Here’s an everyday story of technology folk to make you weep.  Me too.

As you know, all the music on Amazing Radio comes from amazingtunes.com.  It gets there when an artist uploads a song they’ve written and recorded.   When they do that, we ask them to upload only an MP3 file.  Our clever system ingests the file, then transcodes it to the Flash format so it can be played on amazingtunes.com.  When you hear a song online, it’s being played in Flash.  When you download it, you download an MP3.

Unfortunately some artists see the copy that says ‘upload MP3 files only’ … and promptly ignore it.  We’ve had all sorts uploaded.  AAC, .wav, nailfiles, combs, key fobs, small bananas – you name it.  Our system handles the import fine, so the file sits uneasily in the database, surrounded by serried ranks of prim and proper MP3 files, all giving it a dirty look.  But then the transcoding to Flash doesn’t work, because the file is in the wrong format.  To the user, this makes it look as if the upload hasn’t worked.  It has, but the transcoding hasn’t, so you can’t hear your file.  Worse, the transcoder – which is open source – is a bit of a prima donna.  If it finds one file it can’t deal with, it gets all stroppy, falls over, and refuses to do anything until we apologise, pamper its ego and coax it back to work.   So even the legal, decent, honest and truthful MP3 files suffer.  It’s like a whole class being held back because one bad lad at the back let off a stink bomb.

Simple problem.  Easy solution?  Not likely.  You wouldn’t believe how complicated it is to change the transcoding so it works with non-MP3s, or to make a foolproof error reporting system that people actually respond to.   And as the number of uploads has grown, so the apparent problem has increased exponentially.   We’ve had a developer working on resolving the issue for weeks, looking for the ideal, sophisticated solution.  We’ve now decided to implement something more rudimentary pro tem – on the basis that a good plan today beats a perfect plan tomorrow.  As we all know, tomorrow never comes.

It’s a stupid issue, and the impact has been crap.  We’ll fix it: we’re very sorry it’s been a problem.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.