At Magnatune, we're now accepting all credit cards, without having to go through Paypal.
We're using the Stripe credit card service, so that when you pay for your membership, you now can use your credit card directly, or use your paypal account:
And when/if you cancel your membership, your recurring charges are automatically halted.
-john
After a 7 week pause, we're once again releasing new albums!
Why the pause?
A perfect storm of bad timing occurred, when in the same few days I killed our main server, and got a bad case of mushroom poisoning:
1) KILLED THE SERVER: I managed to completely destroy the main Magnatune server by installing a badly written count-the-beats-per-minute program I'd downloaded off the 'net. The main server, tweaked over many years with lots of custom bits and bobs, took a while to get perfect again. I had a backup from the night before, but when rebuilding the server, I took the opportunity to upgrade the Linux version (which was 7 years old) and so, getting the server working became a nest of new versions of dozens of programs, all working subtly differently now.
2) MUSHROOM POISONING: I bought some mushrooms from the farmer's market, that had been "picked in the wild". I've always read that when preparing mushrooms to eat, you should gently brush and then lightly cook them. That turns out to be great advice for cultivated mushrooms, but those harvested in the wild have a strong likelihood of high bacteria levels and require a very different treatment. 45 minutes after eating a mushroom omelette, my girlfriend and I felt very, very ill. It took us about 2 weeks to get over it, during which time we didn't manage to eat much food. I consulted the mushroom picker who sold them to me, a pharmacist, and an expert friend, who all told me that wild mushrooms need to be extensively washed, and then boiled, submerged under water, for at least five minutes! Part of the worry about mushroom poisoning is the concern that you might have eaten something really toxic, that will kill you or destroy your kidneys. When in bed after eating a bad mushroom, you have plenty of time to read all about mushroom poisoning on wikipedia! I've learned that mushrooms which make you ill right away are likely less dangerous (they're not a neurotoxin) and that it's the ones that take a few hours or more to take effect that are really bad news. Nonetheless, two weeks worrying about "is this it?" isn't much fun, and you don't get much work done. I'm sticking to supermarket mushrooms from now on!
So... my apologies for the delay. We're back to doing new releases now, and I'm also back on task of programming to improve the new Magnatune. My main goal over the next few months will be improving how the music on Magnatune is organized, to make it easier to find what you might like. More news on that when new features get close to shipping.
-john
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.
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.
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
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
I've written a program called "ripcheck" which runs a variety of tests on a WAV file, to see if there are potential mistakes that occurred in converting a CD to a WAV file.
I've made this program available as free & open source, and it can be download at Sourceforce at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/ripcheck/ or from Github at https://github.com/panzi/ripcheck
You can use this program on your own WAV files to see if there potential defects in your CD rips.
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WHAT?
ripcheckc.c - source code
ripcheckc - Mac OS command line binary
ripcheckc.exe - Windows command line binary
ripcheck.tcl - Slower version, already creates zoomed graphics of problem areas
Released under GPL v3 license - http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
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WHY?
This program was written because we'd received some complaints of occasional "pops" at the beginning on some albums at Magnatune. Further research found that most of the albums we released in 2007 had various CD ripping problems.
At that time, we were using the open source windows program CDEX and on many albums from that time this program would introduce a very short "click" sound at the beginning of each WAV file, which would then trickle down to all the file formats we offered at Magnatune. Most people didn't notice it, probably assuming it was an audio streaming glitch, since it was so short.
In order to discover just how bad the problem might be, I wrote a program called "ripcheck", because, to my surprise, no program currently exists to try to determine if there might be CD ripping errors in an audio file.
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WHAT KINDS OF PROBLEMS?
Besides the common problem short click at the beginning of a track, this program also discovered:
1) the occasional dropped sample (i.e. a sample value of zero) in the middle of a song. This might be audible as a click as well.
2) the occasional repeated sample value, for about 1/1000th of a second. This would be audible as a very short tone.
3) the occasional empty spot in the middle of a song.
All in all, my program found that 124 albums at Magnatune had some sort of defect in them.
Most of the defects could be attributed to our early years, when we were running our ripping on Windows with software that was in its early versions (remember, we've been doing this since 2003, when CD ripping was pretty new).
Occasional problems also crept in from CDs burnt too quickly or on cheap CDR media, that were then sent to us as "masters".
What's amazing to me is that all these albums were sent to Amazon and iTunes, and those services never noticed anything. Obviously, though companies don't have any sort of "ripcheck" program, to do automatic quality control on the audio they distribute.
All our releases are now automatically tested with "ripcheck" before we make them available. And, all 124 albums that had defects in them have been repaired, in most cases with an audio editor. To remove the introductory pops (usually two samples long), I used Fission because it's a quick tool to use and the pops were in the silent part before the song starts. To fill in the occasional zero sample, I used Sequoia a professional grade audio program and actually drew in the missing sample. Where there was more than one sample missing, we reripped the CD master with modern software. If the CD master had defects in it (which as the case for about 20 releases), we contacted the musician and obtained new CD masters, which we insisted be slow (4x speed) burned. ripcheck was then rerun on all new audio to make sure that the defects were in fact removed.
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HOW TO OBTAIN:
If you'd like to run this program yourself, on your own music library, please download at Sourceforce at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ripcheck/
It's a command line program that works on Windows, Mac and Unix/Linux. There is a fast version, which shows potential problems as text, and a much slower version which generates graphics of the WAV file defects, so you can easily see where the problem is.
In all cases, the location of the glitch is given in samples and milliseconds. You can use an audio editing program to type this number directly in and jump to that point.
Here is a typical warning, which detected 545 duplicate samples at two minutes into a song, which will sound like a very short (.012 seconds long) high pitched tone:
The ripcheck.tcl version of the program made this GIF for this WAV file, showing the context of the potential problem, and highlighting in red what it thinks the bad data is:
This particular audio file had two real problems. The repeated sample above is definitely a glitch on the CD (in this case, on the CDR master).
There was also a two sample long pop at the beginning of the recording, which ripcheck detects by looking for samples in the first five seconds of the song that have a zero value (silence), followed by a very short few samples that have a high value, followed by more silence. Here is how the ripcheck.tcl graphic represents this pop at the beginning of the song:
All the errors in a song are displayed as one GIF file, with the same name as the WAV file but with a .gif filename extension. The image zooms in on each error. Here is what the complete GIF file looks like for this song, showing the two problem areas (click on the graphic to see the full size image):
A text file is created for each WAV file, summarizing problems found, which in this case were:
- possible pop found at sample count 1014 (20 millisecs) values: '0, 0, 0, 0, 24932, 26464, 0'
- 1090 duplicate samples found (value: 18614) in the left channel at sample '6,360,822' (144230 milliseconds)
The program is intentionally over broad in detecting problems, and will often yield false positives (about half of the time, in my experience). For example, if you have electronic music which toys with audio glitches, perhaps creating pure tones with the same sample value, you might get a lot of false positives on that kind of music.
My goal was to always detect potential problems and never overlook real problems. On the Magnatune music collection, I personally listened to every audio file that had a warning, and viewed the samples in an audio editor, before marking a warning as a false positive.
The source code is pretty simple to read, and I'd love for any programmers who find it useful to devise other tests and add them to the list of things to detect.
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HOW TO RUN:
If you download the .exe file for windows, you will also need to install cygwin.
To run it yourself, type:
ripcheckc filename.wav
Only WAV files are handled, and they must be 44k/16bit.
If you want to use this program on Unix/Linux, you will need to compile the program with this command line:
gcc ripcheckc.c -o ripcheckc
The ripcheck.tcl program requires Tcl/Tk to be on your system, and ImageMagick as well. It runs about 3x slower, but creates attractive graphics of the WAV file problem areas. This can be a great time saver if you have a lot of problematic WAV files, aiding you in quickly reviewing the problems visually to decide if they are false positives.
If you want a WAV with defects to test, you can download:
http://magnatune.com/p/ripcheck_example.zip
This file has both a pop at the beginning, and a RIP error in the middle of the song.
- possible pop found at sample count 1012 (22 millisecs) values: '0, 0, 0, 0, 24932, 26464, 0'
- 545 dupes found at sample count 6360820 (144236 millisecs) value='5703'
-john
I'm pleased to announce that all the music on Magnatune is now downloadable in the Opus audio format.
What is Opus?
Opus is a fairly new, open source, IETF standard audio format that provides extremely high audio quality. It has been in development since 2007, by Xiph (the ogg/flac people) and Skype (it uses a modified version of Skype's encoding technology).
Currently, the most popular programs that can play Opus files are VLC and Firefox, as well as foobar2000, GStreamer and FFmpeg. Thus, it is becoming popular on Linux, and those who use the VLC audio player on all platforms, but it's also a good solution when streaming audio to Firefox users (which is something I'm looking into now).
By the way, if you've not heard of the VLC audio/video player, I highly recommend you give it a try, as it is what I use exclusively for playing video files, because (amazingly) the video quality is significantly better for me, when watching movies, than using Apple's Quicktime player. It's completely free. Check it out at http://www.videolan.org
For audio quality, we're using the Opus VBR settings, but instead of the default 96kb stereo, we're using a higher encoding level of 128kb stereo. I've been listening to Magnatune's classical music this morning encoded by Opus, and the sound quality is very, very impressive.
-john
By far the most requested feature on the new Magnatune site is the ability to jump around a song.
I've now added that feature.
When you play a song in an album, you'll see the time elapsed displayed in this new way:
If you click on a dot, you will jump to that precise time in the song. There are also "hover tips" as you hover your mouse over a dot, showing you the time at that point before you click.
This feature seems to work on all platforms, except if you are using a Flashblocker on Google Chrome, due to some bugs in OGG audio file support on Chrome. Firefox with a Flashblocker does not have this problem.
-john
For those of you who want to stream our music using your own audio player (i.e., winamp, vlc, mplayer) I've now added download links to playlists in various formats, both for free and members.
You'll find them about 2/3rds down the page on the "download" tab on an album. Here is what it says: