1.05: Top 20 records of the year
1.05a: track search and instant play in winamp
1.05a
February 28th, 2010Antennaria 1.04
August 16th, 2009OK so it’s about time to get out of mid-summer hibernaculum. We’re back with a few updates.
First and the most important one - Reminder Zone. Its idea was highlighted last fall in this post, but it was never realized up until now. You can easily get reminded about some artists/labels that are forgotten or were underestimated in the past. There’s more functionality coming up to this particular section in following months. Read the “reminder” page header to get the idea how it works. Pretty much it’s manual labour, but it’s worth it if you’re the account holder.
The second update is a slight preview of further developement here at Antennaria, mentioned in the April post in our blog: rate of tracks/songs. Taking into consideration that our accounts have thousands of selected tracks, there’s a certain need to distinguish between this volume. So “favorite track” as a concept has moved to the idea of rating tracks on a 5-star scale. Here is an example of how it looks like: http://www.antennaria.net/baza/aulismedia/artist/Newsboys/Shine+-+The+Hits/10885. To tell you the truth, track rates are tremendously useful when listening to a global playlist and want to filter out some mediocrity.
Stay tuned, we’ll be back.
April News
April 29th, 2009As the summer is quickly approaching along with a few other things in the pipeline, we expect to see less interest in our little project for some months ahead, but to spice things up there will be a new addition of functionality probably in May. In fact, we’re adding a whole new layer of data to the database in order to get everything ready for some new experiments and we hope to get it delivered sooner or later.
Besides, our previous post about faulty and buggy Wordpress was in fact wrong, the problem, as it appears, was caused by compromised FTP logins.
A bit of news
April 3rd, 2009Silence in this blog doesn’t mean things are boring at Antennaria.
A couple weeks ago we had a bit of downtime — our hoster, Lunarpages, turned us off for a technical issue we were having because of all the numerous queries. Got that fixed quickly and in a few hours time it was up again.
Now there’s another problem with unpredictable prospects, Google put an unpleasant tag for all the links to Antennaria - This site may harm your computer. Turns out, this Wordpress blog engine compromised the whole thing. Somebody got control over it and generated a bunch of off-hand contents on the site somewhere deep in the directory structure. Again, we got that cleaned, Wordpress engine updated etc., but we’ll see how soon Google will take the tag off us.
No new functionality is in the pipeline at the time being, but we’ll see what ideas the next few weeks might bring.
Cheers.
Antennaria 1.03 + 100K requests
January 11th, 2009After a bit of a holiday recharge, we’ve come up with a couple new enhancements.
Firstly, account homepage displays latest highlights artwork in the carousel by default, instead of top records of a most popular style. I personally got fed up looking at the same ABBA cover art every time I’m on my home page, now there’s more life in it.
Secondly, in record playback box in addition to Winamp and SlimBox there’s one more option now - Cog. Basically, it allows to play the album ot its picked tracks via local network in Cog. iTunes is still not an option, unfortunately, as it’s not really cooperative when it comes to plugging it to other software or even controlling it through terminal. The most serious difference in generating playlists for Windows and Mac is the flavor of Unicode these guys use. Mac playlists are normalized to NFC flavor of Unicode and they work brilliant on Antennaria.
Besides, as the title suggests, we’ve passed through 100 thousand requests since we started back in October. Number 100000 was Twiceler robot requesting http://www.antennaria.net/baza/antenna/artist/Front 242/Mixed By Fear/1003.
1.02 and 1.02a in one go
November 30th, 2008A couple weeks ago release number 1.02 was published, in which a part of record/album pages in the database got verbal descriptions. Today another push was made, 1.02a, with more descriptions for various pages: years, release labels and artist pages. For all them a “Did you know” block was added.
Here are some examples of such pages:
Today’s update is just in time for the flood of requests from Googlebot, msn-bot and Yahoo Slurp that’s happening right now.
In the next push we’re planning to deliver descriptions for more pages, including regions and calendar. In a meantime there’s still an ongoing work on the map of genres, which is planned for 1.1 release. Besides, there are notions of Personal Importance Rate on some pages now, that’s another step towards a whole lot of new analytical functionality that will be there in the future. Stay with us.
Our presence on Wikipedia
November 4th, 2008In English:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antennaria.NET
На русском: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antennaria.NET
Spoilers: F-Index, Genre Tree and Similar Records
October 31st, 2008I’ve been playing with an idea of F-Index (F stands for Favorite) today.
The whole point of research around F-Index is that it will allow to keep track of music you like. For example, you can love some artist (let’s call it N) a lot for a few weeks but then it gets a bit oldish and you put it away in favor of some new one. But N is not bad at all and you’d like to give his other records a try. The usual problem is that he is now a couple months deep down in the catalog, you don’t see his name among the recent additions anymore and it’s extremely hard to follow such lonely pearls covered in lots of newer stuff.
So I want to come up with a way not to lose artists and release labels I like, and the hardest part is the logic behind it. This aforementioned F-Index is an average rate for release label or artist, but only for studio albums, which allows to filter out a whole bunch of bootleg concert recordings and remixes, as well as singles and so on. Whether to include EPs into consideration along with studio albums is an open question, need to think about it.
I’m experimenting with a subset of records that were added to my phonothèque in the last year and the first results are quite promising indeed. By filtering and sorting the subset its is really possible to do it. Among the names printed in a result, there are bands I loved and forgot about, the ones like Gui Boratto, Rodion, VC-People, Dusty Springfield (not forgot about her yet, but easily could have), Lights Out Asia and Akcent. Forgotten labels include Alphabasic, Gomma, Danarkia, Jumpsuit Records and Aube.
Together with F-Index there’s a revival of an idea of Similar Records. I find it natural to be able to see a list of similar records on a particular album’s page. But it should probably be more logical with implementation of a Genre Tree (yeah, another spoiler). Similarity of records, considering such a multitude of genres, is probably out of reach without manual genres matching/mapping. There needs to be a way to let the system know that, say, “pop” and “alternative pop” are close together. In fact, that “alternative pop” is a part of “pop”. When this is all in place, similarity of records will be easier to calculate.
This post looks like a roadmap for version 1.1 of Antennaria and we hope to start working on it next week.
Version 1.01: 10 days and counting
October 26th, 2008So after ten days keeping the project up and running we actually served approx. 20 thousand requests (mostly from Googlebot, but definitely not only from there). Thanks to everyone from both Americas, Europe and Asia for checking us out.
Today we published version 1.01 of Antennaria.NET. Among other changes:
- Meta data put into HTML headers
- Some visual issues fixed
- Playback functionality — now it’s possible to send the album to Winamp right from its page!
- SlimDevices‘ SqueezeCenter support added — sending music to SlimServer is also very easy now
- New, more presentable site favicon
- Other minor bugfixes and changes
Now you can see the current version of Antennaria on every page at the bottom right corner.
All Aboard!
October 16th, 2008So we finally made it today. October 17th at 5:30 am GMT we opened our public website, www.antennaria.net and this is really something for us. Making several attempts to build a website in the past, we never actually crossed the line of going public. However, according to Murphy’s law it’ll probably be a short-living one (wish it will remain to be just a joke) but this time - welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen.