Special: Streamsampling Tutorial

I’ll make the easy assumption and say you deal with a good number of mp3 blogs on a regular basis. I’ve got a method of sampling the music on them that’s quick and easy. You can skip right to the music to see if you like it. The technique is essentially streaming the file to your audio player, instead of downloading the entire file first. This saves you time, energy, and lets you listen to much more music in less time. Check out the screencast below to get the skinny on it.

aurgasm’s Guide to Streamsampling

Posted by Paul Irish on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005 under aurgasm special.

16 Responses to “Special: Streamsampling Tutorial”

  1. Alastair said on March 23rd at 4:46 am :

    Great stuff. Thanks for the informative screencast.

    You just inspired me to create a variation on my AppleScript to import linked MP3s into iTunes to create iTunes streams for all the linked MP3s on a web page.

  2. DJMonsterMo said on March 23rd at 10:38 am :

    I thought everyone did this! Anyway, one bad thing about streaming is that increases bandwidth use compared to downloading because of the need to buffer. Also, some servers prevent streaming for this reason.

  3. Nick Francis said on March 23rd at 1:23 pm :

    Not happy with your suggestion. Playing the file from the source is indeed wasteful with bandwidth.
    If I’m browsing through a bunch of blogs, I download the first tune, then download a second, then a third, and by that time, i can listen to the first one, and so on.

  4. Anonymous said on March 23rd at 1:30 pm :

    Good thing !! :) Alwats quite interesting hearing the voice…

    best from Paris (yeah, a French around there :)

  5. Anonymous said on March 23rd at 3:19 pm :

    thanks

  6. Tom said on March 23rd at 10:25 pm :

    Sweet! thanks. nice instructional….I’m not even going to ask how you recorded it.

  7. Mike said on March 24th at 7:34 am :

    You can go one step further with this – once you have the urls for the songs you want in your playlist, you can save them as an ‘m3u’ file (stuff2download.m3u for example) and then use wget to download them all at once in the background (i.e. wget -i stuff2download.m3u.

  8. Robbie said on March 25th at 2:39 pm :

    I love it when I learn new things.

    Thanks for taking the time to do this.

  9. darwin said on March 27th at 4:56 pm :

    Have to say I disagree with this approach as well. Bandwidth isn’t free, and streaming would seem to increase usage. I say download one track, and if you don’t like it.. delete it! :)

    =darwin

  10. Paul Irish said on March 27th at 7:24 pm :

    Responding to monstermo, Nick, and darwin:

    My belief has always been that streaming uses a similar amount of bandwidth, but when I ran against your criticism, I wanted to get empirical results before arguing further. ;-]

    So! I fired up my packet sniffer (Commview), watched the traffic and counted the bytes downloaded for streaming to winamp, streaming to itunes, and downloading the file to disk.

    It turns out that downloading to disk actually transfers ~0.4% more (!!!) bytes than streaming the file to your media player.
    So I’ll still stand by the position that streaming saves readers’ time and servers’ bandwidth. :-]

  11. largehearted boy said on March 28th at 1:47 pm :

    Thanks, that’s a great demo for Windows users.

    Thanks for the research, Paul (and for debunking the myth).

  12. Chryde said on March 29th at 4:10 am :

    Following the same principle (people may want to listen better than downloading first), we installed a flash player on which, if you click next to a song, you go directly to the post talking about it w/ the download.

    It’s on the right side of our mp3 page

    Other french bloggers use that too : Pod au feu or The Nation

  13. the rpc said on March 30th at 6:56 am :

    EXCELLENT site. Love it. thanks and keep up the good work!!!

  14. Pétur Blöndal said on March 30th at 5:13 pm :

    Nice blog. My kind of music. I also have a MP3-blog but it´s in Icelandic but you can click the links, I´m sure you won´t be disapointed.

  15. Anonymous said on March 31st at 6:56 pm :

    Hello Paul.

    Are you okay? No tunes for 8 days & I’m gettin’ worried. If you’re on vacation, hope you’re having fun.

    I can’t wait ’till you get back as my ears haven’t had an aurgasm in a while & they’re getting restless! :)

  16. Dr. Harence Wrong said on April 28th at 4:09 pm :

    Winamp, bleah.

    I have found that XMPLAY is superior to the win amp for these sort of collecting and streaming samplings.

    I wrote a detailed tutorial to doing this

    ( http://dzn.fateback.com/mp3blog.htm )

    XMPLAY has a “Monitor clipboard for URLS”

    So , in firefox, right click, keyboard letter ‘C’

    IE6 , right click, press keyboard letter ‘I’

    And for you bandwith worryers, XMPLAY has a option that I always turn on,

    “Restrict Download Rate”

    And crank up the pre-buffer slider

    It adds maybe a second pre-buffer wait time

    well, the rest of the details found my measly tutorial page

    and my blogspot’s subtitle is
    rightleftrightwrong

    I am not spamming for traffic, I just see things that are easier like to share stuff

    Besides , I got a few plot generators there for you if your hard up writing some stories… :)

    -Dr Harence Wrong

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