Hay, DJ, play that request! (aka. where's all the music on VGMdb?)

[MrMAGFest]

As everyone is probably aware, VGMdb doesn't archive audio, samples, or previews of game music. However, we wouldn't be here if we didn't like listening to game music, would we? Well, I happen to have this large collection (sadly, not all listed in my profile yet) of CDs, and many excellent sources for more. I also have the permission and ability to play a lot of the music on my exclusively-game-music radio station.

Gigablah and I have been working on a little glue between VGMdb and Music and Gaming radio (which for now is just a little box in the corner of the MAGFest (http://magfest.org/) site) that allows album pages and my radio controller to communicate. So now, whenever you want to check which song is on "that one CD", or preview an album before buying it when online CD purchasing sites don't really have much in the way of game music, you'll now be able to send a request to my "DJ robot". Given that I've got the track (you won't see the request button to the right of the tracktime otherwise), and that there are no requests ahead of yours, you'll hear it right away at the next song change.

The list of requestable albums is maintained here (http://vgmdb.net/db/collection.php?do=view&userid=2303). Although I don't have anywhere close to the number of albums VGMdb has cataloged, I am constantly adding more albums to the station in hopes that people will find something awesome they want to listen to. If you're an artist listed on VGMdb and you would like to send us your stuff, please feel free to send me a PM or E-mail and we can get it in the rotation. Additionally, we do accept VGM CD donations, though I know we have a lot of collectors so I'm guessing most people will want to hold onto their music. =]

Last but not least, a few quick notes about the station. It depends on my Internet connection, which is up most of the time but blips could knock it offline temporarily (98% of the time it will recover automatically). I broadcast in Vorbis because you can get great sound at a really low bitrate. And last but not least, every once in awhile we will run a live show so it won't interrupt us with your request (though you could certainly jump on IRC and request something there!). Conveniently, requests are stored until they are played, so even if we're running a show, it'll get played when we go back to "regular" mode.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and if you like what you see (hear), please let me know. I'm happy to field constructive criticism and curious about any feedback or questions you might have. If I have time, I can possibly even extend the station and make it more featureful, but that's the future. =]

[Gigablah]

A quick explanation of the system:

If an album is requestable, you'll get request buttons on the tracklist, like this:
http://vgmdb.net/gigablah/vgmdb_request.png

Click on a button to queue the request on MAGradio. If it's accepted, the button turns green. If the request fails for whatever reason, the button turns red.

Well, that's pretty much it. Have fun, and thanks to MrMAGFest for making this possible!

[Carl]

Some quick initial responses...

1. When you click the request button, you should have it automatically pop up the player <javascript:popcontact('http://magfest.org/magradio.html')> or <http://magfest.org/magradio.m3u>, otherwise people will be multi-clicking a bunch of them and thinking WTF unless they see something happen.. They won't know it's playing elsewhere or where to go to bring up the player unless it pops up itself.

2. Configure the broadcast software to access collections from multiple users, so that users with large collections can be remotely accessed and added to the pool, enabling a much wider base of album selections. Or just have multiple stations I guess, as I haven't looked into what net-radio broadcasting softwares are really capable of, so I don't know if they are capable of linking to multiple file sources.

[MrMAGFest]

Well, #1 is certainly possible, though that's all on VGMdb.

#2....not so much. The main problem is I have to be able to have the audio locally or at the very least it should be network-accessible. Unless people can make their collections somehow network-accessible to me, that is. However, please keep in mind the current playlist rotation is somewhere around 20% of the actual available music (I had to run skeleton for MAGFest because I took the archive with me) and then the actual AVAILABLE music pool once I start going through more of it is about 3 times the size.

Once I drop in all of that, it should help a lot, but I wanted to at least test things out with SOME music in place.

[Gigablah]

#1 will need a slightly different approach. You can't just open a window whenever someone clicks on a request button, since if a player is already open, it'll refresh the player and cause an interruption in playback; or, if you open a new window, you could end up with multiple players going. You could check whether a window is already open, but that's not possible if a user opened the player window through magfest.org since it'd be assigned a random identifier.

A compromise would be to show a "sticky" tooltip providing a brief explanation and a link to the player popup, perhaps.

[Carl]

Well after it's open then people can obviously use their judgement on requesting one track at a time, and they'd also know how to close out multiple instances if they get trigger happy. The thing is that something has to open for them in the first place.

Right now, if someone browsed straight to an album page that has radio icons but they didn't come through the front page and didn't read the whole text announcement, they wouldn't have any clue they needed to go to a different website to load up the player.

Just trying to help avoid confusion for folks who jump right into album pages without reading the forum. Some form of player popup is what the user will expect.

[MrMAGFest]

Hmm. So, like, after clicking the request button, what about maybe a cute ajax popup thing (like when you zoom an album cover) that says "Your track has been successfully requested! Be sure to tune <radio link> into MAGradio <info link> to hear it!" with a "don't show this again" checkbox?

[Notundercovercop327]

Will more albums be added in the future? I would really like to hear some of the older albums (IE tecmo, famicom and anything with the word game music)

[MrMAGFest]

Yo 327, I do have 28XA-95 (http://vgmdb.net/album/3818) that is ready for the rotation, and a pretty good handful of Famicom albums that are not currently on the playlist. I should stress again that the temporary playlist is about 25% of what I can have up by the end of next month, or 10-15% of what will be available sometime this summer. I just wanted to have something, even something small, to make sure the feature even worked and iron out the bugs.

I have a reasonably good supply of incoming music and a lot of it comes from doujin/fan artists, so that means it's also very easy for me to get permission to play it. Sometimes people even send me music just so that we can play it, even better! If there's something people would like to see available, I am definitely able to look around, and if I find it, I'll try to prioritize adding it.

[Gigablah]

Right now, if someone browsed straight to an album page that has radio icons but they didn't come through the front page and didn't read the whole text announcement, they wouldn't have any clue they needed to go to a different website to load up the player.

Just trying to help avoid confusion for folks who jump right into album pages without reading the forum. Some form of player popup is what the user will expect.

A popup message now shows for people who click on request buttons. Users can disable it after the first viewing:

http://vgmdb.net/gigablah/vgmdb_request_popup.png

[Carl]

Great, that should do just fine!

[Notundercovercop327]

Thanks, I can't wait to hear it. I'm still trying to figure out how to listen to the songs, do I have to download something? I also have a few (Emphasis on few) CDs i would be willing to add to help out the cause. Also does anyone have the original super mario brothers soundtrack? I've been searching for that one forever.

[MrMAGFest]

327, What music players do you have (and which do you like most)? We'll get you listening with one of those.

[Notundercovercop327]

Windows media is my default player.

[MrMAGFest]

Windows media is my default player.
Try installing the codecs here: http://xiph.org/dshow/

[Notundercovercop327]

Alright, I think that did the trick. Thank you, hope to see more soon.

[MAGradio]

Quick updates,
- The playlist has nearly doubled in size (from 63?) to 112 albums for a total of 5047 tracks.
- Blacklisting is implemented so you don't get drama tracks in shuffle play (they're still requestable).
- That Tecmo album is in there for 327 to listen to. =]
- Some bugs were fixed for some albums that you'd request and they wouldn't get played.
- A summary page linking here is now up at http://magfest.org/magradio

[Notundercovercop327]

Thanks Mag, would it be Okay if I requested a few other albums?

[MAGradio]

Well, I can't promise I'll be able to find them or put them up but I'm always happy to hear what people want to be able to listen to.... so please feel free to post or PM me any requests, er, to be requested. However that works.

[MAGradio]

Tonight's update to the radio station provides us with 165 albums. Previously the radio playback engine did not support requests for tracks from CDs with no catalog number; this has been fixed.

[Kaleb.G]

I tried this a couple nights ago and it didn't seem to work. The radio station was down, I think. Do you know if the m3u files work in iTunes?

[MAGradio]

I tried this a couple nights ago and it didn't seem to work. The radio station was down, I think. Do you know if the m3u files work in iTunes?

First of all, we did have a few problems with connectivity over here, namely the server got knocked offline for a bit, so that might have caused your problem.

Anyhow, as long as it's up to date and you have the necessary Quicktime/iTunes component, iTunes works fine; I've seen people listening with iTunes on the station.

Try:
http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/xiph-qt/xiph-qt-0.1.8.dmg

if for some reason it doesn't and let me know what's up.

[CaptainCapitalist]

DUDE! This thing is awesome! Way to go everybody, this addition really makes this site the tops. I mean, it was good before, but wow. Friggan' awesome.

[MAGradio]

I have mostly fixed a small issue with multi-disc albums, and the current number of requestable VGM albums is now up to 205. Again, if anyone has anything they'd like added, please feel free to message me, and if you already have I've still got your PM. At present, I'm working on adding mostly:
- Albums that people have requested
- Albums similar or related to what people have requested
- Some of the most viewed (http://vgmdb.net/db/statistics.php?do=most_viewed) albums on vgmdb.
- Albums I've already verified as good and don't require a lot of effort to get up

[MrMAGFest]

The storm situation down here caused a few power outages and brought down the radio station a couple times. Sorry if you've been affected, I've moved most everything to a battery backup in hopes it will stay up.

[NukaCola]

This is really, really cool. I like the idea of people sharing tracks they love and the wonder of how many people might be listening to the request and being interested in what game a track is from. it really does help in getting those obscure game soundtracks out there.

[Captain Antonio Falcon]

Hey guys, I'm gonna give you some donations!

[MrMAGFest]

Cool! Always interested in that!

[Carl]

Just curious on the station's status, have you managed to add all the local albums you had available? Has there been any issues of too many requests at time or any types of overloads?

[Captain Antonio Falcon]

Can I post links here?

[Myrkul]

Can I post links here?

Links for what..?
Have in mind that we'r not accepting links to any kind of copyrighted material.

[MrMAGFest]

Just curious on the station's status, have you managed to add all the local albums you had available?

I actually have a decent handful more to add. I have unfortunately just been busy with working two jobs, one of them being MAGFest. The other job is a database job where I sit around calling people all day but lately I have been doing cleanup work that doesn't require as many calls and I got permission to listen to music after hours (the computers don't have sound, so my cellphone and a pair of headphones will have to do!). That way I can verify more albums (I listen to everything that goes up on the air to make sure there aren't any skips).

Anything you see on the MAGradio collection (http://vgmdb.net/db/collection.php?do=view&userid=2303) that isn't inside the folder has been added since my last update/posting, so I am still getting a few things done in this department. I've had offers to help verify albums, but:
- I actually enjoy listening to the soundtracks
- I have to tag and prepare them for air with the station
- There is still a possibility of error when transmitting them to someone to help

One thing that I will be implementing soon is new code that will interface with a feature GigaBlah wrote.... the radio will be able to automatically add albums to the playlist itself when they're placed in the right directory on my end. A few less clicks for me gives me more time to do what's important.

Has there been any issues of too many requests at time or any types of overloads?

In terms of listeners, we are definitely not overloaded. We have had a few dozen listeners at a time and it doesn't cause a problem. Keep in mind that although the computer that *runs* the radio is on a regular everyday internet connection, the machine with icecast is a beefy server in DC, so it's no big deal if a bunch of people tune in. We don't get a lot of people that listen all day but we do get a lot of people that will tune in to hear their request and/or listen for an hour here or there. I'm guessing the number of total unique listeners per day is nearing 100 by now.

Requests aren't overloading either, but every once in awhile someone (probably) uses something like DownThemAll in an effort to spider-download each listen link on the album page and suddenly we'll get a barrage of requests to basically hear an entire album. I already have some throttling in place and I have some ideas of how to implement things to more fairly play requests. Many of these will probably get implemented next month when I have a little more time.

Can I post links here?Links for what..?
Have in mind that we'r not accepting links to any kind of copyrighted material

Indeed. If you're posting links to album pages of stuff for me to choose from or something, that's terrific, but otherwise these need to be physical copies of albums or something we have explicit permission to air (a la what Falcom is doing (http://vgmdb.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2451)).

As an aside, I thought people might find this a little bit interesting. At first I thought my donation request might be a little out of line, but it's generated a little bit of response, which is cool.

For example:
- VGM composers like Josh Whelchel (http://vgmdb.net/artist/5698) have been listening to the stream and offered music.
- Some doujin/fan artists (especially OC ReMix (http://vgmdb.net/org/47) and bands that play at MAGFest) are pretty happy to see music on the stream and will send me discs.
- Some news sites, music4games (http://music4games.net/) and originalsoundversion (http://www.originalsoundversion.com/) to name a couple, have offered us some of their older review copies and/or additional promo material.

I also figured we might get a few offers from:
- labels that want to promote some of their music (indeed, we do have a few discs from Sumthing Else (http://vgmdb.net/org/25))
- people that wanted their old VGM albums to go to a good home but didn't want to bother with selling them, or were already selling them for like a dollar (one or two bites, nothing significant here).

And lastly, Eirikr has been a valuable source in getting this thing off the ground. Last year we even had a few computer setups at MAGFest with earphones so you could sit down and listen to music and browse the CD art. Definitely nice.

[Captain Antonio Falcon]

I see. Then you have permission to do what you're doing, right?

[MAGradio]

Yes, we always ask if we can air music before we do when it's given to us. But I'm finding that things work the other way around a lot of the time; it's given to us with the hopes that it will get played.

Either way, even though you've edited it out, using GH is not an option for me. I'm very much aware of it but MP3s are not suitable material for the radio. It must be a lossless, (hopefully) physical copy to be considered for air, and also MP3 does not transcode (or even re-encode) well.

[MAGradio]

Just an update...we've broken the 300 CD mark. That's currently 235 actual releases available for listening or 7100 tracks on the playlist. Thanks to everyone supporting us.

[MrMAGFest]

Today is a pretty awesome day.

Stemage said that I am allowed to put five of the tracks of the new unreleased Metroid Metal Varia Suite (http://vgmdb.net/album/13166) up for listening. Since there is no way to make only specific tracks of an album requestable at present, we've decided to make it a "game" of sorts. People will have to guess which tracks are available and request the right one. This could potentially cause a little bit of frustration but we hope everyone sees it as fun instead.

If the right track is requested, everything happens as it normally does. So, you're listening to the radio, the track comes up in the order requested, etc.

If one of the unavailable tracks is requested, it just....won't play.

But wait! Don't just go requesting the entire CD. Requests are throttled, and the radio keeps track of the most recently requested tracks, so people will need to request tracks other than the Varia Suite once the tracks have been aired so they will get pushed out of that "recent" list and be requestable again. This is to encourage people to:
- actually try out the feature
- keep listening to the radio
- listen to various different CDs, not just metroid metal (there's a decent handful of metroid-related material on the station if you need to get a fix)

After a little while, the entire CD will be available, or more tracks will become available each X weeks, or something.

Don't forget you can watch the radio playlist here (http://magfest.org/radiostats).

[Stemage]

Just so people know, the tracks available on ze radio for Metroid Metal - Varia Suite are:

Theme (NES)
Phendrana Drifts (MP)
Boss Medley (SM)
Item Room (NES)
Kraid (NES)

[MrMAGFest]

Just so people know, the tracks available on ze radio for Metroid Metal - Varia Suite are:

Theme (NES)
Phendrana Drifts (MP)
Boss Medley (SM)
Item Room (NES)
Kraid (NES)

ZOMG SPOILERS!@ :D

[MAGradio]

Bugfix: If anyone was requesting tracks from a CD that doesn't have a catalog number and got the same track from a completely different CD, yeah, whoops. I didn't notice VGMdb reports a null string instead of "N/A" to the radio station on some no-catalog requests. I was depending on it being specifically that to switch gears and drill down to which CD was being requested. More tolerant requesting now.

I've recently been able to add a couple dozen more CDs to the radio, breaking 7500 tracks and 260 releases. Feels good. Lots more to come now that MAGFest has passed.

[MAGradio]

Tonight's the night.

300 releases now requestable. Over 8500 tracks. The folders got merged for anyone that found that confusing (I had a reason for that, but not any more). Hope everyone likes the additions!