Online "Traditional Chinese Music Audio Player"

[Mark Baker]

Basic premise: sometimes it's nice to have background music playing while I'm online without having to load a CD or start up my MP3 player or otherwise think too much about it.

It's years too late to be cutting edge, and it will probably eat up my bandwidth limits by noon Friday, but I've added an experimental audio player component to my site with a handful of bamboo flute and erhu tunes incorporated just to see what happens.

It's not exactly Internet radio, nor streaming media per se, but if you like the concept, or think another music format would be good, or whatever, feel free to let me know. It's just an experiment, no big whoop: http://www.chinese-outpost.com/audio/

[sfr@rcn.com]

Beizhenwu--I have just sent five weeks of hard work to the fact checkers at my magazine, and am wiped. What perfect timing your music is. I'm listening to it as I write this and it's relaxing me without making me any sleepier than I already am. Where can I find this music (on what CD?) so I can play it in other rooms besides my office?

Thanks,

Sandra

[Mark Baker]

Hi Sandra,

Glad you enjoyed the tunes.

The short answer to "Where can I find those songs?" is "On that one disc labeled 'Chinese MP3s' on my bookshelf over there."

Rather than try to backtrack which came from where, I've put a link on the audio page that will show you some of the sources and similar releases at amazon.com (which also has some free Chinese traditional music MP3 downloads available here and there).

Thanks for the feedback, and enjoy your post-five week writing boot camp reprieve!

[skylee]

The music is very enjoyable. Thank you.

[geoffkhan]

I love this kind of music. Thank you so much!

[Mark Baker]

Thanks for the feedback--I'm glad to know people are enjoying the music in this format.

Quite a number, apparently: in just over 4 days, the audio player usage alone has consumed a full gigabyte of bandwidth. That's more than the entire site gets on a slow month.

It is experimental--I'm not trying to turn this into a "revenue generating machine"--but I'll probably have to go with a lower bandwidth format (the tunes are currently CD/128k quality)...or go with fewer tunes...or take it down if it gets to be too much of a resource drain.

Hmm, why has "open source" and "it's free to use, just give credit" never caught on with Web hosting providers?....

Thanks to the person who made a donation, by the way (M.W. - from Hawaii, I believe). That'll keep the player up a couple more days in this format.

Feedback/suggestions still welcomed regarding this experiment.

Cheers,

[Mark Baker]

Thanks for the contribution, S.R.!