Audio.com Review: A New Home for My Music

It’s been some time since I moved my music over to Myspace after the reboot of Acid Planet. I’ve never been happy with it and have looked for alternatives on and off again. I ran across another offering called Audio.com and decided to give it a try.

# Looking for alternatives.

Acid Planet was my first foray into the music community. It was nice as Acid Pro could publish to the platform without any hassles. Besides being a site for free samples, I could also join contests and listen to others offerings. Although still around, I never signed up for the revamped version. It was time to move on.

Given that Myspace had also rebooted around that time, I started there. It was now focused on music and had a slick, if clunky, interface. Overtime it too became stale and never quite worked right in Safari. Plus, all I seemed to get were spam follows.

This led me to continue to look for alternatives. I had been a SoundCloud user for some time, even using it to house some of my ZX81 audio. I liked that you could follow artists and listen to stations. I could share music there but the community wasn’t for me. They pushed subscriptions and, as a long aging hobby, wasn’t where I wanted to spend my time.

# Digging into free alternatives.

Disheartened, I began looking for music players I could integrate into my own site. I found a decent one and built out a test program. Although it worked well, I had a few issues with the playback. It became one of those beats projects I never completed.

So when I ran across Audio.com, it intrigued me. It seems to be community driven, although lacks the forms I liked in Acid Planet. It suggests other creators and has a good search feature. The player is nice and seems to work well in my browser of choice. As a bonus, it integrates with Audacity if I ever get back into editing music.

# Diving in.

Although my choice was to publish using my own player, the look and feel of a third party site is intriguing. Much like I use Flickr to host photos, I want to use Audio in much the same way for songs. I decided to sign up.

Adding songs was pretty straight forward. You drag and drop them into the site and it builds waveforms for them. I had to go searching to find my music I had archived on my Mac mini. Once I had what I wanted, I dragged it there. This is where I ran into some minor issues.

Seems, some of the songs wouldn’t upload. They showed success, but the waveforms weren’t created and I couldn’t listen to the song. After futzing around for a bit, I found you have to be patient with the uploads. I ended up deleting the broken uploads and adding them again.

The next step was to add art work and tags. That worked well and you can share each song or a collection of songs. The sharing feature is actually quite nice. I created a few collections and added songs into them. Then realized I had a problem. The songs were out of order.

Yes, it may not matter to some, but I did want to add them in order of creation. I found an easy fix. Audio members the order that you add a song. To fix the collection, I cleared it and added each song in the correct order.

# Almost done.

With that complete, I now have a new home for my music. You can enjoy my songs from elective Vibes or wacky video music from “Fly me to the moon.” These are the same tracks I shared on Myspace and will be updating links to the new site as I find them.