I was chatting to @steevc yesterday in a comment thread for my first audio album upload using the SPK platform and he was curious to know how I did it. I decided to boot up OBS and do a walkthrough video, yeah! Why not! This is the kind of thing I love to do, help others and learn a few things along the way myself. I am happy to do more of these in the future if interested on Hive, AI, coding whatever you guys are interested in!
Exploring audio uploads in 3speak
Comments · 3
Update (14 Oct): almost everything below is live on 3speak.tv now, see the ✅ under each note!
Thank you sooo much for the deep dive and all the questions you raised :) We built this feature without having much experience in online audio content, so your ideas and points are super valuable for us! I wrote down every open question and issue and will work on them in the next days. Will get back to you here :)
Here are my notes:
04:30 Album post & playlists: We will add some info here so users don’t get as confused as you were when the original playlist post gets updated :P Playlists are a sidecar that only affects 3Speak itself. Like you said, it’s fine to leave the original post as it is. That way we don’t create 2 comments with identical content :P ✅ Done: the playlist picker now explains that playlists only live on 3Speak and never change your posts.
05:11 The tag input should work the same like for videos. Pressing space should show a pill so you see the tag is set. ✅ Done: tags turn into pills, same as on video uploads.
05:34 We will add an optional input field for the comment body. ✅ Done: every track has its own optional text field.
06:39 Why did the 1st upload fail? We will check the logs. My guess is a race condition because the post was not created yet and a comment under it will fail. We should also show the exact error message when it fails :P ✅ Done: the album post now goes out first and the tracks wait until Hive shows it. Failures show Hive's real error message, with a retry per track.
06:55 Chrome on iPad: Yeaaaah, that’s a tricky one. Our testing devices are limited. Maybe I’ll get back to you and ask if you can test on your device, if that’s an option for you :) ⏳ Still open: a quick test on your iPad would help a lot.
07:03 There should be a final message after the upload. With buttons that take you directly to the final post or to the created/updated playlist. ✅ Done: after publishing you get buttons to open your post, your playlist or your audio.
07:18 “This page didn’t load” error: Never seen this before. Will check it. ✅ Done: if a page fails to load, it now says what broke, offers a reload and reports it to us automatically.
08:10 The playlist display is pretty weird. It also adds the album post itself to the playlist. In general the audio tiles could show a bit more details. ✅ Done: the album post no longer lands in its own playlist, and audio tiles show the album and track number.
09:32 We need an “add to blog” checkbox for albums. And for video uploads too - this is bugging me for a while but I alsways forget it after I put my videos to my blog lol ✅ Done: "Add to my blog" (on by default) for albums, audio posts and videos, scheduled videos included.
09:52 We should first create the post, then the comments, and then update the post with links to the comments. That way the audio comments are still easy to find if the discussion pushes them down. ✅ Done: post first, then the tracks, then the album post gets a linked track list.
12:10 Big empty space on Ecency: This comes from the Ecency side. I guess it’s a function that reserves vertical space for the video player embed and this part is copy&paste code. Will check it and make a PR for Ecency. ✅ Done: our fix was merged into Ecency, so the audio embed now shows as a slim player bar.
12:10 Waveform not visible in Ecency light theme: We will give the embed a slight dark background. Then the waveform shows on every theme :P ✅ Done: the embed has a dark background now, so the waveform shows on every theme.
19:59 The upload did not show up right after publishing the audio post. I will check our background sync tasks and adjust them. ✅ Done: new audio is linked to its post the moment you publish, so it shows up in podcast feeds with its votes right away.
Again thank you so much for the video and your thoughts! Let's make that feature superior to any other audio platform some day :) If you have any more ideas please let me know!
Pretty cool addition to have besides videos, just music tracks. A new layer added to 3speak.
This is cool stuff. It's getting some of the functionality of Soundcloud. We had Dsound years ago, but that shut down. I will be taking a look at this soon.
