Comments on: help the toneless

help the toneless

chelegonian — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:21:59 -0800

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

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:24:42 -0800

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

By: cortex

cortex — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:34:31 -0800

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.

By: box

box — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:02:08 -0800

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.

By: pompomtom

pompomtom — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:22:56 -0800

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.

By: punkbitch

punkbitch — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:37:43 -0800

but now you'll have to wait a week to ask for us to identify the song! :(

By: punkbitch

punkbitch — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:38:31 -0800

oh, i'm in the wrong green. sorry. no you won't. :)

By: punkbitch

punkbitch — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:38:50 -0800

eh, what color is this?

By: cowbellemoo

cowbellemoo — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:42:17 -0800

Always looks eggplant to me. :(

By: chococat

chococat — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:43:51 -0800

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.

By: nomisxid

nomisxid — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:53:35 -0800

You could make a youtube video with the song as a soundtrack, and link to that.

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:09:39 -0800

eh, what color is this?

#666666

By: shakespeherian

shakespeherian — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 01:35:31 -0800

eh, what color is this?

White, like all the rest of them.

By: Eideteker

Eideteker — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:18:09 -0800

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)

By: micayetoca

micayetoca — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:13:02 -0800

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?

By: pb

pb — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:16:35 -0800

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.

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:31:56 -0800

(er, memberfites)

*hugs pb*

By: micayetoca

micayetoca — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:20:09 -0800

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.

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:26:55 -0800

Dear AxMe, this file has a virus and screws up my machine. What does it do to yours?
[CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD]

By: pb

pb — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:10:10 -0800

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.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:09:46 -0800

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.

By: micayetoca

micayetoca — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:29:09 -0800

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.

By: flabdablet

flabdablet — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:22:46 -0800

blue_beetle: since I run Ubuntu, not Windows, it does nothing at all.