We now take a look at what we’ve added to the Wiki over the last month. This is for the month of June.
It’s been a very busy month here on Freezenet. Last month, we announced a massive new patch for the Future Sound of Egypt. Numerous episodes were completed. Then, later on, we announced that we managed to complete the entire archive. Everything we could find has been posted right on the Future Sound of Egypt page of our Wiki page. It was a massive project that took a lot longer then we would have liked, but it is now finally done.
Now, the question we had shortly after finishing that project is: what do we work on next? This wound up being a much more difficult question to answer because there are so many good possible archive projects to be had. We ultimately narrowed our choices down to two possible shows. One possibility is the show we had long ago planned on adding when we finished this project. This show would open the Wiki up to a third genre of music, broadening the overall horizons of this project as a result. The other archive project is another trance show which already has a placeholder on this site. This place holder does get the odd page view here and there from time to time, indicating that there is, indeed, interest for this project.
This choice basically settles what the next two projects are going to be. The real question is: what order should we do this in? Ultimately, we went back to the question of the purpose of this Wiki (so far). It is to help people explore new music they might not have otherwise heard before. There is no question the next Trance show is going to help out the site, but at the same time, it’s a bit of a hard sell to say that your project is all about exploring new music with only two genre’s being present.
So, the final decision was made to broaden the Wiki’s horizons and hit more musical tastes by first incorporating that additional genre. This third genre is known as Synth-Pop. An entry was placed in the music genre’s page to help keep things organized. From there, we added an artist page for Psy’Aviah. This artist has done a lot for us in the past, so we wanted to post up a permanent page as a big “thank you” for the gestures of kindness given to us. After that, we added the Synth-Pop labels category. Currently, there is one label we were able to document – and that is the Alfa Matrix label. This is the label Psy’Aviah works under, so it only made sense.
Now, Synth-Pop is, admittedly, a genre I have slightly less familiarity with. So, a year or so ago, I actually asked Psy’Aviah for suggestions for Synth-Pop shows that would be good choices for people who would be new to the genre. The suggestions given were excellent suggestions and I had a hard time picking between them. I ended up picking the show Synth City as the first show. I picked it because I more or less threw a dart because I couldn’t decide.
It was actually rather fortunate I picked this one because, apparently, there isn’t quite as much structure involved. This means there are no episode numbers associated with episodes. So, I took it upon myself to actually apply episode numbers to each episode. So, not only are there now episode numbers associated with each episode as I go along, but it is much easier to navigate between each episodes as well. Little did I know this would only be the first problem I would run in to while archiving this show.
The good news is that the show archive is already up to episode 175. No, I didn’t down 3 Red Bulls and a batch of coffee and type until smoke wafted out of the keyboard. Instead, a number of the earlier episodes actually have no playlist associated with them. This was actually asked about by show fans, but the host, Rob Harvey, explained that the tracklist appears on Mixcloud as you listen to the show. I thought, “Hey, great, I can add things as I go along and basically work on two episodes at once!” Well, I was sorely disappointed because this feature doesn’t actually work anymore. So, no playlist information was to be found for most of the first 100 episodes. You could extract a playlist by listening to verbal ID’s, but I didn’t want to spend another year working on a single project again. So, I had to leave those episodes as-is. On the plus side, it was dead simple to blow through numerous episodes within minutes with the remaining bits of information.
A second problem is actually counting the episodes. Normally, I post new episodes as they are released as I archive the back episodes. Without episode numbers, that isn’t necessarily possible. Some of you more mathematically minded people out there might notice, though, that each page on the official site has a certain number of entries. What’s more is that you can extract a page number.
So, you might think, multiple the rows by the columns, get an answer, then multiply every page minus the last page, and add up how many episodes are on the last page to get a total amount. Yeah, I thought of that too. It was a good thing I chose not to do that. The simple reason is, for whatever reason, episodes from other shows occasionally pop in to those pages as well. Had I done the math thing, my episode count would have been off, creating a massive mess on the Wiki. So, I’ll just have to do without the newest episodes until I get to them because I have no clue how many episodes there actually are. I What’s more is that I don’t feel like browsing through every individual page, subtracting entries that shouldn’t be there, and eventually getting an episode count after. It’s just safer to just go one episode at a time until I complete the archive.
Another big problem I ran in to is the fact that some of the older episodes pages have coding errors. I wouldn’t have a clue how this happened on the back end, but what I do know is that the tracklist is weirdly placed over top of everything. What’s more is that it also renders some of the Mixcloud embeds unclickable. Case in point is this page (and no, that’s not the only page that has this problem). It’s possible to copy the episode from the index page and I could circumvent the embed by simply going to Mixcloud and searching for the title (at least that’s visible) and extract the URL after. At any rate, I was able to get a nice clean page for this episode after, but it did take extra work to get there.
There were other minor problems that I ran in to, but it really felt like this show was a fantastic candidate for archiving. Not only is the music actually pretty good, but we’re more or less fixing a lot of issues along the way as well. Hopefully, this archive will prove useful for not only fans of the shows, but allow people who haven’t even heard of this show to easily explore it.
Now, for those of you who are disappointed we didn’t choose that other trance show, there is good news to be had here as well. By our rough estimate, there is somewhere in the ballpark of 363 (the total is likely less than that) episodes in all. Because we reached all the way up to episode 175, that means we are already getting close to the half way mark. So, no, it’s mercifully not going to take more than a year to complete. If we had a guess (and this is not a promise by any means), we would say this is probably only going to take two months more to complete it. For all we know, it could take even less time for all we know. So, things will be moving along more quickly than you might think.
So, a surprisingly big patch this month considering we had less time to work on it. The additional 175 episodes represents an additional 351 hours worth of documented music so far (episode 1 was a three hour special). Hopefully, you enjoy this nice massive chunk of content and got some interesting insight to what we are thinking along the way. We’ll continue to hammer our way through these episodes as best we can as we work on evolving this really good Wiki into a great Wiki. Things could get rather interesting this year at the very least.
As always, we’ve also added the latest episodes for the Future Sound of Egypt, Fables, Resonation, the V Recordings Podcast, and the Random Movement Podcast. So, everything should be nicely up to date as well for the ongoing shows as well. Again, enjoy!
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
