The new Kompoz Audio player is up and running on all audio track detail pages.
Wanna see it? Just go to any track page. Here's an example.
The new audio player is a big step forward, but we're not done. We'll be adding more features over the next few months, including the ability to add markers and comments at specific times within the track.
Current Features
You can now see the playhead move along the waveform. The previous audio player showed the waveform, but did not scrub along it as the song played.
As you hover over the waveform with your mouse, the new audio player will show you the exact time at that position under your mouse. This works once the song has started playing.
You can click on the waveform to jump to that position in the track. Note: You can't jump beyond the load buffer (you'll see a grey line in the middle of the waveform indicating the current state of the load buffer).
If the song is playing and you click the pause button, you can then jump to any position within the track and the playback will remain paused. The opposite is true if you click and the track is playing. Try it!
Click the "Open Popup Player" link (appears under the 'Download' button) to open the new audio player in a separate window, so that you can continue to listen to the track as you browse other pages.
The "Share" button will allow you to copy embed code to share this track on your own site. You can also share with Facebook and Twitter.
The "About" button will should you details about the track.
This Friday Night – August 19th – ABC-TV’s Karaoke Battle USA (check local listings) One of our own will be battling it out on national television!!
This Friday night, Cassandra Mae Jopp will be a featured performer on the ABC-TV summer HIT, “Karaoke Battle USA” – Cassandra Mae came to Kompoz via her brother Joshua. With a single vocal track accompanied by her piano, her song – “Falling For You” was an instant hit here with our gang of Kompozers. Within a few short days, Kompozers completed the song with guitars, bass, drums and keys. The All-Star band of Kompzers are:
Drums - John Wooten Bass - Mikhail Konovalov Rhythm Guitar - Brian Sullivan Lead Guitar - Mauro Clerici Keys/Strings - Jay Schankman
Here’s a little background on Cassandra Mae:
Cassandra Mae Jopp, Born in Hutchinson, MN, knew from an early age that music would be a constant in her life. Coming from a very musical family, Cassandra Mae has been surrounded by influential people in the music world and someday hopes to bring her sound and music to the next level. She has succeeded in many talent competitions but the highlight of her musical career was the opportunity to open for Tim McGraw at Wefest as the 1st place Wefest Karaoke Roundup winner. She is very grateful for the amazing support system of family and friends who believe and encourage her to make her dreams a reality.
Hope you have a chance to see Cassandra Mae on ABC-TV this Friday Night!!
We've been working on a new Kompoz track audio player. It's not quite finished yet, but it's getting pretty close. And we'd like for you guys to have a look.
The new audio player will be the central focus of the track details page. You'll be able to click on any part of the audio waveform, and jump to any part of the track visually. The playhead will move over the waveform as the track sound plays. And as you move your mouse over the player, it will show you the playback time under your mouse.
You can try it now. Just add "&beta=true" to any track URL. For example:
You'll also see a "share" button on the player itself, so that you can easily embed your tracks in other sites.
We'll be rolling this out soon to all track pages, but we still have some work to do. Specifically, we'll be adding buttons so that listeners to get information on the project and track owner. And sometime this quarter, we'll be adding a feature so that you can drop markers and/or comments at specific points along the timeline.
Call me Marty. "Sven-Martin" is a title bestowed upon me by Bjorn, as an honorary Swede.
I started playing sax and violin in 4th grade, played through high school, college, and played sax 4 years in the US Marine Corps. In 1985 I played in a country band and was forced into playing keyboards, harmonica and singing (since there is apparently no jazz in North Carolina). I have always loved the jazz genre, although I enjoy playing and creating just about any style of music. I also attempt to play flute, recorder, mandolin, ukulele (none too well). I do some drum programming and anything else I can think of to corrupt whatever I put my fingers on.
All of my kompozitionalizing is achieved in my shedio (shed/studio) and I do not always have a lot of time there, so I try to organize my time so I can do several things at once when I get shedio time. Otherwise I type and listen from the stupid Vista computer in the house.
I'm currently in a band playing R&B, 60's & 70's Motown, 70's Dance and Oldies.
sanger: So, tell me Marty, what first brought you to Kompoz?
MDK: I was an active member of MyVirtualBand.com when it shut down early in 2007. I was sort of addicted to online collaboration and needed another outlet, when a web search led me here.
sanger: What’s you favorite thing about Kompoz?
MDK: There are several favorite things. I hear something new every day. Every project is a surprise. I get to realize my musical ideas with real musicians like never before. I love creating music, and Kompoz makes it so much easier.
I'm learning Swedish.
sanger: Has Kompoz made you a better musician?
MDK: Yes.
sanger: How so?
MDK: I've been given the opportunity to explore so many different styles of music, that my playing and composition skills have improved. I also believe that just playing with and around good musicians makes you better.
Musical osmosis... an excess of musical talent around you has to go somewhere, so it seeps in through your ears and into your fingers.
I also feel like I've learned a great deal about tracking, editing, mixing, and mastering. There's a lot I learn by doing, but a lot more from observing and imitating other talented Kompozers.
Kompoz has also made me lazy in some respects. I used to spend countless hours programming drums, bass, or other various instruments for my projects. I don't do that much anymore. I program a few bars, copy and paste, and call it a scratch track or guide track until the real guys show up. I've been spoiled by having such a variety of good talents here to choose from.
sanger: What can you suggest to make Kompoz even better than it is today?
MDK: More cowbell.
sanger: Have you had a chance to actually meet any of your fellow Kompozers face-to-face?
I met Raf. He was visting relatives at the beach near here. We had dinner, drank a few Coronas and talked about music. I think he took a shower in the men’s room at the restaurant. You'll have to ask him about that. My band mates enjoy hearing they stuff I've played them, but none take much of an interest in home recording.
Friends? All my friends are here.
sanger: Other than your own tunes, do you have a favorite Kompoz Komposition?
MDK: Too many to name. I like a lot of the jazz fusion stuff, but if I had to pick one, there is one I keep going back to after I've listened to everything else; Flavor of the Night (Ice Cream Song). It's a really simple groove, but it's one of those earworms I can't seem to get out of my head.
sanger: What would you like to say about Kompoz that our members can benefit from?
MDK: Communicate. If you want people to collaborate with you, state what you want in the project description. Send invites to people whose musical talents suit your project.
There is also some give-and-take needed to really get involved here. Offer your talent to other projects, but communicate first! You'll save time by not putting effort into something that may not be what the project owner wants.
sanger: One final question Marty, name two artists you’d like to see for a Kollaboration Kontest?
MDK: Frank Zappa... I understand the Zappa family trust has a buttload of unfinished and/or unreleased tracks of Frank Zappa. I'm hoping they might loan us a few. Béla Fleck... super fusion banjo player. If we could get the Flecktones too, that would be incredible.
Here it is. That's the drive that failed, causing the great outage of 2011, and which contains the missing project art.
It finally arrived from the datacenter this past Friday, and I dropped it off yesterday at the local office of a very reputable national data recovery firm (fortunately, they have an office in downtown Miami). If all goes well, they will be able to recover the data this week, and I'll have the missing project art uploaded over the weekend. Fingers crossed.
If you're already enjoying the benefits of a Kompoz PLUS Membership, I thank you. The small monthly fee allows us to continue to improve Kompoz, pay for bigger and faster servers, and pay for all of the audio file storage and streaming services. And of course, it provides you with extra cool features, like working with uncompressed (hi-fi) audio files, publishing finished projects, and more.
Now you can share all that coolness with a friend. Give the gift of a Kompoz PLUS membership to a fellow Kompozer. Doing so is a double gift. A win-win. It allows another member to enjoy all of the benefits you're enjoying. Plus it helps out Kompoz.
It's easy too. You can choose from several different upgrade options with no long-term commitment. And as a bonus, if you upgrade a friend, we'll give you a free Private Project. Upgrade a friend.
We Moved! Sat, Jul 30, 2011 • 01:32 PM UTC - Byraf
First, the good news...
We did it. We moved Kompoz to new bigger and better servers. You will notice faster uploads, faster browsing (page loads), greatly improved up-time, and more overall stability. Kompoz is now hosted on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure -- the same infrastructure where amazon.com itself, and countless other high-traffic sites are hosted. EC2 provides us with scalability, redundancy, and reliability. We're really excited about this. Now, the bad news...
We had not planned to move when we did. We had actually planned to move this weekend, and it was only going to take a couple of hours. Instead, Murphy's Law kicked our ass. What happened is so unbelievable. Four days before we had planned to move, and after four years of running without issue on the same server, the primary disk drive on the server that stored the project art and member profile photos failed. Just died. You just can't make this stuff up.
So we were forced to move before we had finished our migration plans. We had not even finished configuring the new servers at EC2 when the drive failed. We had to scramble to setup the servers (there are four primary servers), install the operating systems, configure the load balancer, and migrate the database. And then, during the mad rush, we ran into a snag with the audio transcoder (this is software that allows us to convert WAV, AIF, WMA, OGG, MP3 and other audio files to other formats). It would not work on the new systems, so we had to totally re-write that component.
Current State of Affairs
You're reading this, which means that the site is obviously up and running. The new servers are humming along. But we're not finished. There are still things to fix.
These are the outstanding items:
The member photos and album art are glaringly not yet loaded. As I lamented above, they were on the drive that failed. We're working with a very good data recovery firm that specializes in recovering data from damaged drives, and we're confident we'll get them back. Unfortunately, this may take another week or so. But please, please, please don't wait -- upload new profile photos and album art. It would really help us out if you could upload new profile photos and album art!
Email notifications are turned off for the moment. This means you will not get an email when new tracks are uploaded to your projects, or when you receive new Private Messages. We're working on setting up new mail servers. This should be up and running before Monday.
Private Messages sent and new tracks uploaded on Tuesday and Wednesday may be lost. This is the most regrettable piece of the story. Our last backup on Monday night was recovered, but the Tuesday backup failed. So we lost about 24 hours of data.
We're still testing, tweaking, and fixing. If you notice any problems, please post them on the Tech Support Forum. I'll be monitoring that today.
Again, I appreciate your patience and I value you as a Kompoz community member! Please update your profile pics and album art.
I spend a ton of time on the Internet looking for sites that may be of interest to our Kompoz Community and MSI: Music Scene Investigations, is a pretty cool site.
MSI is not one of those Internet Radio Stations, nor a social network. MSI is a site for independent musicians to have their tunes ‘reviewed’ by some top notch industry pro’s.
MSI: is an online music discovery show, where MSI: investigation experts provide their immediate, spontaneous, analysis and review of music selections submitted by artists that are showcased, each week.
About MSI:MSI: is a hot, new, live broadcast and podcast, where our team of self-proclaimed ‘music experts’ investigate and analyze three random songs, submitted by you, the viewers. For an hour, we talk about and debate the music you send us and, hopefully, by the end of the show we are able to all agree on a “Song Of The Week”, which is featured here on the website.
Our panelists hear, viewer submitted, songs for the first time live on the show and then each expert has just a couple of minutes to offer up their true feelings and first impressions of the music. We don’t aim to pull our punches either… If we don’t like it, we tell you… If we think it can be improved, we try and offer constructive criticism… If we love it, you might just make “Song Of The Week”.
The show is hosted by Rich Wildman of iCWeekly, who is joined each week by fellow iCWeekly broadcaster Tom Chianti, a retired sound engineer, and by Ian Husbands, an independent music artist. Our third panelist each week is a, hand picked, special guest to bring even more knowledge to the debate.
The show is broadcast weekly, on Sundays at 4.00pm (EST) / 9.00pm (GMT), on the iCWeekly website, where viewers will be able to watch the live steam and interact with the show in our chatroom. The show is, also, available to download for FREE from iTunes, a few hours after the end of the broadcast.
For more information about MSI: Music Scene Investigations, please go to:
A few weeks back I posted a blog detailing a new feature which allows you to block abusive members from your projects. I'm happy to report that it is NOT being used very much, and where it is being used, it is working.
However, I did fail to include another important feature. I had meant to add the ability for a project owner to delete comments posted to tracks on his/her projects -- I forgot.
I noticed today that a member (who has since been inactivated) had posted dispariaging remarks on all tracks of a certain project. The project owner, after noticing the comments, blocked the member, but he had no way to remove the abusive comments. I removed them, then quickly impleted the "delete comment" feature. As of today, project owners can now delete comments posted to their projects.
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The new Kompoz Audio player is up and running on all audio track detail pages. 
We've been working on a new Kompoz track audio player. It's not quite finished yet, but it's getting pretty close. And we'd like for you guys to have a look.
Here it is. That's the drive that failed, causing the 
