Sound Of Faz Radio is going all in with a 24/7 365 days a year internet radio station. Building it all myself, this is the blog following my journey including all highs and lows of this mammoth project!
The main page that has the player to tune in is now completed. Very simple but looks cool. I’ve opted for the one widget that has a tab for previous played tracks. The player shows currently playing artist and title and the cover art of the track. Horizontally and vertically centred on desktop and mobile (a lot of expletives were heard sorting out the vertical centering I can tell you!)
A draft version of the other page is done too. This is the page that is used when a DJ is live. As well as the player it contains a chatroom.
Once done, there will just be the one page that has some logic that switches between both layouts depending on the schedule ie. when a DJ is live. But for now, it’s easier having 2 seperate pages for testing.
Stay tuned…
I have the player set up on the ‘main’ page. Sound quality is good. Currently playing random tunes from the hard house category (I forgot how great Fergie’s remix of ‘Rock Da House’ is!)
Page looks good – clean and simple but I’m not 100% happy with it. The player needs vertically centering properly (to any web guys reading this, vertical centering and CSS never go hand in hand easily do they!) so will work on that. Also need to slot in the ‘Last played tracks’ list somewhere although the main widget has the ability to show the last 4 played tracks anyway so may keep it like this for a super clean player.
All in all, it’s going well and once the vertical centering is sorted this will look very good. Although with fresh eyes tomorrow I may think it needs something more on the page. We’ll see.
Stay tuned…
So….. all metadata has now been applied and sorted to all the music library. The only thing left to do is upload mixes or past radio shows that will be part of the schedule. These require markers adding with individual metadata for each track so quite time consuming so I will do this at the very end before going live.
Time now to start looking properly at the website. The widget that Live365 supplies as standard has no styling control (aaaaahhhhhhh!!!) so I can’t style it myself and as it’s in an iframe I can’t overwrite the CSS. Tried out an external player plugin that was really cool and added a player that stuck to the bottom of the screen but that doesn’t pick up metadata so may use that somewhere but need to stick with the official widget. I put a feature request into them to allow CSS changes but all depends how many others also request the same thing.
So initially I foresee 2 pages. 1 ‘main’ one that simply has the player – dead simple, nothing more. A clean design. Then a seperate page for when a DJ is live. This page will have player and a chat room. Once both are done, write some simple logic to display one or the other depending on the schedule ie. when a DJ is live.
Will get the bare bones of these pages done (already started both) then jazz up with CSS.
Stay tuned…
I encountered a bug with the Live365 metadata section. When uploading a batch of tracks, I have a review page where I can enter the album metadata of all tracks all on the one page however after doing that and hitting save, it doesn’t save the album metadata. I’ve reported the bug and luckily have found that the software I use for bulk managing metadata (MP3 Tag) also allows me to update album in bulk too!
Currently uploading the entire trance folder but will have to check the cover art of all of them as any tool that bulk scans various sources for the artwork tends to not always pick up square photos. If it’s rectangular for example it simply crops a square out of the left hand side which results in this:
So, cool in an arty kind of way but overall it looks a bit crap so need to look into that too in case there are any settings to automatically crop a square from the centre of the image.
So currently uploading trance folder but may be easier to delete it once done, look into the above to sort images THEN upload again. This is the only issue currently, if I can sort the artwork I’m on a roll.
Stay tuned…
