matt hackmann - web developer - artist - nerd

I've blogged about it before, so I'll keep the introductions short: for the last three years I've been developing, on and off, a web based music player. The last time I talked about features was v3 and I'm now two versions up from that. In today's post, I'll highlight version 4.

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As you can see, v4 was hardly polished. It fell victim to the "I want to add new features but I don't want to design for it" that v3 had towards the end of it's life (hint: it's the row of links towards the top). v4 was the first to go three column, based loosely off of what Microsoft was doing with the Zune player. The first column was for albums, second for whatever-the-fuck-I-wanted (songs, trending and latest in this case), and the third was the current playlist.

Also introduced in this version was a new extensible player module. I had tacked HTML5 capabilities onto v3 down at the end of its life, but this was the first to be built with that in mind. Also, it was the first to be able to switch output sources (here's where the modular part comes in) from HTML5 to remotely controlled VLC, which would play music out of the server itself. This could be done on the fly without having to use a separate page entirely, as had been done.

Finally, I had made a few things that would aid in the finding of media. Based upon recorded play data, you could get a list of media that was trending in the last seven days. Also added was a search-as-you-type function to quickly locate songs.

Oh, and yes there's a "video" tab there, but it never did anything. I had grandiose plans to merge my separate "video page" into this, but they never panned out.

Ultimately, v4 was just a testing ground for a lot of ideas that all got packaged up neatly in v5...

I have a webpage that allows me to listen to my music wherever I am. Anybody who has perused this blog for more than five minutes is acutely aware of this. One thing I did in August '09 was to add play stat tracking in so I could see what had been listened to when. Now that this functionality has been in for a full calendar, I've culled all the data to present a bunch of pure CSS graphs filled with 2010's listening habits.

I've done some odd things to other people's work for my own pleasure. Editing parts I don't like out of songs comes to mind (I've done this on more than one occasion). However, the latest target of my artistic raping is the live action video for Ningyo Hime, the Chobits closer and a song I much enjoy. While I do enjoy Japan's animated fare quite a lot, I am of the mind that they really suck at live action. The video of this song suffers from a lack of vision and direction, but more importantly it looks like it was shot on an old Sony HandyCam. I sought to "correct" this issue by using it as practice for color correction. After dropping the frame rate to 24 - down from a too smooth looking 29.97 - and slaughtering the blue color channel, this is what came out:

One of the first video game songs I remember really enjoying was Gerudo Valley from Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64. Back when I had a crappy computer and little hard drive space, I would listen to MIDI files and Gerudo Valley was one of the few songs that had a pretty good version out there. Of course, now that disk space isn't an issue, I've moved on to MP3s. However, I still find myself listening to more remixes than the actual original itself (because, let's face it, the N64 instrument library sucked). But, anyways, here are this weeks Gerudo Valley music picks.

Back in August of 1992, Nintendo released unto the world the little gem known as Mario Paint. Bundled with it's own mouse Mario Paint was the equivalent of Adobe Creative Suite for the Super Nintendo. You could draw pictures, do animations, and it even came with a nifty little mouse based game called Gnat Attack. However, Mario Paint's legacy lies not in it's visual abilities (though it inspired a certain internet cartoon). No, Mario Paint is all about its music creating abilities and the amount of high quality Mario Paint remixes on YouTube is absolutely astounding. Narrowing it down to three videos was a challenge not only because of the sheer volume of videos out there, but there are two guys who have the lions share and I wanted to give everybody a chance. Oh, and Mario Paint Composer doesn't count. But, enough rambling, enjoy!