Can we do this? What do others say?
It must have been the time when bandcamp.com was 3years, soundcloud.com was just starting up, the Popkomm was cancelled and the #a2n_conferences in Berlin brought people together in a creative manner. The first connector I wrote for my associative Java Desktop Music Browser was an API Client to search and stream tracks of the FreeMusicArchive. Bandcamp and Soundcloud followed directly after and out of a sudden I was meshing up various streams from various sources in form of Soundposters. This is where the idea really started to kick into others minds, too.
Nowadays artworks got much bigger in all kinds of players and most platforms - it took them quite some years to realize this and bring back the focus on the visuals which cover sounds. As I was eager to create a network of partners around my digital music startup, I let them know. Just look at the frontpage of bandcamp.com today. I put a bit of pride in myself if I gave them focus or inspiration to head this way. The guys at Bandcamp are fantastic and have been supportive from Day 1 about my idea. I was one of their first third party players searching and streaming directly via their API and today I am - or better Soundposter.com is - one of the remaining few.
Through working on a platform I wanted to put the emphasize on creating music graphics for digital music communication and with the platform - I created a tool to put such into the hands of artists and listeners. Soundposters can easily exceed the boundaries of our displays. Topical audio-landscapes wait to be drawn. This is digital space.
As jri and many others have put it back then:
Digital music tracks connected to record covers, booklets, gig posters, illustrating playlists or sample tracks put on a music festival map — that's what soundposter.com helps you to do.
If you want to create yourself or your beloved ones a soundposter please find the Introduction on soundposter.com and then absolutely get in touch with me!
On the rest of this page you'll find links tosome soundposters we've authored using the platform and some background information on the development of the project.
I hope you can enjoy the read as I enjoyed the ride!
Festivals and concerts with Soundposters
OHA AHO (Live) Avec Spatzhabibi
TSF'14
CTM'13 Vorspiel
TSF'15
Behind the scenes - authoring soundposters
The editorial interface with which we can author new soundposters in minutes is DMX - The Context Machine.
Imagine audio files and streams can be associated equally and theses associations can be typed. That was the associative audio library project (AAL) and foreseen by some but never developed into production. The AAL was the forerunner of soundposter and lead me to finally creating soundposter.com.
Through writing a responsive audioplayer I turned the concepts of Topicmaps into a music player which tried to put the face back into digital music.
Album releases with Soundposter and Bandcamp
Joe's Trommler - Joe's Trommler
The Moh & Herr Ehrhardt - Best Off
Stefano di Puma
Idea background & Credits
With soundposter.com one can depict a playlist on the web across many devices. Soundposter provides us an interaction format for audible websites.
At this early stage of soundposter.com, there is no DIY interface yet. Please get in touch with us if you would like to use soundposter.com, and we will help you do it. We aim to bring the creation process of visual setlists, lp-covers, booklets and gig-posters into the hands of listeners and artists.
All its concepts were distilled after more than 2 years of supportive, friendly and open talk with many really cool people. Expect a blog post on the ideas and discussion which fueled the distillation process anytime soon. For now you can find out more about these guys here, they all have been very supportive to us:
- all2gethernow e.V. (Berlin)
(Network, Events & Idea Development - rostfrei gestalten
(Gestaltung & Produktion) - C3S (Europe, Germany)
(Marketing partner) - DeepaMehta e.V. (Berlin)
(Inspirational Community & Technical Support) - MusicScatter (Berlin)
(Friend - The new service for upcoming gigs in your city) - newthinking communications GmbH (Berlin)
(Network, Idea & Business Development) - Solution Scout (Berlin)
(Idea Development) - Bandcamp (International)
(Streaming services, API-Provider) - SoundCloud (International)
(Streaming services, API-Provider)
Thank you all for your unlimited support over the past two years.
Yours Truly
Malte
Website release notes
Platform backend realized with a simple player - (Berlin, Winter 2012/13)
1st Website and 2nd Player Launch (Berlin, Summer 2013)
1st Designed Website Re-Launch (Berlin, Sept 30 2014)
Website design completion, player update - (Leipzig, Dec 31 2014)
Migration to new server, deployment of new web-design - (Leipzig, Mar 28 2015)
The original player - Associative Audio Library
It started with me trying to squeeze something practical out of the diploma thesis i worked so hard for. So i re-purposed my alternative pen and touch driven topicmap renderer and turned it into a platform independent, associative audio player.
Technically the UI was composed of ca. 9k lines of .javafx hierarchically stacked frontend components. I found the part declarative, part imperative development practices of JavaFX Script for this UI extremely effective and fun. As the (platform independent) multimedia support in JavaFX was basically not working on any platforms at that time I used gstreamer-java to get platform independent music streaming work. The deepamehta3 R&D effort provided the underlying semantic network technology for building up an associative audio library and provided the tools for the specific HTTP REST API.
The result was a platform independent music player (Codename: Audi0-Canvas) which allowed me to navigate tracks or sounds in specific relations through selecting and prioritizing paths through my network of sounds. Using the deepamehta3 platform all associations between sounds in the audio library could be easily assigned custom types and those associations were directional.
Furthermore the UI provided a simple text search and select dialog for audio files from the FreeMusicArchive.org and bandcamp.com platform.
As a listener one could even draw new associations between tracks, select a path over multiple edges in the network of sounds which the player followed along (Math Joke: as long as no AmbiguityException by traversing the graph was thrown).
JavaFX has now replaced Java Swing but its declarative language has gone. The support for declaratively developing frontends with .javafx was ended by Oracle Inc in 2012. For details see this article mentioning the history and lifecycle of JavaFX Script on ThoughtCo.com.
JavaFX Script was "originally developed by Chris Oliver and known under the name F3 (Form Follows Function)".