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  #1  
Old Mar 24, 2009, 09:47 PM
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MrMAGFest MrMAGFest is offline
 
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Lightbulb Hay, DJ, play that request! (aka. where's all the music on VGMdb?)

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 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. 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. =]
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  #2  
Old Mar 24, 2009, 10:51 PM
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A quick explanation of the system:

If an album is requestable, you'll get request buttons on the tracklist, like this:


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!
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  #3  
Old Mar 25, 2009, 05:21 AM
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Some quick initial responses...

1. When you click the request button, you should have it automatically pop up the player <javascriptopcontact('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.
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  #4  
Old Mar 25, 2009, 06:33 AM
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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.
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  #5  
Old Mar 25, 2009, 06:38 AM
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#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.
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  #6  
Old Mar 25, 2009, 07:22 AM
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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.

Last edited by Carl; Mar 25, 2009 at 07:24 AM.
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  #7  
Old Mar 25, 2009, 08:49 AM
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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?
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  #8  
Old Mar 25, 2009, 02:02 PM
Notundercovercop327 Notundercovercop327 is offline
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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)
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  #9  
Old Mar 25, 2009, 04:36 PM
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Yo 327, I do have 28XA-95 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.
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  #10  
Old Mar 25, 2009, 08:29 PM
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Gigablah Gigablah is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Carl View Post
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:

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  #11  
Old Mar 26, 2009, 04:09 AM
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Great, that should do just fine!
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  #12  
Old Mar 26, 2009, 08:12 AM
Notundercovercop327 Notundercovercop327 is offline
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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.
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  #13  
Old Mar 26, 2009, 08:15 AM
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327, What music players do you have (and which do you like most)? We'll get you listening with one of those.
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  #14  
Old Mar 26, 2009, 01:36 PM
Notundercovercop327 Notundercovercop327 is offline
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Windows media is my default player.
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  #15  
Old Mar 28, 2009, 12:29 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Notundercovercop327 View Post
Windows media is my default player.
Try installing the codecs here: http://xiph.org/dshow/
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  #16  
Old Mar 29, 2009, 12:54 PM
Notundercovercop327 Notundercovercop327 is offline
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Alright, I think that did the trick. Thank you, hope to see more soon.
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  #17  
Old Apr 2, 2009, 09:09 AM
MAGradio MAGradio is offline
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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
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  #18  
Old Apr 2, 2009, 03:05 PM
Notundercovercop327 Notundercovercop327 is offline
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Thanks Mag, would it be Okay if I requested a few other albums?
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  #19  
Old Apr 2, 2009, 03:11 PM
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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.
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  #20  
Old Apr 8, 2009, 07:36 PM
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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.
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  #21  
Old Apr 26, 2009, 04:03 PM
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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?
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  #22  
Old May 2, 2009, 07:03 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaleb.G View Post
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/x...h-qt-0.1.8.dmg

if for some reason it doesn't and let me know what's up.
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  #23  
Old May 3, 2009, 06:18 PM
CaptainCapitalist CaptainCapitalist is offline
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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.
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  #24  
Old May 7, 2009, 02:04 PM
MAGradio MAGradio is offline
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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 albums on vgmdb.
- Albums I've already verified as good and don't require a lot of effort to get up

Last edited by MAGradio; May 7, 2009 at 02:31 PM. Reason: 205 not 202
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  #25  
Old Jun 10, 2009, 06:47 PM
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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.
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  #26  
Old Jun 21, 2009, 04:41 PM
NukaCola NukaCola is offline
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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.
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  #27  
Old Jul 15, 2009, 05:14 AM
Captain Antonio Falcon Captain Antonio Falcon is offline
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Hey guys, I'm gonna give you some donations!
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  #28  
Old Jul 15, 2009, 05:43 AM
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Cool! Always interested in that!
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  #29  
Old Jul 15, 2009, 06:42 AM
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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?
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  #30  
Old Jul 15, 2009, 10:02 AM
Captain Antonio Falcon Captain Antonio Falcon is offline
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Can I post links here?
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