Added pages for Voleti Venkateswarulu and K V Narayanaswamy. I have added only some concerts and many more are to be included.

My plan was to add a page for S Kalyanaraman – but found that the recordings need some cleaning up and signal boosting. Also I am contemplating whether to combine tracks of a concert or just upload them as tracks and include them in the pages as tracks. Both these approaches require work, but wondering about the better option.

When it comes to storage, there are a bunch of options to choose from and price becomes the main factor in making a decision.

Google

Google charges $1.99 per month for 100GB. That is a lot of space.

Uploading is pretty easy – create folders and simply drag and drop 🙂

There are a bunch of options to share the file, but has to be done at the file or folder level. Not too bad.

Playing a media file from Google drive is a not smooth experience. Even for a shared file, playing a mp3 file (browser based access) is jarring; if the file exceed some size, it refuses to play and suggests that it be downloaded.

Including the media file on a page like on this page is quite an odd experience too; even if I add the link as a media link, it appears as a link and not as a media player. One would have to download the file in order to play the file instead of being able to stream the data and play it.

Amazon Cloud

They have storage option called S3 for which they charge 3 cents per GB per month and probably based on actual usage and also number of requests etc. But they also give the first 5GB free.

One needs to understand their model of buckets and folders, because each file has a unique URL for which access rights can be defined. And uploading is complicated if the AWS portal is used. I found a windows application that can browser and upload files to S3 – pretty intuitive and as easy to create folders and drag/drop files.

Including the media file on a page like this is a breeze too. All I have to do is to add a media control in the page and supply the url to the media file. And it appears as a media player as you have seen in the pages I have already set up. 🙂 🙂

Decision

The obvious choice is Amazon Cloud. As I keep pushing my recordings to the cloud I will have to monitor the actual cost of maintaining the recordings on a monthly basis. Will have a good idea at the end of December.

I pretty much forgot about this blog site I had set up a long time ago. The intent then was linked to activities at work.

Recently I registered the domain shankarkrish.com, which was surprisingly available. Years ago when I checked, it has been taken !  Then i started considering setting up a WordPress machine on Amazon Cloud so that i could start posting stuff; that turned into not so easy to accomplish (I am still on it at this time) and then I thought ‘why not get a blog site on WordPress’. On attempting to register, found that it was already registered and showed content that i had created eons ago. Shockingly, I could remember my userid and password too. Yay 🙂

I have been thinking about how I can listen my recordings that i have (mp3) from anywhere and without anyone hounding me about mistaken copyrights. The algorithms used  by YouTube is atrocious – if i push a recording of me singing vaishnava janoto, i am told that the copyright belongs to some recording company in India; really !

For storage amazon S3 is a perfect place and the price is modest too. At least I can push all the ‘private’ and ‘non-public’ recordings I have and listen to them; i could even share this info with my friends who would be enjoy these recordings.

Here is the first try with the basic media plugin from WordPress.

Fabulous singing by KVN and a tani by Trichur Narendran.

Enjoy 🙂

Welcome to my first blog.

Blogs were very effectively used in the last presidential election – whike there are differing accounts of which party actually leveraged the blogosphere to their advantage, the elections did provide an environment for blogs to become mainsteram. Believe it, it also became a means for people to make money varying from peanuts to indecent numbers for simply documenting their views, agendas and a lot of useless information in real time with no filters, analaysis and contemplation.

So what we have in the blogosphere is a whole lot of useless information that people spend time reading, commenting and getting duped at times in the process – the “Steve Jobs Blog” which was actually run by a journalist is a classic example of how blogs were abused.

At the same time, there is no doubt, that blogs can be used a very effective platform for sharing ideas and getting comments from the users particulalry for web based marketplaces such as guru.com; In web based market place there are 10 silent users who prefer to remain silent or walk away from the site for every user who takes the effort to complain to the customer support – and without a proper feedback mechanism, web based marketplaces are at a disadvantage in getting a complete view of feedback from irs users.

Here is where blogs come to rescue – while users may hesitate to submit error reports, they are attracted to blogs like ‘you-know-what’ (leave it to your imagination).

Comments?