune mostly working now

Hurrah! Magnatune is mostly back to working now.

Here is a complete list of the things that I know are not working, which isn't very long:

1) podcasts are not available, and are not currently being built
2) audio streams for Second Life are not currently available
3) shoutcast radio stations (i.e., listening from iTunes radio) is not working.

While I do want to get these things working, they're all lower priority for me.

IMPORTANT: If you find something that isn't working, that isn't on this list, please DO post a comment here and I'll get to it right away. If you put your email address in the comment (it isn't posted publicly) I'll let you know via email when it's fixed.

No data was lost because of the problems or downtime.

Thanks for your patience!

-john

Magnatune unavailable

Sorry folks, a bad tech problem has occurred at Magnatune, and the service is currently unavailable.

I'm working on fixing it just as soon as possible...

update: the main server is down (operating system corrupted) and we'll be restoring from backup.

update #2: as good fortune would have it, we had switched to new backup software just three days ago, which means that I have a full backup from Sunday, and incremental backups for each day after. Woohoo!

Usually, my experience is that when you look at your backups and you really need them, you find they "didn't work" for some previously unnoticed reason.

For those of you who are curious, this current problem was caused by my installing some very-badly-behaved new software that was supposed to auto-detect "beats per minute" for each song at Magnatune. It was supposed to make some charts, but instead the software it depended on wasn't available, and the bpm script went a bit haywire. It erased most of /bin/. Result: unbootable server. My bad, though, for not testing the software first from an unprivileged account (whoops).

For the techies out there: Magnatune is running Debian Linux, and the server hadn't previously been rebooted in 6 months.

-john