We continue to expand on what is available on the Freezenet official wiki. We take a look at everything that has been added for January.
It’s a brand new year! Can you believe we’ve already burned through a month of it already? I honestly can’t. It really does feel like the year has barely started. This month, we managed to go well above 2,000 Wiki pages already. That is an incredible accomplishment to have pulled off in less than a year. It’s also hard to believe that a little over a year ago, we launched the official Wiki. When I wrote that announcement back then, I was busily seeing the enormous possibilities that the Wiki technology could offer Freezenet. It was a bit daunting at first setting it up, but once everything was in place, the fun was about to begin with the website.
In fact, I personally found that the most fun part of the Wiki was actually making the pages themselves. Punching out code all day long might not strike people as the most fun thing in the world, of course. In fact, it sounds so incredibly dry on first blush. However, with the way Wiki is structured, it does make life a heck of a lot easier. Between making new content all the time and writing the code behind it, I haven’t really lost the vibe of how fun that is. One year in and the fun vibe being still around is a very positive sign indeed!
Of course, it isn’t just about making content for the sake of making content. It was making something that could prove highly useful to people out there. When I first started researching music more than a decade ago, it was actually much more difficult to figure out what all was out there. I might be able to dive deep into one genre, but other genre’s proved elusive to me. Every new genre I traversed, it felt like starting over from scratch with pretty much nothing to go by. While I did successfully build my knowledge enough to get a very solid grasp of the different kinds of music out there, I couldn’t help but think how this is something others after me will have to do as well just to get an appreciation for what I happen to know already.
I did look around at different sites. A big question for me is if there is something out there that allowed people to easily explore music. What I ended up finding was sites that were reg-walled, sites that were pay-walled, and sites that pretty much depended on you knowing what you are looking for. One example of the last point is, surprisingly, YouTube. I looked up multiple examples of different music I knew. This ranged from drum and bass to house music to trance music and even ambient. The recommendations that kept popping up? Deadmau5. Did you like Sub Focus, maybe you’d like Deadmau5. Thought Maor Levi was great? Well, try Deadmau5. Oh, you’re listening to Hellsystem I see. Then, maybe you should try Deadmau5. Oh, how edgy of you to listen to old Toby Emerson music. Clearly, you’d also like Deadmau5. I’m not saying Deadmau5 is a bad producer by any means, but there’s more to music than just what Deadmau5 has on YouTube.
Other sites offered information, but they were clearly set up with the idea that you knew what you were after. What if you didn’t? At that point, you are just staring at lists of stuff with absolutely nothing to go on. It was at that point that I figured that maybe I should try and generate something that would actually attempt to give people who don’t necessarily know what they are after a chance to find something that maybe they haven’t heard of. Of course, this is probably the hardest way to build a site. So, I figured that, hey, I’m crazy enough to attempt it, why not take a crack at this?
Well, one year into my attempt at open source research and I think it’s going pretty darn well. Sure, more is always going to be better, but considering what is already up in such a short period of time, I’d say I’m very happy with what I’ve built so far. Obviously, I can expand things even more by, well, a lot, but what is up there is already multiple life times worth of music already as it is. It’s already more music then what most people would consider to be a satisfying quantity even when they are into the genre’s already on the Wiki. This makes it all the more promising and I’m even more excited to see what I can pull off on year two.
Of course, you also came here to find out what I posted this month. Well, first of all, we got the usual updates. The Random Movement Podcast is no updated to episode 130. Meanwhile, Resonation is updated all the way up to episode 009. Finally, Fables is updated all the way up to episode 178.
This month, the focus has been to get as much of the show, V Recordings Podcast archived. Normally, this is something that can easily be posted in full. Unfortunately, thanks to COVID-19, everything is far from normal. The time I’m able to devote to archiving has been shortened for the last several months. This month was no exception. Still, we managed to get the show updated all the way up to episode 060 (with episodes 101 and 102 already up – the latest episodes). Since this is generally a two hour show, this represents roughly 124 hours worth of content archived already. So, we aren’t exactly slacking this month either.
The hope is that, this month, we’ll be able to finish archiving that show and move on to a much larger show. Yes, there will be updates to this podcast just like every other show, but we are also looking forward to the next show as well. It’s mostly an opportunity to expand the offerings yet again more than anything else.
We hope you enjoy what we have up already and definitely look forward to being able to offer even more content in the future!
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
