Selling Ruby in the corporate world is easy. Just tell them this:
Ruby has the momentum to
leverage the dynamic potential of synergies between your skillsets and
its core competencies on Internet time. Achieving best-of-breed,
mission-critical componentization utilizing standards-compliant
scalability, it provides an adaptable, standards-based framework to add
value via a fast-track, result-driven development process.
We are one of the distributors of all the digital music for these companies. (iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc.)
Really only the big guys are using DRM. There are lots of other smaller independent digital retailers selling music with no DRM at all. We send them the albums in FLAC, MP3, or OGG format.
Check out this list of companies that we distribute to. There's a link to each, and all of them have (or will have) the entire CD Baby Digital Distribution catalog of 30,000 albums (350,000 songs).
At CD Baby we used to think like the other folks here saying "Why not just use MP3?" We have over 78,000 CDs here, and we hired two people to rip them all to hi-fi MP3 (lame --preset standard).
But then... digital distribution started last year with Apple iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc. All of these companies REQUIRED that the encoded file (AAC, WMA, etc) come from the master WAV file. Ack! Screwed! 9 months of ripping down the drain!
So... we finally realized what I was kicking myself for not realizing in the first place - and exactly what the story post mentions: hard drive storage is cheap. labor is expensive. rip the CD *once*, lossless, and NEVER have to rip it again. We wiped all our useless MP3 drives and started again: ripping all 78,000 CDs to FLAC format. Since it's a perfect digital copy of the master audio fles, and supports metadata tags, too, it's the perfect archiving format.
To all those here saying "MP3 is fine!" - you're being short sighted. In a few years there will be a newer better codec, and all your old MP3s will look as bad to your ears as your old 320x240 JPGs from 1995 look now. Go lossless. (FLAC, WAV, etc) - your future self will thank you.
On a related note, has anyone else noticed how COOL the AMD-64 chips run?
I got my first AMD-64 last month and was assuming it would be burning hot (fast = hot, right?) - but was surprised that even under heavy load, I was able to hold my hand on the heatsink and it was barely warm.
It's an email list with people talking about the digital delivery of art and the convergence of entertainment and technology.
Bunch of people there talking about this subject every day (and have been for years).
Re:Tip for auto-validating PHP generated XHTML
on
Web Standards Solutions
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Here's another thing you can (and some say SHOULD) do for that same purpose.
Put this at the very top of every HTML page:
<?php /* XHTML proper header for browsers that accept it. If using Mozilla, this is one way to make sure your XHTML validates */ if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT']) AND stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'application/xhtml+xml')) { header('Content-type: application/xhtml+xml'); } else { header('Content-type: text/html'); } ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> < html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
Then if you do your development in Mozilla/Firefox, it will die any time your XHTML is malformed.
It has the added benefit of something you would leave in on your production server.
a web hosting (or domain-registering) company could do this for all new domains (if the client chooses):
use the company as contact info
set email address as that-domain-name@domains.webhost.com
have incoming email to that email address sit on protected servers forever, but give the client webmail access to it in their members login area
that way incoming spam will never bother them, but be there if they need it (like if changing registrars)
I'll bet something like vpopmail could do easy unlimited accounts on the fly like that, so that a webhost company wouldn't even need to charge extra for this service.
No - we're just a digital distributor sending our entire catalog to over 30 different companies (so far) that sell it. Whether the end-company (the retailer) decides to do DRM or not is up to them, not us.
You know my company, CD Baby, is one of the companies supplying a huge chunk of music to iTunes, Rhapsody, Emusic, Napster, etc.
A few months ago I was at a music conference when I got into a deep discussion with this guy about our love of West African music. He's been doing an African music radio show for 20 years, and has met Fela Kuti, and been in this band doing Afropop, too.
So after half an hour of talking about this, I said, "I'm sorry I don't know your name." - and I flipped around his badge. He was one of the heads of Microsoft MSN Music! I cringed a bit and said, "Oh. Uh. Microsoft? Whoa." I'm generally a MSFT-basher. But I said, "Well --- it's nice to know they have someone like you inside the big beast."
He said, "I was surprised, too, but guess what? They actually found 8 other guys like me, too. People who have been in the music side of the music biz for at least 10 years. People running folk radio shows, and jazz magazine editors and such. Real MUSIC people. And they told us to make the online music store of our dreams."
They're going to be selling the entire CD Baby Digital Distribution catalog - and in fact they pursued us pretty strongly. Even on the tech-side of things, they're really doing everything right. (Yeah yeah of course they insist on DRM. You expected Ogg Vorbis?)
But anyway I just felt you have to give credit where credit is due, and I can tell my fellow Slashdot nerds in advance that I think the MSN Music Store is really doing it right.
>> 288 SATA drives spinning. How often do you have to replace one?
Every few days, it seems like. Maybe every two weeks, actually.
It's not so bad, though I'm sure it'll be something we look back and laugh at in the future when it's all in RAM or Flashcards or something that almost never fails.
IMPORTANT: we made a root-cron that immediately shuts down the computer if one drive fails, so that it doesn't put a bigger load on the other 7 drives, and protects against the risk of more than one drive going down on the same RAID.
But then you just pop in a new drive, run the 3WARE rebuild at boot, and you're back in action.
For CD Baby we have about 50 TB of audio stored here, and we built the boxes ourselves, damn cheap. Goes like this:
Find any tall beige-box case. ($150)
Find 9 good 250g Serial ATA drives. ($100 each = $900)
Get an 8-port serial ATA hardware RAID controller like these ($300)
Get a good 400-500W power supply ($200)
Any motherboard and CPU will do ($200)
Spend a few extra bucks on gigabit ethernet ($50)
Put 8 of the hard drives into a RAID-5 array. (1 for your O.S/system use). That makes about 1.4 TB for only $1800 total. The 3Ware IDE raid thing works great with FreeBSD, which is what we use for everything.
Rip all your CDs as FLAC so that (1) you never have to rip them again (it's lossless), but (2) it's half the size of saving WAV files
At least that's what we've done with our 68,000 CDs we have here.
Maybe you've already seen these - but here are the hilarious Real Insurance Reports
The following was published by an insurance company for internal distribution. These reports were submitted when policy-holders were asked for a brief statement describing their particular accident.
The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its intention.
I thought my window was down but found it was up when I put my hand through it.
A pedestrian hit me and went under my car.
The guy was all over the place. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him.
I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law and headed over the embankment.
The accident occured when I was attempting to bring my car out of a skid by steering it into the other vehicle.
I was driving my car out of the driveway in the usual manner, when it was struck by the other car in the same place it had been struck several times before.
I was on my way to the doctor's with rear-end trouble when my universal joint gave way, causing me to have an accident.
As I approached the intersection, a stop sign suddenly appeared in a place where no stop sign had ever appeared before. I was unable to stop in time to avoid the accident.
The telephone pole was approaching fast. I was attempting to swerve out of its path when it struck my front end.
To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front, I struck the pedestrian.
My car was legally parked as it backed into the other vehicle.
An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my vehicle and vanished.
When I saw I could not avoid a collision, I stepped on the gas and crashed into the other car.
The pedestrian had no idea which direction to go, so I ran him over.
I saw the slow-moving, sad-faced old gentleman as he bounced off the hood of my car.
Coming home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don't have.
The indirect cause of this accident was a little guy in a small car with a big mouth.
Sorry - they never signed up for Digital Distribution. BUT - because of your post I just called the band, got their answerine machine, and told them to hurry up and get us more. If you put your name on the waiting list here: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/clickband - it will not be used for any other reason than to email you the minute the CDs arrive. Says they logged into their CD Baby account just a week ago, so they must still be active and hopefully CDs are on the way.
Worry not. There are many many MANY more to come that are being very competitive AND open. CD Baby is delivering over 250,000 songs to EACH of the companies below, and the norm for the smaller companies is to receive MP3 or even FLAC delivery.
So instead of whining about how some big major-label Universal album (where the artist hardly gets paid anyway) is DRM'd or expensive, be an independent thinker and go try some of the smaller services.
Emusic
Website for Mac, Windows, Linux where members can download up to 40 tracks per month of high-quality MP3 files.
Has been around for YEARS doing both 99-cent downloads, and all-you-can-eat downloads for paid members. Has great catalog of indie label music - company is currently reforming.
AudioLunchbox
One of the first all-independent music download sites.
Tracks retail for 99 and albums retail for $9.99. ALB pays out 59 per song and $5.90 per album.
NetMusic
Digital download and streaming service.
We get 65 cents per downloaded song. Entire-album downloads usually retail at $9.99.
Emepe3.com
Website that primarily targets Latin America, USA and Spain.
Tracks sell for 99 cents. We get 65 cents. Entire-album downloads are usually $9.99.
Etherstream
Website that offers a la carte downloads.
Tracks sell for 99 cents. We get 65 cents. Entire-album downloads are usually $9.99.
Music4Cents
Retails independent music at very reasonable prices.
Pays 55 cents per download.
Sells independent music - they will sell CD Baby songs at $.69.
QTRnote
Artist gets about $.64.
TriaSite
TriaSite retails independent music downloads.
Pays $.65 per download
Puretracks
Canada-only service that offers $.99 downloads. Website is currently available to Candian residents only.
Puretracks is acting both as an online download retailer and a back-end service provider for other retailers.
Downloads cost $.99 per track - artist gets about $.59 per track.
CatchMusic
Download site focusing on independent music.
CatchMusic sells a la carte downloads at $1 each.
Songs retail at $1 - artist gets about $.55 per song.
Viztas Digital Marketplace
Viztas Digital Marketplace will sell all kinds of digital media - not just music.
Tracks retail for 99 and albums retail for $9.99. Vistaz pays out 60 per song and $6.10 per album.
Viztas has not yet launched.
DiscLogic
A la carte downloads.
Tracks sell for 99 cents. We get 65 cents. Entire-album downloads are usually $9.99.
Do you use Apple's AAC encoder for both of the AAC styles or only the one going to iTMS?
We only use iTunes to encode the AAC128 for Apple iTMS. For the AAC256 we use the AAC encoder from Coding Technologies because it runs on FreeBSD. We have 25 FreeBSD boxes for encoding (and storage, mainly. 1.3TB each) but only 3 Macs.
Could you share your impressions about the sound quality of the various formats?
Sorry I wish I could (I went combing the net for hours for that kind of information) - but I'm just not the audiophile listening-test kinda guy. Everything over 160k bitrate sounds good in my headphones.
Personally I only listen to FLAC, since I'm here with the terabytes of audio and gigabit ethernet.:-)
I run (and am still the sole programmer for) CD Baby - one of the companies that is supplying a huge amount of music to all of these big legal download music services. Our digital catalog of independent music is even bigger than than the entire Universal Music Group record labels', combined. (Over 230,000 songs now, and adding about 75 new albums a DAY.)
It's actually really interesting watching this happen, from a tech point of view. These big companies appear to have their stuff together from the outside, but I've had quite a few conversations where the techies at the big giant download music service are asking us, Uh... what do you recommend? How are the other companies doing it? Others say things like, This is how Universal Music sent us their catalog - so can you just imitate that? And voila! Watching new standards form.
I get the feeling that immediately after the initial announcement of Apple iTunes, and their 1-million downloads, lots of companies felt they just had to jump in as fast as possible, without any time to think out the long-term strategy. That's part of the reason why they're so incompatible. No time to communicate with others. (And plenty of paranoia about revealing their plans, I'm sure.) Things are settling and standardizing now, though.
Anyway, as you can tell I'm a very open guy, and this summer I'm going to take the time to do some detailed technical write-ups of all the things that go on behind the scenes (including our cool 40-terabyte digital audio warehouse). It's pretty interesting stuff.
(For details of what we do, see the CD Baby Digital Distribution page. Tell any good artists you know who want to get their music onto these services!)
Slashdot Mirror
Doing the shorter clips was the hardest part, though I know it applies to very few people, hopefully you'll find it useful.
:-)
(found many places online...)
If you think this article is about spam, make sure you read it all the way to the end. It's not.
He's questioning the entire technology of email as an effective way of communicating.
Analyzes not just the spam-count in his email, but the work-time needed to respond to the non-spam emails, too.
This is one of the most thought-provoking articles posted on Slashdot in a long time.
Really only the big guys are using DRM. There are lots of other smaller independent digital retailers selling music with no DRM at all. We send them the albums in FLAC, MP3, or OGG format.
Check out this list of companies that we distribute to. There's a link to each, and all of them have (or will have) the entire CD Baby Digital Distribution catalog of 30,000 albums (350,000 songs).
But then... digital distribution started last year with Apple iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc. All of these companies REQUIRED that the encoded file (AAC, WMA, etc) come from the master WAV file. Ack! Screwed! 9 months of ripping down the drain!
So... we finally realized what I was kicking myself for not realizing in the first place - and exactly what the story post mentions: hard drive storage is cheap. labor is expensive. rip the CD *once*, lossless, and NEVER have to rip it again. We wiped all our useless MP3 drives and started again: ripping all 78,000 CDs to FLAC format. Since it's a perfect digital copy of the master audio fles, and supports metadata tags, too, it's the perfect archiving format.
VERY easy to just script-up a bulk converter. http://perl.pattern.net/transcode is a great Perl solution. I posted my audio-converter scripts here, which include the use of SOX to make 30-second audio clips (since we needed that for work).
To all those here saying "MP3 is fine!" - you're being short sighted. In a few years there will be a newer better codec, and all your old MP3s will look as bad to your ears as your old 320x240 JPGs from 1995 look now. Go lossless. (FLAC, WAV, etc) - your future self will thank you.
On a related note, has anyone else noticed how COOL the AMD-64 chips run?
I got my first AMD-64 last month and was assuming it would be burning hot (fast = hot, right?) - but was surprised that even under heavy load, I was able to hold my hand on the heatsink and it was barely warm.
Can anyone explain why this is?
It's an email list with people talking about the digital delivery of art and the convergence of entertainment and technology.
Bunch of people there talking about this subject every day (and have been for years).
Put this at the very top of every HTML page:
Then if you do your development in Mozilla/Firefox, it will die any time your XHTML is malformed.
It has the added benefit of something you would leave in on your production server.
I'll bet something like vpopmail could do easy unlimited accounts on the fly like that, so that a webhost company wouldn't even need to charge extra for this service.
No - we're just a digital distributor sending our entire catalog to over 30 different companies (so far) that sell it. Whether the end-company (the retailer) decides to do DRM or not is up to them, not us.
We do not DRM anything.
You know my company, CD Baby, is one of the companies supplying a huge chunk of music to iTunes, Rhapsody, Emusic, Napster, etc.
A few months ago I was at a music conference when I got into a deep discussion with this guy about our love of West African music. He's been doing an African music radio show for 20 years, and has met Fela Kuti, and been in this band doing Afropop, too.
So after half an hour of talking about this, I said, "I'm sorry I don't know your name." - and I flipped around his badge. He was one of the heads of Microsoft MSN Music! I cringed a bit and said, "Oh. Uh. Microsoft? Whoa." I'm generally a MSFT-basher. But I said, "Well --- it's nice to know they have someone like you inside the big beast."
He said, "I was surprised, too, but guess what? They actually found 8 other guys like me, too. People who have been in the music side of the music biz for at least 10 years. People running folk radio shows, and jazz magazine editors and such. Real MUSIC people. And they told us to make the online music store of our dreams."
They're going to be selling the entire CD Baby Digital Distribution catalog - and in fact they pursued us pretty strongly. Even on the tech-side of things, they're really doing everything right. (Yeah yeah of course they insist on DRM. You expected Ogg Vorbis?)
But anyway I just felt you have to give credit where credit is due, and I can tell my fellow Slashdot nerds in advance that I think the MSN Music Store is really doing it right.
Every few days, it seems like. Maybe every two weeks, actually.
It's not so bad, though I'm sure it'll be something we look back and laugh at in the future when it's all in RAM or Flashcards or something that almost never fails.
IMPORTANT: we made a root-cron that immediately shuts down the computer if one drive fails, so that it doesn't put a bigger load on the other 7 drives, and protects against the risk of more than one drive going down on the same RAID.
But then you just pop in a new drive, run the 3WARE rebuild at boot, and you're back in action.
- Find any tall beige-box case. ($150)
- Find 9 good 250g Serial ATA drives. ($100 each = $900)
- Get an 8-port serial ATA hardware RAID controller like these ($300)
- Get a good 400-500W power supply ($200)
- Any motherboard and CPU will do ($200)
- Spend a few extra bucks on gigabit ethernet ($50)
Put 8 of the hard drives into a RAID-5 array. (1 for your O.S/system use). That makes about 1.4 TB for only $1800 total. The 3Ware IDE raid thing works great with FreeBSD, which is what we use for everything.Rip all your CDs as FLAC so that (1) you never have to rip them again (it's lossless), but (2) it's half the size of saving WAV files
At least that's what we've done with our 68,000 CDs we have here.
Spam filters compared, here. This article was linked from Slashdot a few months ago. Good info, too.
The following was published by an insurance company for internal distribution. These reports were submitted when policy-holders were asked for a brief statement describing their particular accident.
Sorry - they never signed up for Digital Distribution. BUT - because of your post I just called the band, got their answerine machine, and told them to hurry up and get us more. If you put your name on the waiting list here: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/clickband - it will not be used for any other reason than to email you the minute the CDs arrive. Says they logged into their CD Baby account just a week ago, so they must still be active and hopefully CDs are on the way.
So instead of whining about how some big major-label Universal album (where the artist hardly gets paid anyway) is DRM'd or expensive, be an independent thinker and go try some of the smaller services.
Emusic
Website for Mac, Windows, Linux where members can download up to 40 tracks per month of high-quality MP3 files. Has been around for YEARS doing both 99-cent downloads, and all-you-can-eat downloads for paid members. Has great catalog of indie label music - company is currently reforming.
AudioLunchbox
One of the first all-independent music download sites. Tracks retail for 99 and albums retail for $9.99. ALB pays out 59 per song and $5.90 per album.
NetMusic
Digital download and streaming service. We get 65 cents per downloaded song. Entire-album downloads usually retail at $9.99.
Emepe3.com
Website that primarily targets Latin America, USA and Spain. Tracks sell for 99 cents. We get 65 cents. Entire-album downloads are usually $9.99.
Etherstream
Website that offers a la carte downloads. Tracks sell for 99 cents. We get 65 cents. Entire-album downloads are usually $9.99.
Music4Cents
Retails independent music at very reasonable prices. Pays 55 cents per download. Sells independent music - they will sell CD Baby songs at $.69.
QTRnote
Artist gets about $.64.
TriaSite
TriaSite retails independent music downloads. Pays $.65 per download
Puretracks
Canada-only service that offers $.99 downloads. Website is currently available to Candian residents only. Puretracks is acting both as an online download retailer and a back-end service provider for other retailers. Downloads cost $.99 per track - artist gets about $.59 per track.
CatchMusic
Download site focusing on independent music. CatchMusic sells a la carte downloads at $1 each. Songs retail at $1 - artist gets about $.55 per song.
Viztas Digital Marketplace
Viztas Digital Marketplace will sell all kinds of digital media - not just music. Tracks retail for 99 and albums retail for $9.99. Vistaz pays out 60 per song and $6.10 per album. Viztas has not yet launched.
DiscLogic
A la carte downloads. Tracks sell for 99 cents. We get 65 cents. Entire-album downloads are usually $9.99.
AAC 128k (same as they sell in iTunes Music Store)
Personally I only listen to FLAC, since I'm here with the terabytes of audio and gigabit ethernet. :-)
- WMA9 - 192k
- WMA9 - 160k
- WMA9 - 128k
- WMA9 - 96k
- WMA9 - 32k
- WMA9 - 20k mono
- AAC - 128k
- AAC - 256k
- MP3 - hifi VBR (lame -preset standard)
- MP3 - 128k
- Ogg Vorbis - q6
- FLAC
In-house we use FLAC to store everything, then have shell scripts to de-code those FLACs to WAV files to convert to the various other formats.Since the first two Slashdot stories about CD Baby getting independent music into Apple iTunes (see iTunes Indie Meeting Notes and Sell Your Music on iTunes Music Store) - things are starting to standardize.
It's actually really interesting watching this happen, from a tech point of view. These big companies appear to have their stuff together from the outside, but I've had quite a few conversations where the techies at the big giant download music service are asking us, Uh... what do you recommend? How are the other companies doing it? Others say things like, This is how Universal Music sent us their catalog - so can you just imitate that? And voila! Watching new standards form.
I get the feeling that immediately after the initial announcement of Apple iTunes, and their 1-million downloads, lots of companies felt they just had to jump in as fast as possible, without any time to think out the long-term strategy. That's part of the reason why they're so incompatible. No time to communicate with others. (And plenty of paranoia about revealing their plans, I'm sure.) Things are settling and standardizing now, though.
Anyway, as you can tell I'm a very open guy, and this summer I'm going to take the time to do some detailed technical write-ups of all the things that go on behind the scenes (including our cool 40-terabyte digital audio warehouse). It's pretty interesting stuff.
(For details of what we do, see the CD Baby Digital Distribution page. Tell any good artists you know who want to get their music onto these services!)
--
Derek Sivers, CD Baby