Roll Over

The more music we publish on our site, the more I want to make sure downloading it is as simple as possible.

We currently post free music tracks in 3 places:

1. MP3 enclosures in this blog's music posts,
2. An iTunes podcast of the music archive RSS feed,
3. Our homepage, with featured iTunesy playlists culled from music posts

We use WordPress and podPress, together a great combo for posting tracks and keeping them organized, but that means you have to visit our site regularly and download each new track by hand. Not only is it tedious, but I have yet to find a concice way to communicate to newbies how to get an mp3 "out of" your browser and into your media software of choice (i.e. "Are you on Mac or PC? Is it loading into QuickTime? You have to control-click/Download Linked File… or right-click/Save As…" etc).

Our iTunes podcast of the Music archive is a step in the right direction — and more foolproof. When we update our blog, the RSS feed updates, your iTunes finds the new tracks and downloads. But only the 15 most recent tracks are present in the Music feed. If you are a new subscriber, there's no way we can deliver you our older tracks without reposting them. I'm also a little bothered that iTunes segregates Podcast tracks from your Music library and that the mp3s are automatically set to "remember playback position" with no way to override it.

What I really want is to deliver a whole album as one download — much simpler for you and guaranteed complete.

So once I post each track of the Platforms score individually, we're going to provide the whole album as a single .zip download. And to make downloading these big files easier, we will torrentcast them using the Amazon S3 service.

I wouldn't normally pay for storage when my LunarPages hosting account has plenty, but torrent serving is not allowed on a shared hosting plan. S3 has built-in torrent support and is really inexpensive. Simply adding "?torrent" to the URL of any publicly-available S3 file downloads a .torrent file instead of the actual file. S3 acts as the seeder, and if the BitTorrent swarm can serve the bits, we save a nickel or two on Amazon data transfer costs.

So that will bring us to 4 ways to get music from us. Each sounds a little bit technical if you're new to all this, but it's really not. And all the music is still free to download.

We still will happily burn you a CD if you want it. No tapes tho.