Building Ambisonia.com

soundofspace.com is now 95% ready.

statistics

I’ve got statistics running now. They are good. They enable you to get a good understanding of which pieces are getting hits, and when. There’s more info that I am collecting that I can present as well, but exactly which info is useful can be determined later, as the site evolves.

The primary issue now is helping people get the 5.1 system hooked up to their computer. The AV route (via digital pass through) is proving to be not so good. I’ve emailed the Perian people (who make the quicktime plugin that allows digital pass through on OSX) and they say that their plugin waits for the whole file to be downloaded before playing it…. but they say it doesn’t have to be that way because ac3 can be streamed.

Tests work on Safari, but not on Firefox (OSX). So getting ac3 to your digital receiver really isn’t there yet.

Any C programmers with a bit of time on their hands? … the Perian people say its just a matter of adding streaming support to their code … then streaming AC3 to the AV receiver would work on OSX (but will it work on OSX?).

As for windows, well, I havn’t had the time to do much testing yet. This is important because most users are on windows. If you have a 5.1 soundcard, then you’ll be right. But if you want to do direct to AV receiver on windows, then I’m really not sure how to go about that. Any suggestions?

So that’s what missing right now … documentation. Documentation then ramp up traffic

Next step after documentation:  scaling.

I havn’t used *any* of Rails’ caching tricks. But I will soon. The audio files are being served off Amazon, so they dont take up any server bandwidth at all. So scaling should be relatively straight forward.