help the toneless

August 24, 2008 5:21 PM

Dose anyone know how to (or if its possible to) upload a song to askmefi? i have a mystery song i'd like identified. i tried uploading it to the music section but was told i was naughty for doing so
posted by chelegonian to MetaFilter-related at 5:21 PM (22 comments total)

You can upload it to one of the zillion file uploading sites such as rapidshare and others and have people download it from there. You can not upload a song to AskMe and we prefer that people not upload songs to MeFiMu for the purpose of illustrating an AskMe question
posted by jessamyn at 5:24 PM on August 24, 2008

Aye; see also sendspace, megaupload, and a dozen other free file-hosting solutions. Some of have limited time windows for file storage, others are more permanent.
posted by cortex at 5:34 PM on August 24, 2008

Divshare's my personal fave, among other reasons because it'll let folks play the song without having to download it. But yeah, there's a million of 'em.
posted by box at 7:02 PM on August 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

You probably got some web space with your ISP account. If so, that'll be much less annoying for all parties than using a web share service.
posted by pompomtom at 7:22 PM on August 24, 2008

but now you'll have to wait a week to ask for us to identify the song! :(
posted by punkbitch at 7:37 PM on August 24, 2008

oh, i'm in the wrong green. sorry. no you won't. :)
posted by punkbitch at 7:38 PM on August 24, 2008

eh, what color is this?
posted by punkbitch at 7:38 PM on August 24, 2008

Always looks eggplant to me. :(
posted by cowbellemoo at 8:42 PM on August 24, 2008

Ooh, I'll have to try Divshare.
I used Box last time I needed to link to an offsite audio file and, while it did the trick, I would have preferred it have just gone right to the linked mp3 instead of going to a page where you had to choose "play" or "download" (and then a popup-player appears if you choose play.)
Kind of killed the immediacy of the thing.
posted by chococat at 9:43 PM on August 24, 2008

You could make a youtube video with the song as a soundtrack, and link to that.
posted by nomisxid at 11:53 PM on August 24, 2008

eh, what color is this?

#666666
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:09 AM on August 25, 2008

eh, what color is this?

White, like all the rest of them.
posted by shakespeherian at 1:35 AM on August 25, 2008 [4 favorites]

Divshare's my personal fave, among other reasons because it'll let folks play the song without having to download it save it permanently to their hard drive specify a location for the file on their hard drive.

If you can play¹ a song² without downloading it, well, I'd like to see that.

¹on your computer (Of course any idiot can use a CD player.)

²that's not on your computer (i.e., you need to get it from somewhere on the internet)
posted by Eideteker at 4:18 AM on August 25, 2008

Divshare looks great. Now, is there a possibility that we could use their embeddable flash player to appear in comments? it would be awfully useful in threads like this one, for example, where people are linking to different versions of one song. Should I write pb about it or is it enough to ask here?
posted by micayetoca at 8:13 AM on August 25, 2008

I'm here (and asking in MeTa is great), but implementing something like this isn't up to me. It's technically possible to include a flash player in comments but there are several reasons we wouldn't want to. We exclude the object tag from comments because there are lots of malicious things people can do with it. And we have a general rule that we don't embed things from other servers within conversations (like images) to limit security risks among other things. That would rule out embedding MP3s hosted on other sites too. There might be ways we could allow users (er, memberfites) to attach files to comments and host the MP3s here, but that's a bigger project.
posted by pb at 9:16 AM on August 25, 2008

(er, memberfites)

*hugs pb*
posted by cortex at 9:31 AM on August 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

Oh, right. I see.

There might be ways we could allow users (er, memberfites) to attach files to comments and host the MP3s here, but that's a bigger project

Perhaps it could be a feature of the Music Talk section only. That the "comment box" allowed people to upload mp3s to better illustrate what is being discussed. Is that awfully complicated? (not snarking, I'm challenged as to these matters)

And thx for the response, pb.
posted by micayetoca at 11:20 AM on August 25, 2008

Dear AxMe, this file has a virus and screws up my machine. What does it do to yours?
[CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD]
posted by blue_beetle at 11:26 AM on August 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

Is that awfully complicated?

It's all a matter of trade-offs. We can build it, but do we want to give folks another thing to consider when adding a comment? There's something nice about the simplicity of a single textarea for commenting. We would build it to be solid, but there are always issues to work with when you complicate a form. It adds in more failure points, so it's just something we'd need to consider carefully. I don't think anyone is against it—it's just not a snap decision sorta thing.
posted by pb at 12:10 PM on August 25, 2008

Audio content uploaded to the MeFi servers also means some additional mystery meat as far as moderation goes. When people flag something that's a YouTube video for example, we often have to watch it to figure out what the problem is. This would likely be true with audio content in MeFiMu comments. I could see having an extra line for "include a URl to divshare with this comment" or something, but with so many content hosting sites available for one-offs like this, it seems a bit like wheel re-invention. As pb says, there's definitely trade-offs and there would need to be some compelling reason that what is currently available isn't working for some reason.
posted by jessamyn at 1:09 PM on August 25, 2008

Fair enough, all good reasons. I asked mainly because from my clueless perspective it seemed harmless and easy (of course it would, wouldn't it, since I am clueless), but those are good points, and there is no real reason why one can't have divshare playing the song in another tab. Thx for the responses.
posted by micayetoca at 1:29 PM on August 25, 2008

blue_beetle: since I run Ubuntu, not Windows, it does nothing at all.
posted by flabdablet at 12:22 AM on August 26, 2008