Infrastructure Upgrade: Online CD Previews
by eby
About the Upgrade
We've been working hard lately on an aadl.org infrastructure upgrade that includes updates to Drupal, SOPAC and the servers that run the site.
While it will still have the same look and feel, behind the scenes we've made changes to speed things up, fix bugs and give us a robust platform to more quickly roll out new features and bug fixes. You'll notice most of the changes in the catalog which was completely revamped. Below is one such update to the catalog you can look forward to when we go live with the changes.
Stay tuned for more previews and please leave any feedback and suggestions you have.
Online CD Previews
You may have used our CD preview stations that are present in our branches. They allow you to scan a CD and listen to samples of the tracks. Thanks to the company that produces our stations we were able to get a head start on moving these samples online. Here is a screen shot of the tracks for Big Dave and the Ultrasonics:
The display is based on the BSD licensed project SoundManager 2. While we're starting small with just simple previews the project supports more advanced scripting of volume and playlists which we can hopefully take advantage of. This also opens the door for featured previews, playlists and the like.
Currently our sample collection is rather incomplete but we hope to fill it out and hopefully get some of our more unique and obscure items up for easier discovery.
If you have ideas of projects/ideas that can take advantage of this new track and preview data, please leave a comment.
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