Gray's blog

Sup,

So last night (10-20-09) I made a tweak to the search engine part of Axcid that greatly improved the service. So before yesterday, keyword searches such as:

mac dre, dr dre, rem

would return nothing. Also words under 4 letters in length weren’t counted, resulting in less relevance in search results & various other bugs. Last night I set out to correct that and did so successfully.

You’ll notice that specific searches now get more results, as well as the searches above which before returned nothing, now all return results.

This is just another step for Axcid’s future as a search engine, it gets better nearly every day.

Well this blog isn’t anyways.

I will be posting more / deleting this post when I have something useful to say. Right now most projects are under wraps, so it’s hard to say a lot.

As for Axcid 2.0 updates, it has been decided that the entire backend portion of the site (the API, the search tools, the database, the index, the relational DB) will all be powered by a Java servlet backend.

This means data processing will be faster / more extensible & clean. The API will include an insert API in 2.0 for private use (Internal crawling). More types of data will be indexed (bitrate, id3 tags, file size).

The server situation will be changing, built on 2 dedicated servers, one will be a workhorse, and one will be a datastore.

The workhorse will be the server used for streaming content, running large indexing operations & holding large amounts of data.

The indexing/logic machine will be used for the larger, more complex data manipulation systems. It will also manage searching/api responses/site control.

Song checking & large operations that require multiple machines will be operated under clusters, using a popular Java distributed operations API.

This is just some of what is planned / in development for Axcid 2.0. The wait will be well worth it, taking a music database to a proper, music search engine.

After a while of running this music DB, and noticing lag spikes and slowdowns due to poor, old coding, I made a decision. It’s rewrite time.

Now I know I’ve been saying that forever, but this time Axcid changes itself from a database to a search engine. I’ve engineered a new storage format / searchable database that can store music data, literally 50 times as fast as before. Queries that once took 50 seconds now take 20 milliseconds.

The new system will be much more scalable. Work starting with multiple servers, splitting the ‘powerhouse’ load (streaming, content checking, ‘heavy lifting’), from the database load (searching, indexing, database handling).

The XML api’s will also be re engineered. They will use a better / more standard format.

There will also be many new features, including album indexing, better art retrieval, users / sessions & playlists. The software version will be rebuilt to a more solid, complete application.

We’re moving out of the prototype days, and into the real software days. The beginning was fun, but it’s time to buckle down and launch a real music service.

In honor of my new G1 I purchased today, I’m showing off the development on Tunebin/Axcid Mobile.

The application is called Tunr. So far it’s bug_free and supports Tunebin Playlists & XSPF Playlists.

When I am done, it will be available on the Android Market, free of charge.

At the moment I’m writing my Media Services background service, the app will use it for playing songs, and it will of course support multitasking, so you can listen to your playlist whatever your doing.

Tunr supports(/will support) searching for songs via Axcid, it supports live music archive / Axcid search.

Downloading support will also be implemented sometime in the near future. I don’t have a ton of time to work on this due to paying jobs, but it will get done, don’t worry.

Hopefully in a couple days, I’ll get an SVN up for the packages:
org.graysblog.tunebin
org.graysblog.xspf
org.graysblog.http

so basic xspf playback can be implemented before the whole app is done. (Because who actually pays attention in class when there is 3g and music..),

Made something to spit TuneBin playlists into XSPF or M3U format.

http://graysblog.org/tunebin_xspf?p=6

where p=Your Playlist ID

and for m3u add &type=m3u

http://graysblog.org/tunebin_xspf?p=6&type=m3u

Alright this is just great. Will started to mess with the axcid api the other day, and came up with something cool. It’s like IgniteMusic, and uses the same api. But on the other hand, it doesn’t suck.

http://tunebin.info/

Powered by the axcid api, works on pretty much everything. Great way to listen to music like I do in class.

Some of my favorites:

Rap:

http://tinyurl.com/csnpuh – Gucci Mane – Icy (remix)

http://tinyurl.com/c4oloz – Eazy E – Eazy Does it

Alternative / BritRock:

http://tinyurl.com/cztwm6 – Arctic Monkeys – Scummy

Chillout:

http://tinyurl.com/dm7wfu – Sublime – Real Situation

Alt. covers:

http://tinyurl.com/d3re95 – Dynamite Hack – Boyz in the hood

just some good ones this week. gives me an excuse to post.

Mashup API (early stages) was released publically:

See axcid.org

http://graysblog.org/ignitemusic/

Now you can run with the lite version, comment and critique I BEG YOU D:.

http://axcid.org/

Yes, it’s released. Windows (beta) and Mac (Alpha).

So you can now enjoy millions (literally.. huge DB) of songs, much faster then limewire. Free to download, and very cool.

Very intresting new band on Axcid:

Jupe Jupe

Some pretty good music there, and a new upcoming band.

s’all good

I’ll upload this post later but the youtube video says most of it. Audio was dubbed in due to shitty camera not being able to record but atm most of the prototype is done..

About 2.3 weeks to estimated delivery in the store (Android Market).

If you have an android phone and want to test hit up my AIM or MSN (graykicksass, or gray@nati0n.org) and I can get you the apk package.

Youtube video:

Features working:

Downloads about 10% done, still lots to do (PROPER THREADING)

Search (separate thread in next update PLS)

Player (SD Card)

And everything else I forgot to mention.. all done in java with the android SDK.