#1

I’m playing with the idea of making my own blog/site engine specifically for audio for myself a while now because I want to have full control over the listening experience’s creative context and player. With Soundcloud’s potential flop this idea became more relevant personally and maybe even a reason to go the extra mile of making it available and useable for others and to turn it into a polished user friendly product?

Think a fully customisable listening experience (per track?), visually and functionally, and you set the frequency/form (podcast, sound diary, albums). I’m not so interested in social or discovery features: more web 1.0 style and self hosted(?). There are already enough social and discovery platforms which strip away the art around and normalise the listening experience.

So, I’m curious, are you interested in a new platform for sharing your sounds? Would you like self host your site/content? Dropbox, s3, own web hosting, own server? Or rather hosted? What kind of features would you like to see? How would you like to put your sound on display? What would you want to customise, how much effort would you put in customising? What kind of pricing would you expect, self hosting (software only, updates?) vs. hosted (service) or better said what would it be worth to you? Is this interesting at all?

Touching upon



8 Likes
#2

So long as it is self-hosted and hackable, yes, very much so.

I should be able to choose my storage layer, my rendering layer, and my hosting layer. These could be all on the same machine, or on different machines, potentially in different places.

It’s surprisingly difficult to find an open source audio player that uses modern HTML5 web technology and also streams well (especially difficult if your audio files are unusually large). Honestly this is the only “missing” piece in my opinion. A solid audio player that works really well for any size audio file. Nifty features like waveform display are nice-to-haves but entirely optional.

I’d be willing to contribute elbow grease!

Not just interesting, but absolutely necessary.

2 Likes
#3

Something self-hosted.
Compared to telemata, mediadrop, or mediagoblin, or even scenari webmedia (example), it should be:

  • simpler to deploy and maintain (docker is not simple if you want to understand what’s going on and how would things evolve over time (ie. what happens with next stable debian release ^^ ), and what is it actually doing to your server etc.);
  • focused on sound, not video/pictures/3D files;
  • some indexing/navigation/chapters/time-dependent comments(set by editor, not visitors) capability;
  • avoid trying to be a full-fledged system for archive, dispatch, auto-replication and self-generation of audio;
  • if “web 1.0” is a point, then i would except it to work in a straightforward static site generator way, organize various collections by simply putting audio files in folders;
  • so, be flexible in the way one wants to organize content (i guess Hugo is a good reference here)
  • a novel(?) point would be a basic ability to change the visual aspect of a page/player (morphing between css files? (is that even possible?)) based on time cues in the sound played.
  • want more great ideas that “just need to be in there” (and of course that i have no clue how to even start implementing) ? ;]
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#4

I’ve been hacking around building something for myself for the same purpose. Happy to share notes here or in another thread. I’m currently building around S3, nodejs lambda functions and DynamoDB. Considering Google’s cloud stuff though. Trying to get as far as I can without touching an operating system.

#5

I’d be really interested in something self-hosted that I can just drop onto my normal webhost (with limited access) without being a server/web development wizard. You know something as easy to install as wordpress…
But I guess I am asking too much :slight_smile:

#6

So far all votes go to self-hosted, yay! Took your suggestions into account and I’m thinking along the lines of this now: a small desktop app which allows you to organise files, generate, preview and publish your static website. Might allow publishing with netlify at first which has an api for this and seems user friendly. For non-netlify users there could be a drag and drop/diff file support for manual publishing. Shouldn’t be too hard technically, hardest bit is always UX and aesthetics :innocent:

3 Likes
#7

Sounds fantastic! Let me know if I can help (especially with UX/design).

1 Like
#8

Thanks! Will definitely take you up on this! :smiley:

1 Like
#9

This is a great idea - if I can contribute any product marketing/product management experience let me know.

#10

This is great! Nothing to contribute at the moment technically, but plenty of good vibes and love.