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After three years online, the first version is going bye bye. Numerous downloads happened, and no bug has been reported, which can be explained because this project was started as a fork to add CMS features to the code of what is now named Clewn.org, which is in production stage and continuously tested and improved since early 2008.
The new version is codenamed "Slcnc Reborn" and is licensed under GPL V3. It requires the download of a third party library, php-getid3, which is also GPL licensed and available for free on Sourceforge.
Check the online demo
The online demo is split in two part, each featuring a little more than 20 songs. There is the Free Download mode demo, to test the ease of use of the software to run a music project website with content available for free download, and the Online Store demo, which allows to see how work the cart system and payment steps to complete a buy and get the downloads. Its is fully configured and linked to a live Paypal account : if you wish to, you can spend real money to test the song buying process to its very end.
The online demo is currently being uploaded to a web server. The media files are huge, and a link should appear here within at least a few hours.
UPDATE 20150220 : A strange bug on the hosting service prevented me to finalize the task shortly : the hosting, using PHP 5.3, showed incorrect behavior for the use of the htmlentities function, causing non-ASCII characters in the content provided by the user to not display correctly. After a long search, I discovered that updating the PHP engine to its 5.5 version solved the problem. I still have to check the spelling and grammar of the texts I provided for this online demo before I can add the link here. It won't come before several days ; I worked quite intensively on this project in the past few days, and I'm now on a break to take some rest.
Whats new in this new release
The look and feel and navigation method have been totally reworked for a much better user experience. Fostering curiosity, fun and discoveries, it take advantage of the small footprint of HTML5 audio and the power of nowadays' computers to provide an easy, clean browsing of your music production, minimizing the number of click needed to discover and stream music. Please take a look at the screenshot on the Sourceforge Slcnc CMS's home to see how it looks.
A complete French translation has been added, in addition to English. French readers may want to read this complete introduction/tutorial that I posted on the forum of the nonprofit Musique Libre : http://musique-libre.org/forum/discussion/7373/nouvelle-version-de-slcnc-cms-nom-de-code-slcnc-reborn-pour-mettre-en-ligne-facilement-votre-site
Some strange features, that weren't working that well and were never used by anyone, have been removed to reduce complexity of the software and improve user experience by providing a more straightforward user interface
What was removed from this release
*The personalized radio stream : they were working quite good if all your files were encoded at the same bitrate and using the same stereo or mono mode, but with mix of stereo/mono files or differents bitrates, on most if not any media player music turned into strange noises. Funny but not very useful. No one was, by the way, ever using this feature in production websites, and it was removed from Clewn.org years ago
*The online DJing and mixing feature : while interesting, this feature was risky over an internet connection, with sometimes lag and was not very useful for anything serious, just a toy feature, that by the way never has visitors on production websites
*The embedding feature : meant as an easy way to have your music shared among websites and to have it spreading all over the internet, the embedding feature, that was maybe a bit too technical at use for many users, has never been used widely outside the few website I am running. On Clewn.org, I only know one person besides me who embeds the Clewn.org's music on his site.
What was already available and is still here
You can choose to offer your music for free download or to sell it using Paypal to process payments, with a compete ecommerce module including a shopping basket.
Please note, that, as stated once on Bandcamp's faq, no method can prevent skilled people to steal music from a streaming website. This is even more true with HTML 5 streaming, which requires very little skill to be accessed online, although Slcnc CMS uses various method to make it more difficult. But as it was also stated on Bandcamp's website, studies seem to show that the more a music is illegally copied, the more listeners and exposure it gets, and the more sells are made, finally.
As before, the navigation paradigm is mainly suited for a single music project website, and not very useful for multi-project or label website.
The CMS is still 100% metadata driven. There is no steps to perform, no forms to fill. Just put your correctly tagged audio file into the "audio" subdirectory and you're done.
The cover pictures management is also very simple. You'll only have to create a "Artist Name/Album Name" directory structure in the covers subdirectory, and but each cover picture in the corresponding "Album Name" subdirectory. Warning, there's no support for rear cover, only one front cover picture file is to be put in each subdir.
How to I Install ? Where is the documentation ?
The only documentation available besides what is listed on this wiki is located inside the option.php file, which also contains about half a dozen options that you'll have to set to have your website tailored to your music project's profile and fully functional.
The archive file containing the software is replicating the directory structure that has to be created on the web server. Just upload anything and you're done, but you may want to remove the temporary draft files having their filename finishing by the ~ character, they are not harmful in any way but just totally useless and were included by mistake.
Don't forget to download the latest version of the php-getid3 library and unpack all its files in the id3/ directory.
Is there any help available for setting up and running this CMS ? Is there commercial support available ?
As a freelancer, I plan to add to my service offer a very cheap (according to western world standards...) all-in-one package including hosting selection, hosting rental and renewal, configuration and installation. The only things my customers will have to do on their own is to prepare the media files and upload them, and I'm currently writing step-by-step tutorials to help even the most computer-illiterate musicians to achieve these easy tasks by themselves, using standard and broadly, freely available open-source tools. I'll also indicate pricing, which will be a small setup fee including hosting and domain name for the initial year, and an even more modest yearly fee for the following years to renew hosting and domain name registration, various advantage and drawbacks of this CMS for music hosting, various tips for people willing to learn somehow more advanced usage like modifying on their own the options.php file later. My freelancer service offer website is written in French, but I plan to polish and rework this particular section of the site to have it fully and understandably translatable using automated translation tools. Link will show up on this wiki as soon as I'll have finished writing the presentation and tutorials.