Sorry for the delay, but our load balancer is fixed now so customers on that part of the system are running again.

Also, we have released a new version! There are a variety of fixes and new items.

Artist Features - We have added some things that will allow owners of their content greater control for the distribution of it. If you are a content owner, we can let you control whether people get only a 30 second clip of your music, or the whole track. We will have legal docs that you will need to submit to us verifying ownership of your content and then we will enable you to control access. Many bands have been asking for this sort of feature, so we added it!
Multilingual - We have added support for other languages to the interface. It looks at your browser and replaces the english parts with your local. We launched with Cyrillic, English and a bit of German. There are slots for Spanish, French, and Portuguese at this point. We will need some help from the userbase to fill in the rest of the words for other languages.
Tabs - The tabs are now aligned across the top of the interface which should lead to less confusion over where to find things on the page.
Ads - We have added Google adwords to the lower part of the page to ease people into a better revenue model. Sites need to make money to stay live.
Custom Colors - You can now control the background colors of your account. This was added to let bands better control their accounts for people who are visiting and listening to tracks there. We left it in for normal users as well!

Please be patient, there will be bugs for a while now that it is out, but we should be able to fix them quickly now that the main parts are there. We also hope to have a fix for the Facebook app later this week.

Thanks for listening!

Hi there. One of our load balancers is down currently. It means certain accounts don’t have access to the site until it is up again. It is usually a 50/50 split as to which servers your account is on that causes the login problems. The servers are fine behind the system, so your data is safe. We will try to get to it by Monday at the latest, over the weekend is more likely though.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but we are physically understaffed at this time. The new version of the software should be up next week sometime as well after looonnngggg delays.

Our Colo facility had a power outage caused by Pacific Gas and Electric.  Things are back up and running again now.  Several power strips were tripped and caused some of our machines to not come up again.

It looks like we are having some power issues again.  The load balancer and a few other machines are down for a bit.  We hope to have things running again by late morning PST.

A spate of recent articles about Cloud Services makes me wonder about them.  Some are nice and concise and others just ramble on.  We link to think of MediaMaster as a useful cloud service.  It lets you get to your music anywhere.  It’s simple, it serves a pupose, and it lets you do more than you can from a home machine.

The bigger companies are trying to cover all of the bases and be like .mac (now MobileMe), but that model does not seem to work very well; it’s very broad and requires integration directly into the OS which only MS and Apple are capable of.  A hard drive in the sky is nice for backup but not very sexy.  However, when you start to add things to make it useful, then you stop thinking of it that way.  Microsoft added special view to My Pictures, My Music, My Videos and others that make them more than just a folder.  We think that MediaMaster does that for music on the web.  Flickr is more a website than a true service in the sky.  You are limited to interacting with it through Web tools (as are we) however, they are making the transition.

The key for Cloud Services is not just to remain in sync with your drive at home, but to add functionality that is not possible (My Radio on MM) or Facebook pages.  The Sync feature is the transition to when things are only online, like Y!Mail and HotMail.  Yahoo! has added other APIs recently to allow other to inteface directly and build their own services with Y! as a backend.  S3 and EC2 from Amazon is very complicated, while XDrive from AOL is just a boring backup service.  Cloud backup is nice for small businesses, and can make money, but it is not fun for the consumer.  The layers on top are the future.

So, the site is up again, but Radio will likely be down for the week.  The Flash player part of the site works fine so you can listen to your music, however you will need to log in directly to the farm your music is on.  That is, http://n90.mediamaster.com or http://n91.mediamaster.com .

The Radio system being down seems to mainly effect Second Life users who have been using the radio streams for their homes and clubs.  It will also affect people who listen using WinAmp and people with Radio links in their blogs.

Once again, we are sorry for this set of problems and we are working hard to fix them.

Sorry folks. We had a power problem in the cage that affected incoming traffic. The file servers were all happy and running as well as the other back end machines. However, something tripped the power strips for the front-end machines. We will be fiddling with an ammeter to make sure that does not happen again. We will also set up a better process for holiday coverage for outages.

Once again, we are sorry about the outage and plan on having some software updates out in 2 weeks from now.

Hi there folks,  we have clearly had some issues lately since the site has been down.  They are power related and we are ordering a new circuit at our ISP to help with that.  We recently moved the development servers into our cage and after about a week, it turned out that we got had too much extra load and popped the breakers.  Oops.  We will shut some servers down and make do with the power we have until we can rearrange the circuits. Your data is safe and should be online again soon, like a day or two at most (we hope).  We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience.

Seems like a pretty silly thing to me: why EMI thinks that online storage of music files is a problem. The funny thing is that they go after little mp3tunes.com. Sure Michael Robertson continually pokes the labels, that is a good reason for them. It certainly isn’t the money, the service is hardly thriving. In fact, the other online music storage companies have disappeared. Anywhere.fm was purchased recently and Ezmo shut down. Neither had a big following. If EMI really thought storage was bad and wanted it to stop, then they should go after AOL’s XDrive, Apple’s .mac, or Microsoft’s new Skydrive, or Amazon S3 (back end for Anywhere.fm). We at MediaMaster have not heard from them either. All of the above have big “My Music” folders at the top level of them, that would seem to indicate that people place their music files in them

A label going after one high profile small company sends shudders through the small business world. Venture funds run screaming from media startups that actually touch content. Knowing they have to maintain a huge legal slush fund for the possibility that there will a lawsuit is reason enough to not fund innovative little companies that deliver what consumers want. This is storage of something most users do own, the DMCA rules allow for takedown of accounts that are known to be illiegal, why not use that system, that’s how it was designed. Assuming that everyone is bad and has illegal files hardly seems like a way to regain trust of consumers.

And consumers do want these services. I would bet there more than a million customers spread across these storage locker sites. Maybe look at the world a little differently, treat these services as subscription sites that can work. Instead of 2 million tracks owned by the labels, expand it the other tracks that aren’t on that big list, and get paid for a service with truly unique offerings. Users will pay, and the labels can make some money too.

If I buy a hard drive to back up my files at home, there is not much difference. If I then share that hard drive in my home, that is arguably family ownership of content. NAS devices are now very popular as well and beg to be connected for outside access. You still would only access your own files, since your Quicken files are somewhere on that drive as well. Why don’t they sue Seagate, Hitachi, Western-Digital, and any other drive maker. Oh, right, they tried that; to levy a tax on all iPods and mp3 players that would pay for their content that all users have stolen.

They also have to admit that the old days of billion dollar returns are gone. Welcome to the world of razor thin margins that every other industry in the world has learned to deal with over the last decade. Seems like plenty of business thrive still. In fact, an industry that has practically no cost of goods sold should be able to do more than thrive…

Hello MediaMaster users!  It has been a long time since we have updated the blog, in fact, since December!

We have been making some changes and have been slow to update the forums.  We are catching up with those now and also responding to direct support emails as well.  We have made some updates and bug fixes to the site and have a new list of projects to work on.  There are some known issues with Vista 64 (who doesn’t have issues with that), but we have most other common OS’s under control.  Localization is looming on the near horizon.

We are growing steadily and version 2 has been very well recieved.  We have noticed that some of our competition is disappearing or morphing.  Ezmo has announced they will shut down.  Mp3Tunes is still there, with few changes, but lots of commentary.  Anywhere.fm was purchased by imeem.  Lala has yet to launch their revamped product.  It seems that the locker notion is becoming popular just as the early sites are slowing/shutting down.  The record industry seems to be warming to them as well and it’s about time.People store everything else online, why not your music?  We think we have the best system for it and think that your music should be fully accessible instead of locked away in some online backup system.  The whole point of the cloud is access, not a dark closet to safely store things that are on your hard drive.

 <RANT>

In fact, given Microsoft’s latest announcement about Windows Home Server (news), would you feel safe storing anything on an unreliable system THAT WAS DESIGNED AS RELIABLE HOME BACKUP!!!

</RANT>

We have published an API which should allow outsiders to make the widgets they want.  We are looking for some developers out there who’d like to help out the community.  Widgets we are getting requests for currently are a Vista sidebar, a  Slimserver plug-in,  Firefox plugins, and perhaps a Songbird plug-in if that ever gets finished.  These are all now possible for our more technical users to write and distribute.  We’ll try to put up some sample code, but many of you already know what to do with an XML schema.  The JAXB jar file is also available for Java programmers.