Sing To The World
We were approached in early 2001 by Rob Southall and Steve Bennett about creating the UK's first Online Karaoke web site. Over the following months we worked on different solutions to the main problem of taking over 2000 Karaoke tracks and repurposing them for Internet delivery to the public.
We quickly realised that Macromedia Flash was the right content type for the tracks, and we could cater for different Internet connection speeds by using different qualities of audio. In 2 months we created a process to:
- Take a file from the Karaoke authoring package used to create each of the 2000 tracks
- Re-create the information in Flash format
- Create multiple quality MP3 files from the original audio
- Combine the audio and the graphics to create the finished Karaoke track (in Flash)
All this was complicated by the unavailability of MP3 handling in the available code to create the Flash file format as well as the sheer number of files and computational power required.
In the following 2 months we repurposed the 2000 tracks and fully developed the website:
- Subscription-based Karaoke streaming service
- Custom Disk Creation system (to enable customers to build a custom CD from the 2000 tracks available)
- Fully-featured multi-category Shop with automatic product popularity charts and multiple pricing
- Stock control, sales order processing, reporting and site administration from simple web pages
- Email Marketing tool allowing multiple list management, HTML emails, in-line questionnaires and success tracking
- Web-based administration over a secure Virtual Private Network
- Java-based environment, using Open Source software underpinned by a huge Sybase database
- Secured by strict firewall and utilising complex encryption for sensitive data
- Hugely robust, featuring 3 powerful front-end servers and fully raided database servers
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