One
way to put
your songs on the net
(revised January 2002)
Put your comments in my GuestBook
Contents Page of the Moving Finger
Page about putting music on a CD
Introduction
Ingredients
Recording
the song
Getting
the song into the computer
Using
Goldwave
From Goldwave to RealAudio
Getting yourself a website
Loading the website
A
word about space
Putting songs on the website
Other
music files
email
This Do It Yourself guide is written with people in mind who might be great shakes with a guitar or a mandolin, but aren't too handy with computers. (If anyone reading it finds at times that I explain at great length things which are so obvious they don't need explaining, you've come across some place where I screwed up myself, so it's not as obvious as you think.)
What I wanted was to be able to share songs I'd
written with friends on the net - either people I've run into at
festivals or sessions who liked a song I'd sung , or people I'm
in touch with through the
"One way" means just that - it's not necessarily the best way, but it does the trick. This page is here in the first place so that I can refer to it any time I forget how it's done, and in the second place so that when I want to get someone to put a song on the net so I can hear it, it's here to tell them how they can do it, if they don't already know how. Or if someone asks me how it's done, I can just give them a link to it.
In fact I've just come back to have another read, and refresh my memory of how it's done, and I've changed a few misleading bits - so now it's a bit more likely to be found helpful than it was before. I hope.
The system I'm used means people can listen to your song while it is still being downloaded, rather than having to wait until the song is all downloaded, only to find after the first note they don't want to hear any more, or that it wasn't the song they were meaning to listen to. That's called "streaming", for some reason. "Streaming" takes the waiting out of listening.
Ingredients
needed:
An
audio cassette with your song on it.
Programs for
getting the right kind of sound file in your computer:
Goldwave
(for making a sound file in the
computer)
RealProducer (for turning that sound file into one that is suitable
for RealAudio, which uses "streaming".)
(And people need RealAudio ,
also known as RealPlayer
in order to be able to listen to them.)
Programs for
getting the song on the net:
FrontPage
Express for getting a webpage
together - this is included with Internet Explorer (though you
don't need to use Internet Explorer as your browser. There's a
Netscape equivalent anyway.)
WS_FTP for putting the webpage and the RealAudio song files on
the net.
And of course you need
some (free) webspace (probably provided by the same people who
give you free Internet access).
These aren't the only programs that would do, but they do the job OK, and they don't cost any money. (There are posher versions of them that would cost money, but the basic ones are fine - Goldwave is shareware, and if you register it and pay a bit you get the improvements as they come in. The basic version still works anyway.)
I suggest that you put links to all the programs you might need in a folder on your desktop marked Music Tools, or something like that.
(Some of these programs are available on the kind of free discs you get from .net magazine in the UK, (which is worth getting a few times anyway, because it has lots of useful advice as well as really useful programs on the disk).
Recording the song: I use an audio tape in a cassette recorder. Recording straight into the computer never seems to work well for me - there are too many sounds going on, like the fan in the box, and anyway singing into a blank TV screen feels uncomfortable. Obviously, the better the quality of the recording the better, and it could be a lot better than the way I do mine. (You can of course start off with the song on a CD, if you've got the song on a CD - it just means that when you get to using GoldWave you use a setting called under Tools called Audio CD extraction.)
From the tape recorder to the computer:
Connecting to the computer: Anyway, there you are with the tape in the recorder. To put it into the computer you need a suitable cable. I have one that plugs at one end into the headphones output from the cassette recorder, and at the other into the line-in socket, which is somewhere on the computer box or tower. (Probably in some totally inaccessible place. If there looks like there's a line-in plug where you can get at it easily, it's probably a dud...)
The cable I use cost a couple of quid, and is a 3.5mm (1/8") stereo plug to 3.5mm (1/8") stereo plug. If your socket on your cassette recorder is different from that you'd need to get the appropriate size plug on the cable, or an adaptor to give you the right size socket fro the cable you're using. While you're about it anyway, get an appropriate splitting device, so that you can plug your headphone into the cassette recorder at the same time as the cable to the computer. (I prefer to switch off the volume control on the computer to avoid any feedback risk, which could mess up the sound.)
Using
Goldwave:
Putting the song or tune into the PC -
Next stage is to get the song from the tape into a sound file in
the computer. For that I use a program called Goldwave.
This has all kind of clever controls in it that I don't
understand too well. But if you click on its Help, it
tells you how to use them. They explain it much better than I do.
But in case your mind works the same way as mine, here is my
version (NB if you are starting from a CD you do it a bit
differently, using a facility under Tools called Audio-CD
extraction which allows you to copy a track into GoldWave) :
Essentially what you are doing is telling Goldwave to listen to the sound coming through the line-in cable, and turn this into a sound file. So open up Goldwave - this may open up several little windows on the screen, butget rid of all of them except the one saying Goldwave. Then click on "File", right at the top left of the screen, which opens to give you a series of options, and you click on "New".
Up pops a box labelled "New Sound", and that also offers various options. The important one to get right is the one saying how long the song is going to be. So you check that with a watch, and enter it in the appropriate place (it's in the form minutes:seconds.thousands of a second, which took me some time to work out, since I don't normally work at that level of accuracy.)
You also have an option for going for different levels of sound quality. I'd suggest go for the CD option and stereo sound. Other options give you smaller files, but that's not relevant here, because you're going to end up reducing it anyway.
So you click OK, and another little box comes up, saying it's setting up a sound file - it hasn't recorded anything yet, it's just getting the space ready.
Get back to the screen saying Goldwave - it's got a range of options up the top, the first being "File" - so you move along to the one saying "Tools" and click on that.
A menu of further options opens up, and the ones you are interested in are Volume Control and Device Control. First you click VolumeControl, and it opens up showing you what is switched on and what isn't. You want everything muted except "Line" (and you also switch off the sound on your computer loudspeakers) - and then you click on "Options" on the top left of the Volume Control screen, and then on "Properties", and then make sure that it is set to "recording" rather than "playback."
Now to Device Controls. You open that up (by clicking on Tools on Goldwave) - look for the button with a tick on it (or a "check mark" if that's how you talk), and click on that. There are all kinds of options there, which are probably very helpful if you read the instructions and work them out. But the only thing I do is make sure that on the tab marked play, the only button with a dot in the middle is the one saying "All", and on the tab marked record, the only one with a dot is the one saying "Monitor". (This means that you can check that the sound is coming through at the right kind of level before you start recording.)
When you've got it all set up, you just click on the play button on your cassette, and the red dot on the Device Controls (which turns pink), and sit back while it does it's tricks. The marker on the screen goes along the line to the right end, and stops. And then the flat sound line turns into a jagged up and down graph, representing the recorded sound (or rather, there are two lines, one for the left channel and one for the right (since it's stereo) and it trurns into two jagged graphs. If it was a mono recording on tape they'll be identical, but never mind.
What should happen is that it all goes smoothly. That means the sound is in there, in the computer, ready to be saved as a "wav file".
But first you'd better listen to it, to be sure you want to save it - and to do that you switch on your loudspeakers, and go to Volume Control . Then you make sure that Wave and Volume Control (ie the option marked Volume Control inside the screen called Volume Control - confusing) are the only ones which are not muted - and that (clicking on Options in the top left corner), it's set for Playback rather than Recording. Then you go to Device Controls, and click the little arrow on the top left that sets it playing.
Assuming everything is OK ( a big assumption, that), click on "File" in the Goldwave screen. You get an option to Save As... and that's the one to use. This is actually very flexible indeed, and you can use it to produce both big files, and much smaller ones with poorer sound (and the reason you might want to do that is if you want to send a file as an attachment with an email - I'll stick a note about that at the end of this page). But what you want now is a big wav file, because it's going to be reduced again when you change it to RealAudio in the next stage. Make sure you've got enough room for it - but you won't need to keep it if you don't want to, so you needn't worry about cluttering up your disc, if you are short of space.
So the setting I use is the default one, and I don't adjust anything, except telling it maybe where to save it, and giving the file a name so I'll be able to find again. I suggest you give it the name of the actual song - let's say it is called squirrel, so the file will be squirrel.wav - and it's a good idea to set up a folder with the same name, which is also going to contain any other files of the same recording which you p[roduce in the editing process. And you put this folder, in another folder you've set up called Song Recordings or something like that, where you keep all your songs, so long as you want to keep them on the hard disk. (And then you can shift it bodily to the CD RW if you've got one and feel like doing that.
Editing the sound: It is possible to do all kind of clever things with the sound, if you know how. I mean you can take bits out and change the key, and make it slower and faster and add echo effects, and combine it with other backing tracks and... Someday I'll learn how to do that, but it's not really necessary for what just putting a song up to share it with other people.
The only one of those features that I have used properly is the one for cutting bits of the beginning and end of the recording. This means you can take away the clunk when you switch on the recording, for example, and any delay while you were getting ready to start - and at the other end, it means you can leave a comfortable margin if you aren't sure of the exact length of a tape, and then get rid of the excess. Or you can break a recording into different files, say if you recorded two songs one after the other, or a couple of tunes.
It's best to save the file first, just in case.Then when you modify it you can save it with a different name (squirrel2.wav for example), that means that if you've done it wrong you can do it all again, because the original squirrel.wav is still there (in the folder called squirrel, in the folder called Song Recordings...)
With squirrel.wav in the main Goldwave window (either it is still there from recording from the tape, or you have get it back by using the "open" facility at the top left of the main Goldwave window), you just move the mouse so that the cursor is over the start of the bit you want to keep, and left click; then you go to the end of the bit you want to click and right click.. Then the sneaky bit open up Device Controls. (by clicking on the Tools option, and then on Device Controls.) Once again on Device Controls click the button with a tick on it (or a check mark, if that's how you talk). On the tab marked play, tick the button saying "selection". And when it comes to saving, this time click on the option "save selection as" - and give it that new name I mentioned in the last paragraph squirrel2.wav. And squirrel.wav is still there in its folder, which is handy if you find you overdid the cutting, for example.
From Goldwave to RealAudio: For this I use Real Producer . This is fairly straightforward to use, once you know how to use it... So are most things. (Here is a website with lots of useful infiormation about all this stuff.)
So you click on the RealProducer link in your Music Tools folder you assembled on the desktop.
It opens up, and offers you various recording options - I'm assuming you use use the "Record from File" option. It is possible to record directly from the line-in device, without using Goldwave at all - but I found the quality was a lot worse - however, experiment, because it might be different with your equipment. In which case it's a more straightforward way of doing it. If you can be sure of getting it right first time.
So when you click on "Record from File", it goes on, naturally to aks you what file, and what to call it and so forth. So you use the browse facility, and hunt around your computer with it until you find the file you are after. (If you prefer, you could write it in yourself, if you're good at that stuff.) When you've found it, check that the name of the file you want is entered the same way in the type-in box as it is in the bigger screen. (ie, if you want to open a file called song1, make sure that is what is actually entered on screen - Real Producer has a trick of trying to put in the name of the last song you recorded as a default.) Then you click on "open".
Hey presto, the name of the file comes up on the relevant Real Producer wizard screen, with its address in your computer - ending up ...song1.wav (That is, if it was called song1 to start with - if it had been called Charlie3, it would be ...Charlie3.wav. As I said, these are mistakes I have made...)
Then you click on "Next", and it asks you what the song is called and that kind of stuff, so you put in squirrel or The Squirrel Song, whatever you want to appear on the screen when someone clicks to play the RealAudio file once you are done. So you click on next again, and you get asked what sort of file type you want, and the sort you want is the Single Rate for Web Servers. Next again, and you're asked what sort of Modem is should be optimised for . I take it this means the modem of the person at the other end - I've got it set for 28K, since there are a lot of those still around, and I assume that, if it's set for 28K, people with faster ones will still be able to use the files, and it maybe wouldn't work the other way round.
Next again, and the question is Audio Format, and the answer is "Music", logically - enough. And then you get to a page headed "Output File" - and there you see squirrel.rm or whatever.
So you click on that, and it says "Prepare to record" (and it congratulates you! Quite right.) And you do as it says and press the "Finish" button, and then click the "Start" button at the bottom of the Real Producer screen. (With my Monitor you have to drag the row of icons down in order to see the Start button - and we're talking about the Start button on the Real Producer screen, not the one for the computer itself.
And when you do that, it should do its tricks, and there is a file called squirrel.rm (or whatever) in your computer. Real Producer will flash up things asking if want it to add it to a data base somewhere and so forth. and you can use Real Producer to publish it to the net - but I prefer a more hands on approach. It's like preferring a manual gearbox to an automatic, which I do. So I say "No".
Getting yourself a website: If you've got a website and know about things like that, the next few bits aren't for you. But skipping to the next section about putting the song on the website is pretty easy to do.
What setting up a website entails is collecting together a bunch of files of one sort or another, wich may be text files, or pictures, or sound files, linking them together so that clicking on a link will get you to another page, or will open up a sound file, and pictures will appear in the appropriate places. (And you will also have links to other files on other people's websites.)
And when you've got the files sorted out, you have to load them all up to a computer called a "server", where it will have an address that enabble the rest of it to look at it. And any time you want to, you can change it around, and add things and take them away.
The program I use for getting the website edited is FrontPage Express, and it comes as part of Internet Explorer, and it's designed for people who aren't too knowledgeable about these things. The crucial thing is that it is what is termed a WYSIWYG system - What You See Is What You Get. You don't need to use all this html code (you can if you want, because there is a sort of override facility under View at the Page Index - sometimes you are driven to use it, but it's never essential).
Using icons at the Page Index you can put in links, either to other pages in your own website, to other parts of the same page in your website, or to other websites. It's pretty straightforward - as Pete Seeger put it in Talkin' Union, "take it easy, but take it".
To start up with I suggest setting up a folder on your Desktop called whatever you want to call your website (mine is called The Moving Finger). That's where all the files you are using live.
So you open up FrontPage Express, and click on "File", and then on "New" in the menu that opens up. And this is your first page, and you write on it what you want and put in any links youi want, using the appropriate icon at the Page Index. Then when you save it you use "Save As" (under "File"), and give the website folder on Desktop (or wherever you choose to put it - probably better as a folder inside the folder called My Documents) as the place you want to save it. And in the type in box you call it index - because the servers are all set up so that that'll be the first page that anyone looking for your website will be directed to - it's your front door. (That doesn't mean that people can't be given keys to all the other back and side doors, and attic windows as well).
And every time you make a page that belongs to your website, you tell FrontPage Express to Save As in that website folder. And any time you want to change a page you've made, you click on "Open" under "File", instead of "New", and browse arounde until you find the page youi arer after in that folder. And if you want to put in a picture, you will have put that picture into that folder, and then you'll use a command called Insert to make sure that it will be seen at that particular place in the page when anyone opens that page on their browser. (And the folder with that picture will also have to be loaded up on to the website, so you include that in your site folder.)
And the same goes with sound files of songs. Except you do it slightly differently. And I'd suggest that it is easier to load your text pages first.
Loading the website: I suggest using WS_FTP for this. I think it's easier for you to use the help tutorial that is linked to it rather than for me to try to explain. Install it either from a magazine CD ROM or download it from site, in a compressed form, and reconstitute it with a programme called WinZip or similar. All freebies/
Essentially what you are doing is to enter instructions to the WS_FTP form that comes up when you click on the icon, which will enable it to connect to the server where your files are going to be stored (and accessible to others), and to upload the files as you wish. You can delete files which you have prevuiously loaded, and you can replace them by newer versions. And the files involved can be text, or pictures, or sound files and so forth.
What I have made a point of doing is not to load the website folder which I keep in my hard disk, but to make a copy of it on a floppy disk, if it's still a small website, or a zip disk or a CD RW if it's a bit too big for that. That way you avoid losing it by pushing the wrong button, or if the computer crashes, or if the server computer goes wrong. (Belt and Braces...) (It works the other way too - once the whole thing is up on the net you can retrieve it if your computer and your disks and all that were to be wiped out.)
So what I do is right click on my Moving Finger icon on the Desktop, select Send to, and tell it to send it to my zip disk, or my floppy before it got too big, or my CD RW now I've got one. If I just had a floppy I could have saved it on to two or more floppies, but it wouldn't have been as convenient. (And before all this I had adjusted my Send To facility so thta it contains an option for sendig to those places - the floppy, the zip, or the CD RW. That just involved typing Send To in to Find on the Start Menu, then clicking on the icon for it to open it up, and sticking in a shortcut to those disks.)
So I have set up WS_FTP so that the "local host directory" which it asks to be told about (it's on the "start up" tab on Sessioin Properties, which opens when youi click on the WS_FTP icon) is my zip disk Moving Finger folder - D:\/your website folder. But that's a personal idiosyncrasy. WS_FTP is just as happy with a folder on your Desktop, or anywhere else, so long as you give it the right address. And your webserver will tell you what to enter on the Session Properties page (which is where you tell WS_FTP how to load the files you want loaded). IThe "remote host directort" on Startup is, simply enough "hosr", at least it is in my case.
The address of your website is your URL (Uniform Resource Locator - though I prefer to think of it as Universal Resource Locator.) You've a certain leeway in what you call it, within whatever parameters are laid down by the people who supply the webspace.
Putting songs on the website: So to start off with you move that squirrel.rm file into that website folder from wherever you saved it before. Initially you move it to the website folder on the hard disk, with a view to copying it on to the website folder on the floppy or zip or CD RW from where you will actually upload it to your site.
(And at the same time, if you are short of space, you could delete the squirrel.wav file - except I'd hold on to it for now in case something goes wrong, and you have to make another copy of the song1.rm file because you've accidentally deleted it instead of copying it. (These things happen...) Or if you've got a removable disk with enough room, such as a zip or a CD RW, copy it to there, and delete the original on the hard disk. Just open up the removable disk on tye screen, and drag the wav file, or indeed the whole squirrel folder, over into it. And then delete it from the hard disk.
So now you've got your squirrel.rm file tucked away in your website folder (preferably maybe inside a folder called Songs or something like that which you have created in that website folder for such things.)
But in order to get this streaming process I talked about going, you need to go through two more stages. There is going to be an URL for the song, and yoiu are going to set up a link to it anywhere you want people to be able to open up the Real Audio sound file and hear the song. But the link is not going to be directly to that rm file..
It is going to be a link to what is called a metafile, which is going to sit uip in the website, together with the ram file, and is going to redirect people automatically to that ram file, like some kind of forwarding address. So you have to set up that metafile, and also any link to it from your pages - and then load it all up to the website up in Internet heaven,
So you open up a Notepad text document in the same file where you are keeping squirrel.rm. Then you type in the full address that squirrel.rm is going to have when it is loaded. So if your website was http:www.rhubard.freeserve.co.uk, and squirrel.rm was going to be in a folder called songs on that site, what you would type in the metafile would be http://www.rhubard.freeserve.co.uk/songs/squirrel.rm (And getting that exactly right is crucial - if you put in Songs or song instead of songs it wouldn't work - unless that had been what you called the folder. And therfe musn't be any spaces. I speak from experience...
And then you save the metafile - but you do it using Save As and you save it as squirrel.ram. And then something weird happens - you find that it has turned into a little blue ram file, which in this case would be called squirrel. Next to it is another text file called New Text Document, and it is empty.
And then, using Front Page Express, you put a link from (for example) the text of the song on the website to http://www.rhubard.freeserve.co.uk/songs/squirrel.ram (When I did this first I accidentally linked it to the address of the rm file on my hard disc, instead of up on the Internet. It seemed to work beautifully - until I tried it on another computer.
And then, when you've got it all set up, using WS_FTP you load songs and its contents on to your website, and you load the page with tye lkinks to it as well.
And if you have done it right, anyone opening your page, who wants to hear your song will just click on the link you have made tomit, and they will see a RealAudio screen pop up, and in a few seconds would hear the song coming out at them. Or they would, assuming they have Real Audio on their computer - so just in case I make a point of giving a link to a site where they can get a free download of RealAudio, and I suggest you do so as well. (These days it sends to be called RealPlayer, because it can do videos as well.
This is all simple to do, buit hard to explain, and maybe even harder to understand the explanation - so to sum up: The song file itself is a rm file, which was set up by Real Producer. The link to that song is via a ram file, (containing the full address that the rm file is going to have once it is loaded up to the internet) created by saving a Notepad text file with .ram typed after its name. and both these files are loaded up to the net together with the rest of the website. And the way people are going to get to that song file is to click on a link that is made out using the full address of the ram file.
It would be a lot easier if the people who think these things up hadn't used ram and rm for those file suffixes. And that magic transformation of the text file into the blue ram file.... Do it a couple of times and it seems simple.Till you try to explain it to somebody else. Or remind yourself how it's done, if you haven't done it for some time. (And as I said at the beginning, that is why I made this page.)
A word about space - I have tended to use full size wav files for RealAudio. I imagine you could get away with reducing the size of the files with Goldwave or with some other program (see section on email below for some ideas). Even with a fair sized file (600K for example) streaming means that a song will come through quite quickly. But of course it doesn't take too many sizeable file to eat up your free space, and reducing the sixe of the file is one way around thta. Anoither would be to get more free space - there's lots of it about still. The onlt trouble I've found with that is that there seem to be problems that stop you linking from one website directly to a ram file in a site on a different server. I'm sure there are ways around this. When I've worked out what tehy arer I'll put them in here so I don't forget them.
Other music files: RealAudio / Real Player is only one type of music file program. The other program which is really handy for playing back various types of sound files (other than RealAudio, is WinAmp, which is also free. And for midi files there is Windows Media Player, which you very likely already have.
email: If you want to let people have your song by email, there are two ways. One is to give them the URL to the ram file, actually in the text of the email - http://www.rhubard.freeserve.co.uk/songs/squirrel.rm for a fictitious example. Or http://www.macgrath.freeserve.co.uk/realsongs/Marmite.ram for a real one.
The other way would be to send then a sound file as an email attachment. And if you want to do that, I suggest that when you are saving the song from Goldwave, on the Save As screen, you click on the triangle next to file attributes, and scroll down to something like the bottom MPEG Layer-3 8Kbits, 8000Hz,Mono. That makes it reasonably small, which is what you want. The sound quaity suffers - but you can experiment with other settings.This is the stuff that is referred to in the media as MP3, and there are other programs for turning big wav files into smallish MP3 files.So you could use one of them for turnimng the wav file into an MP3 - "encoding" it - instead of Goldwave. And WinAmp is great for playing them back, as well as wav files. I haven't really got into that yet. Maybe if I do I'll have to make another page about it.
And that is that for now. Any suggestions for making it clearer, let me know (put your comments in my GuestBook). . Any mistakes or needless complications are purely down to my technical incompetence.