Tales from EqBeats

Hey all,

There is now an EqBeats app for Windows Phone 7 and 8! It’s free, get it here.

Many thanks to Connorcpu for making this app.

Hello all!

We’ve just pushed some updates to the website a few days ago.

Detailed statistics

Took us long enough, but here it is, a day by day report of views, plays, and downloads; as well as a report of referrers (where did visitors click through to your track).

Of course this is still a very new feature, so we only have statistics going back about a month, and there will be discrepancies between it and the plain old hit counter.

More audio formats

We now transcode every upload to two more codecs:

• AAC, for the sake of iDevices
• Opus

Now I’m fairly sure most of you haven’t heard of Opus, so let me tell you about it. It is a fairly new codec (July 2012), worked upon by the Xiph.Org foundation, Skype/Microsoft, Mozilla and others, with the ambition to be efficient at pretty much any bitrate. And, surprisingly enough, it meets its goal, all the while being better than every other codec at most bitrates.

Most importantly, it is an open, royalty-free standard, so those of you who care about software patents should already be smiling, and those of you who don’t should probably go read up on them.

Sadly, it’s still not widely supported, but if you’re using Firefox, you’re already listening to it.

We have tinkered with our encoding settings so that those two codecs (as well as Vorbis) are comfortably streamable on a slow internet connection, while still remaining very close to the original uploaded file. But, we’re not sound engineers or anything, and thus we would appreciate your feedback on this.

On this note, we’d like to stress once again that uploading lossless files is always the better option. While we do accept most formats imaginable, transcoding from MP3 or other lossy formats to yet another lossy format will incur more loss than transcoding from FLAC or WAV or ALAC to a lossy format.

Happy everything

In other news, we’re in 2013 now apparently?

Happy new year, folks. Hope your year was as fascinating and fulfilling as it could have been, and that the new one will be too.

With the new year comes another milestone: EqBeats is now one year old! Thanks to all of you for trusting us with your music and making EqBeats into the sizeable repository that it is now.

Hey folks,

We’ve just pushed out a big update today. It’s mostly a rewrite of the backend, so you shouldn’t see a lot of changes. However, this update was in the works for more than six months already, and prevented us from any kind of fast update-pushing, so finally seeing the end of that means we can start working on other, more interesting things again.

So if you have a feature you’ve always wanted to see, we’re listening, on our Github issue tracker or still via Email or IRC. Yes, we already know you guys want stats, and we’d like you to tell us what kind and at which density.

And of course, if you see a bug appear with the update, please let us know as soon as possible.

Hi folks,

We’ve put this off long enough, but EqBeats is now Free Software! The code is licenced under the BSD-3 license, and is available to view, reuse, or contribute to, in its GitHub repository.

Moving to GitHub also means we get a bugtracker so direct all your bug reports and feature requests to it here.

Thanks to Nido, Valodim and Igor for answering our call to developers and giving us the push we needed to get rolling again.

Summer has been busier than expected. Unfortunately, the big update isn’t ready yet, but it could be considered mostly done. The good ol’ reliable version still works, so why fix what ain’t broken? (lazy man’s excuse for not doing anything)

Less important: we’ve added OpenSearch support. That means you can easily add EqBeats to your browser’s search engines. And there is this fancy new blog. Hope you like it! There has also been a small change to the youtube uploading system: if your track is unpublished when you upload it, it will be unlisted on youtube.

Also, if any developer wanna help, send us a mail or check the chat (#eqbeats on irc.ponychat.net). We live on UTC+2, if that’s your timezone, that’s perfect; if not, don’t expect to see us at 4 AM UTC. We’re specifically looking for volunteers with some experience with C++, as well as *nix. You needn’t know C++ perfectly, you’ll be here to learn and practice, not to show off fake skills. Still interested? Good!

So, as expected, June has been busy. Still, we’ve improved a few things, including our spam filter. EqBeats now supports module files (MOD, XM, IT, etc…) too.

We’re also preparing a massive update of the software. This is going to take some time though, but the development should be boosted very soon. Expect new features.