Website Update

The error 500 which appeared yesterday evening is gone now. I was told it could have been an over-utilisation on the server, some open database connections which were not closed. Just to be on the safe side I now closed explicitly all database connections on each page. The page load is still quite slow - this is because of my extensive use of PHP for various purposes: reading the ID3 tags from the music files, sorting them by date, etc. Also the Javascript widgets which load content from other sites (through Feed2JS, Twitter, and Facebook) take their time... but there is unfortunately not much that I can do in order to improve the speed.

I did a few changes across the site to make it "compatible" with being viewed on a mobile screen: ensured that the default scaling is off, auto-aligning the content into one long column when the screen is too small (can be tested when resizing the browser to a small size), and reducing the information shown with some of the audio files. Also I ensured that links to the the MP3 files are shown wherever they exist. I personally prefer WMA files because they are smaller at a comparable sound quality, but WMAs are not in general playable on anything else than a Windows maching.

I checked the site on a Apple iPhone, and it appears to be ok.

Update of Website

In the past days I updated/upgraded the website of the Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra: a consistent set of icons was designed, and several PHP automation scripts were included to read the ID3 tags. For this I found the great getID3().php script, which allows to read the tags in all kinds of media files. In my site the use of this PHP automation required a consistent use of filenames; therefore I had to rename a whole set of WMA files for consistency. I could have used a MySQL database for this task, to achieve a more abstract separation of content description from the file name, but I did not want to go through the hassle of setting this up.

I also added a new partial recording: the first third of the 2nd movement from Mahler's Symphony No.1. It is so far up to the beginning of the Trio. A really marvellous work. Sounding deceivingly simple in the orchestra recordings, but it took quite a while to get these first 4 minutes recorded.