Visual Stimulation

So the other day I found an awesome website called Soundcloud.com. Some of you may have heard of it already, but it's a music sharing site for artists and DJs. The object of the site is to give artists and DJs a way to distribute their tracks or mixes so that other people can hear what they have to offer. They have widgets for websites, as well as profile pages to point to, and they allow commenting and following of other artists. There's a bunch of other interactive stuff to do as well, but I'll let you check it out for yourself if you're interested.

The whole point of this is, the time comments allow me to track my mixes out. WHAT?!?! Track lists on LoveBug's mixes??? WHAT IS THIS NOISE???? It's true. I folded to demand and tracked them out. Improbability Drive is missing a couple (for obvious reasons), but the other ones are completely tracked out, front to finish. So far I've only done the ones that are in OGG. They re-compress everything to 128 for the widget player (although the download button links to the full track) so that they load faster, which makes the MP3 mixes sound like ass. The OGGs were originally 128, so it doesn't screw with them and they still sound pretty damn good. Again, OGG > MP3. You'll get the hang of this eventually. At a later date I may post the MP3 mixes up, which will make the difference obvious, but for now I've embedded the widget flash player for the top 4 mixes into their individual sections, and each player also has a fun wave form to look at while you're listening, so when you go about skipping through a mix, you can see where you're going, and since the tracks are marked on the wave form itself, you'll know where to click to hear that track.

I think everyone will like the visual enhancement to their audio experience. Go check them out, and comment in the mixes section to let me know what you think.

OH, speaking of comments. We've implemented a new captcha system that only demands a captcha if you sound like a bot or spam. I know it flags anything with code in it, but to the best of my knowledge comments won't support code, so if you're having a a captcha pop up for that, it's reminding you that we don't support code and you should probably get rid of it. I'm sure anything relating to "loving it hard" will also demand a captcha prompt so don't be too alarmed if you get one. It's a learning captcha system, so it's going to take a bit to figure out what to flag and what's not alarming in the least. The best thing to do is not to try and avoid it. It can't learn that way, so if you get one just feel good for contributing to betterment of the site. We can also flag stuff we think is inappropriate, so don't try to fool it because in the end there's a real person reading your comment and flagging the post manually. At the very least, try to be funny if you're going to go about wasting everyone's time (even yours) by trying to fool it. You had better make it good too, because I'm not even joking when I say I'll blacklist anyone who makes me waste part of my day flagging a post that fails to make me laugh.

At the end of the day, when all's said and done, time spent laughing is never a waste.