Current location:	snowy Worcester
Current mood:	geeky
Current music:	The Damnwells - Bastard of Midnight
Entry tags:	carpeliam.com, code, copper tree, creativity, internets, lyrics, web 2.0, yay for goodness!

songwriting and carpeliam.com
carpeliam.com/music has a whole new look.

Because I'm both a songwriter and a programming geek, I've been working for a while on how to make it easier for me to write songs and keep track of them. Songs go through several revisions, sometimes I delete sections and wish I could go back to them, sometimes I wish I could compare my changes, and some songs find themselves scattered across my hard drives or across different pads of paper. I'll record music for an idea, label it with the date, tuck it away somewhere, and then forget about it.

version 1.0: a good start, but incomplete
When I first started carpeliam.com, I put together a decent start at a songwriting journal: lyrics could be posted and categorized, and each song could have an associated mp3. It was ok to start with, but mp3s were second class citizens, nothing more than an attachment to the lyrics. If I wanted to post an mp3, I'd have to wrap it in a whole song with empty lyrics, and if I wanted to attach it to an existing set of lyrics later on, I'd have to delete the 'dummy' song and reupload the mp3 into the other song. While I could keep track of changes to lyrics and even run a 'diff' between versions (a la wikipedia etc), there was really no way to track or compare different audio versions of a song.

enter version 2.0
I guess I've hit version 2.0 of carpeliam.com/music, and just like web 2.0, this version involves AJAX. Lyrics and mp3s are totally separate, and you can browse both on the same page without losing your place. Behind the scenes, I'm able to drag-and-drop in order to make associations between lyrics and mp3s. There are RSS feeds for categories. Eventually, I'll even add tags to songs and mp3s, so that if I have a "sad" mp3, I can find "sad" ideas I want to write about.

...but you've got to sign up to see or hear most of it
You can go to the website right now and listen to any song that's already finished, but if you want to listen to anything that wasn't recorded in a studio, or read the lyrics to a song that isn't ready to be performed yet, you're going to have to sign up. Signing up is more or less a way of saying "yeah, I know it's not done, I know it could probably sound better, but I'm curious to hear it anyway." And that's not to say that there's nothing good. I think the "dailies" category is probably the most interesting, it has a few of the mp3s I've recorded over the last 5+ years. (If you like Jim Brickman, you'll probably love the dailies. I'm not a big fan of Jim Brickman, but whatever.) If you see a category you like, just click on the "subscribe" link and you can get an RSS feed for that category. That way, if you're curious about music I'm working on, you can just check your feed without having to go through the website.
Updated: I added OpenID support, so if you don't want to go through the whole login process, just use your OpenID. Anybody with a livejournal has an OpenID, it's just "yourlogin.livejournal.com" (mine is imotic.livejournal.com). OpenID is pretty cool if you don't already know about it.

I'm also looking for beta testers and people who like to break things, so feel free to try to create/read/update/destroy things that you're not supposed to. (But if you're going to destroy something, try to destroy an old something, as there's a better chance of it being backed up. Or even better, try to destroy the stuff you create illegitimately.)