A blog about Muziboo.com
February 14th, 2011 § 4
Many valentine songs get posted to Muziboo on this day as a dedication to special friends and loved ones. The one that caught my attention was a soulful song by Randy Farmer for his wife Christie.
The song is called Lamp of Love and here we go!
LAMP OF LOVE (AKA) CHRISTIES SONG | Upload Music
Have a great day Randy and Christie!
December 29th, 2010 § 10
We recently pulled off the option of pooling music into Groups for the reason that the pooling/ grouping was not done appropriately by most of the users. There has been a lot of requests to reinstate that feature for it did prove useful to all users that could use it appropriately. So we are introducing a similar feature – ability to build playlists – which exactly takes care of the need of pooling music of similar kind but discards the possibility of diluting the quality of groups. Also, unlike groups this feature gives listeners the ability to build playlists of their choice.
I am posting below a screen shot of a player with the playlist option highlighted.
December 7th, 2010 § 1
The concept of Groups was primarily introduced in Muziboo for two reasons: To promote discussions and provide a way for categorizing music. In the couple of years of its existence this feature has been used widely for discussions. The other feature of ‘Post song to Group’ was mostly confusing users and hence negligibly used. To keep it simple and more useful, we have pulled off the concept of ‘Groups’ by just retaining the ‘Discussion’ platform. This minimality will help us bring more focus and attention to individual discussions.
You can write to support@muziboo.com if you need any clarification on this or leave your query as a comment for this post.
December 4th, 2010 § 1
Those of you who use Muziboo embeddable players for your audio blogs might have noticed that the player embedded has a different look than the one in Muziboo’s Song page. There has been a bit of confusion among the new users because of the mis-match. To avoid this, we have designed a new embeddable player which matches the existing player’s look, color and feel. From now on, the embedded player will look like the one below. Do let us know how you like this!
November 16th, 2010 § 8
Paypal has been having lot of troubles lately in keeping up their service for Indian merchants and Indian payments due to new Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regulations. Since Muziboo has been using Paypal for accepting payments we had to face an outage when Paypal stopped accepting payments from Indian users. All of you that tried paying through Paypal for Pro upgrade or renewal would have seen the following error.
‘We notice that you are attempting to pay an Indian resident user. The payment you initiated has been blocked. Paypal only facilitates international payments and cannot be used for domestic payments within in India. We suggest you find alternative methods to complete the payment. If you believe that the person you attempted to pay is not based in India, please contact Paypal customer support’
Thanks Nitin for sending us a screenshot of the error and also for bringing the issue to our notice.
We really appreciate the co-operation extended by all of you in trying alternate payment methods like cheque deposit and online bank transfer during this outage.
We have now integrated Alertpay, a Paypal alternative for Indian users. Gladly enough Alertpay supports payments from lots of other countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh which were not supported by Paypal. All users from countries where Paypal is not supported will see the Alerpay option.
You are not required to create an account with Alertpay or even sign-up there. All you need is your credit card to make the payment.
Thanks again for your patience and co-operation!
November 10th, 2010 § 3
In the last few days we have received quite a number Support mails about Muziboo tabs disappearing from Facebook profiles. This post is to let you all know that Facebook has disabled Third party application tabs (Muziboo and the like) on profiles. You can see the announcement here. However, it has to be noted that the tabs are still available for Pages.
Users of Facebook have to now wait till Facebook itself comes up with an application to showcase music. Many users are furious about this change. Well, Facebook as usual isn’t heeding any of this. Here’s the latest user comment on the Facebook announcement
John Carr:
“I’m quite certain this will probably just disappear into a cloud of disregarded comments, but as a user (not a developer), I was furious when I saw today that app tabs were being eliminated. First app boxes, my personal preference, went away, and now this. I am not one to play games like Farmville or what have you; my personal preference in FB apps are things such as Visual Bookshelf, Last.FM, and Amazon Wishlist – apps that have the specific purpose of displaying and sharing information with my FB friends. Now, such applications are going to be completely useless. Does FB have any plans to develop a bookshelf with a now reading function? Allow me to incorporate info from another social network in my profile? I doubt it. And FB shouldn’t be spending it’s time developing such things, that’s what third party apps are for, after all. Except now they aren’t, because now they no way to display and share such information. So thanks FB, thanks a lot for “improving” my user experience in this way.”
As we see it, it is not an application like Muziboo that is seeing a setback but Facebook’s own users who are not able to use the platform to their needs!
October 7th, 2010 § 6
We recently did away with the hard limit on uploads by enabling 5 free uploads every month for the Basic account in Muziboo. Over the past few months we have noticed that most of the users tend to upload all the five songs on the same day which inevitably results in nill visibility for all songs except one (Only one of the uploads is made visible in the ‘Music‘ tab that displays latest uploads). To obviate this disadvantage, we are introducing a daily limit of just one song per day on the 5 free uploads. We appreciate every query that was posted to us regarding bringing visibility to one’s songs. That played an important role in helping us make this decision.
If you have any queries regarding this shoot a mail to support@muziboo.com
September 15th, 2010 § 1
Taking photographs is the most common way to capture a moment. But there are times when capturing audio is a more meaningful record of memory than a visual image. Like when your baby speaks, when you are listening to a great concert, having a musical get together or singing a melody to your baby at bed time.
Muziboo though started off as a destination for music and community around music, it has over time seen quite a few uploads which are not music. It has been everything from story recitals to speeches and interviews. And most times one is not suitably equipped to do a decent recording of such occasions and hence such uploads aren’t of great quality. We have had a number of our users check with us on softwares and devices that can help them with such recordings so that the quality is not compromised. The best way is to use one of the handy and portable digital voice recorders available in the market today which promise CD quality recording.
As with any other gadgets, the market is fraught with products that compete with each other on features and usability. In case you have felt the need for one and you are willing to make the investment, I suggest you go through the following post on Voice recorders . It gives you a decent comparison of the options available in the market today based on user reviews.
September 6th, 2010 § 1
One of the members of Muziboo, Venky Krish has a very interesting take on how music can be used to reach out to the underprivileged. Below is a reproduction of what he had posted in the Muziboo Lounge.
“I am a new entrant to Muziboo and in the short while I have listened to the music uploaded by the members, I feel that the talent potential is phenomenal. Not only is it talent alone, it is the passion and the dedication to music that comes through.
We all feel good when we perform well and are appreciated. In the best among us, the more the praise and fan following , the more humble we become. It is this humility and compassion of talented members of Muziboo that will bear fruit in time to come. This may or may not be in the form of higher accolades and opportunities for performing live for a larger audience, launching albums, getting playback chances. But for sure this will be in the form of extending one’s talent and reaching out to the lesser endowed, disadvantaged or distressed in society. Such a situation does prevail even as I write this… in Pakistan our neighbouring country, ordinary poor people have had their lives reversed…. They are staring at an abyss and uncertainty so burdensome that it fails imagination. Many of them having lost their kith and kin and sources of livelihood… many of them simple, gentle rural folk … who are now forced to look up to the powers that be for their next meal. While simple decisions of giving aid have got trapped in a net of politics, I believe it is up to us ordinary but talented people to make that critical difference.
It is just a matter of time that the world forgets the plight of the poor, affected by the colossal floods. Aid pledged may or may not come in, may go to the wrong hands and as far as the poor are concerned, their condition will rarely recover even to the extent of what it was before the calamity. We still have people affected by the Tsunami ( what to say of the Bhopal tragedy), who are yet to get back on their feet.
Music has always been a great bridge between countries that are other wise politically or economically indifferent to each other.
I implore my Muziboo friends to come together and devise a vehicle to help the people of Pakistan. We can contribute our music either through live shows or through sales of CDs. I also have an idea that we could form an NGO of Muziboo artists , dedicate to teaching music and contribute the proceeds to the cause. I can even see Muziboo artists putting up their original compositions (grouped under proper genres) on a sponsored Radio FM show, a kind of hit parade where listeners will rank the entries. Ad revenues….can be contributed to the cause. Some of these will yield results only over a period of time…. All the more reason to start early.
My inspiration….
On Aug 15 ,2010 here in Dubai I met Glenn Perry , he’s a guitarist, composer and jazz performer , who runs a music school here.But I went to meet him because he had just returned from Pakistan… and he gave me a first hand account of the misery there. He is doing a private concert here on Sep 17 to aid the cause.
He is active in mobilising aid for poor and calamity stricken…all over the world… welfare of children and world peace are his main concerns.”
Do you have interesting thoughts on Music or anything related to Music? If you do and you would like to see it published in the Muziboo blog , write to us at contact@muziboo.com
June 28th, 2010 § 1
If there’s one thing majority of the users have been uncomfortable about their network in Muziboo, it is the ‘Add as friend’ model. The friend model forces a two way relationship between people where it is not required. If a Muziboo member likes another member’s music, he/she should be able to receive updates on that member’s activities without having to wait for an approval. Also, the friend model creates an unnecessary obligation for members to receive updates from others just to let them know about their own updates. The light weight follow model does away with all these complications.
Hence we launch the ‘Follow’ model in Muziboo. You can now follow any Muziboo member by clicking the ‘Follow’ button that appears right next to the name in the profile page. And as of now, all friends are made mutual follows and un-approved Friend requests are converted to follows.
In the next cut of this feature, we plan to launch better home page feeds. Till then happy following!
Muziboo is an audio sharing platform for musicians, podcasters and sound professionals. Find out more!
This blog talks about new features, shares exciting stuff from the Muziboo community and talks about all things music and audio :)
