Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Fine tuning the ABF online recital schedule..(Suggestions wanted)

The ABF online recitals have been a huge succsess thanks to everyones participation and involvement. In order to keep this event so well received, may I propose keeping the next recital (Nov 15th) a "regular" recital in which anyone can submit any type of piece they wish and then have an additional "Holiday performance" scheduled for a much more timely Dec 15th in which only holiday selections will be featured.

Having the 4 recitals a year is working out perfect (Feb 15th, May 15th, Aug 15th, Nov 15th.), however, we may be cutting ourselves just a bit short by limiting the recitals to three plus an (very early) Holiday recital.

Again, I suggest having 4 quarterly recitals (on the dates mentioned above) as well as having a more timely Dec 15th "Holiday performcance" in which any member is invited to share a nice holiday piece for everyone to enjoy. This will allow for the Nov 15th recital to be a "regular" (non-holiday theme) recital which will also make the Dec 15th a much more timely event closer to the actual holidays.

Now, these online recitals are all of ours and are comprised of the input given by everyone. If you think that keeping the Nov 15th recital a "regular" one and adding an additional "Holiday performance" on Dec 15th is a good idea, please speak up and say so.

Should anyone have any other suggestions, we would love to hear them.

BTW, I was thinking that the Dec 15th Holiday performance would be more of a performance rather than a regular full blown recital.

It would be posted in a similar fashion but without the comments or critical discussion rooms. Of course, replies to these performances are welcome, but not nessessary as this is more of a themed performance.

So, at the risk of stating the same thing 4 times in a row now, I'm going to stop rambling and ask for everyones approval and/or suggestions concerning these dates.

Again, thanks to everyone involved (participants and organizers) for making these recitals so much fun. Its nice to know that this is the only forum on Piano world (or anywhere) that is actually organized and amicable enough to pull this off!. Hooray for us!

I approve.
Mike

I agree. The "Holiday performance" should be more informal.

Multiple entries and multiple instruments allowed?

(Not that I could do either - I'm just throwing out the suggestion.)

Er... did THAT make my stomach quail!

super-hunky, I like the idea of an informal holiday celebration for the AB forum. I'm a little less enthusiastic about the idea of personally having to organize two recitals a month apart from each other... especially a Dec. 15th one (which coincides with final exams here, which keeps me pretty busy, my daughter's birthday, and Christmas prep). So I will be happy to spearhead and manage the Nov. 15th recital as I did the August recital, but I'd like to suggest that the holiday recital be conducted more like the Piano Bar, i.e., we could have an "AB Forum Holiday Recital" thread where everybody simply posts their own direct links. (Alternatively, somebody else puts together the Christmas recital, but I'm guessing it's going to be a busy time of year for everybody.)

I tend to agree with Monica....maybe just have a special holiday themed piano bar.

I like this suggestion. Much less "heavyweight" than the mechanism put in place for the full-blown recitals but at the same time a good focal point for people's holiday submittals.

I think the Piano Bar-like Holiday theme is a good one, too. That takes the full burden of collecting, organizing, posting etc a Recital format out of one person's hands, at a very busy time of year.

Well... how about (semi) automating the whole recital process? It would be fairly simple to do for someone with a web site and some web programming skills.

We'd simply need a web page with a submission form that has all the entry fields and a file upload box. The form saves the submission info and file on the web server, and sends a confirmation email back to the submitter.

After the deadline, whoever runs this starts a special program on the server that renames the files, makes the zip files, and -- possibly -- creates the posts in the special recital thread (possibly in addition to a page on the web site itself). The zip files would simply be downloaded from that server.

The only manual labor involved is a check to see whether all the info is complete and that there are no bogus entries. And creating the threads here on the forums.

It's not terribly complicated and I'd be happy to volunteer to program this. I think my current hosting account can handle the files and the load (and in the worst case if too much bandwidth is being consumed, we can divert traffic to those free file hosts again).

What do you think?

Just make the normal December 1st piano bar an optional Holiday recital. This takes the burden off of Monica and the other organizers. I personally don't want to be doing Christmas music before Thanksgiving anyway...

Mark

Wow, Mahlzeit, if you're willing to do that, I think it could be great. It sounded tremendously complicated to me, but if you say it's easy, I'll believe you.

There's two other issues that you may or may not want to address: One of the things that Bob (and I) did for the recitals was to normalize each mp3 in audacity first, so that the zip files would play at a constant volume. There was considerable variability in the individual mp3 files I received. That adds to a certain amount of workload for the organizer; alternatively we could just let the volumes vary.

The second issue was standardizing the mp3 tags. People submitted mp3s with all sorts of tags, and I tried to edit them to make the album title and other info consistent. That's also a bit of legwork, although again maybe we wouldn't care about getting consistent tags for this more informal recital. Or we could ask people to adopt a systematic nomenclature for the tags. (I'm less optimistic about this strategy working.)

Creating the descriptions on the thread is yet another time-consuming task, but perhaps we could just let each person add their own description to the thread, and not sweat it if it's not in the same order as files in the zip files.

The main issue is for me to remember how to use the PHP progamming language because it has been a while since I last used it. But I need to brush up on my web programming skills anyway due to the fact that I have to go out a get a "real" job soon.

But I'd like to hear some other options too. It's a few days of work to build it and polish it and I'm not going to commit to that unless everyone agrees it's a good idea.

In that case what would you think about hosting it on its own site like www.pianoworldrecital.com (or whatever)? I can do that on my current hosting account, but obviously I would have to buy the domain name first. It's not required but it might give it a nice touch.

Yes, I considered that. There is a free program called mp3gain that will do this in a much quicker fashion, actually. No manual work required.

I'm thinking that this is the semi in the automation. Unless mp3gain can be run from the web server, the operator for the recital would have to download the mp3 files and run mp3gain by hand, and make the zip files by hand as well. But this is a minor inconvenience. Technically speaking, this could be automated as well with an all-in-one offline program.

This is no problem at all. It's easy to write a program that overwrites the MP3 tags with sensible information.

This was my main concern. It is possible to write a program that logs into Piano World and creates a new post in that thread for each submission. However, this is a bit of a hack. Basically, the program would have to pretend to be a user using a web browser. It can be done but it's tricky (and Frank might not like it ).

One alternative is to have the program write one big post with everyone's information in it that can be copied & pasted. However, I don't know if single posts have a size limitation. If so, then this isn't a very good option either.

The simplest alternative (and most user-friendly) is to let the web site itself (www.pianoworldrecital.com or whatever it will be called) list the submissions. This is extremely easy to do because that's what web sites do all the time. The disavantage is that the recital now lives on another site, although obviously the discussion threads will be held on Piano World.

Or... Frank might be persuaded to host the recital program and database here on Piano World.

Let me know what you think...

the main purpose of this post was to obtain everyones approval of keeping the Nov 15th recital a "normal" one while adding a more timely, additional "Holiday performance".

Monica, my description of this Holiday performance may not have been to clear, so I'll try again.

Sometime in Dec, (either the first or the 15th), I am suggestion a having a thread dedicated to ABF Holiday performances. It is a place where everyone who wants to is invited to submit holiday themed piano pieces for others to listen to and enjoy.

This Holiday performance IS NOT AN ADDITIONAL RECITAL, but rather, a much more informal setting to just enjoy nice holiday selections performed by our members.

Due to the immense work involved, I say we scrap the more formal presentation of this holiday performance and just have the Dec piano bar be a holiday themed one, or simply have a seperate new thread entitled ABF Holiday Performances in which members can contribute to an ongoing thread at any time.

We have done similar type of performances/exhibitions in the past with great succsess and absolutely no burden to anyone in the form of organization and presentation.

I would prefer to have a separate thread in Dec dedicated to these holiday performances and not utilize the Dec piano bar. This way, those who only want to hear uninterupted holiday piano pieces can do so while the option of presenting any other type of music is still available in the piano bar.

Basically, to keep it simple, I propose the following:

Regularly scheduled online recitals:


Feb 15th
May 15th
Aug 15th
Nov 15th

ABF Holiday piano performances:

Dec 15th (in the form of a new thread that can be added to by individual members).

The monthly piano bar will remain unchanged.

Yes or No??

Sounds good to me... mahlzeit's ideas about the self-posting self-organizing website are intriguing, especially to this computer illiterate who never dreamed websites could do all those things by themselves, and we may very well want to pursue them at some point with the aim of ultimately automating as much of the recitals as possible. But I also like the idea of keeping the holiday thread a low-key affair, especially as it follows the 11/15 recital so closely. I think there's also a better chance that more of us would have Christmas music ready on 12/15 than 11/15. [she says, thinking back to LAST year's recital when she had to post a badly off-tempo "Holly and the Ivy" and swore never to do that again... ]

I vote for Yes, too, by the way. Although here in the Netherlands the holidays start before the 15th already. So maybe from Dec 1 instead of 15th.

. . . what do you think the Piano World forums are? They work in basically the same way, except that you're submitting posts and not songs. (And the posts are not zipped, etc.) But the basic principles are the same. Users submit stuff, the site puts it in a database, and pulls it out of the database when other users want to view it. That is, for example, why your name change is automatically visible throughout the entire forums (even in the private messages): this web site is essentially a fairly complex computer program. Automating the recitals would be similar but simpler.

I agree with Mr. SH, four regular recitals and a holiday music thread. Piano Bar separate.

In the spirit of inclusivity, I suggest the date for the holiday music thread be Dec. 1; Hanukkah starts at sundown December 4, and some people may wish to post Hanukkah music. If December 1 is too early (for all you practicing pianists!) then maybe sometime before the 8 days of Hanukkah are over?

What about Ramadan?

Actually, my suggestion regarding the recitals themselves, would be to include performer's avatar inside his recital post.

I like this idea very much. 4 recitals and a online holiday piano party!

Rich

I like Mr S-H's idea:

Recognizing that not everyone's holidays start at the same, and that people may or may not be ready so soon after the online recital, maybe the holiday thread could open on Dec 1st and people could continue to add submissions throughout the month. How does that sound?

S-K,

Opening the whole month of December for Holiday performances sounds super to me...assuming all else is the same as your preceding post.

I like Eternal's suggestion about the performer's avatar as well. I wonder how difficult that might be?

Lisztener

Okay, two very good points came up.

1.) The "Holiday performances" should be open and inclusive to all. Lets set *the start* of this Holiday performance thread for Dec 1st, and then let it continue to run until it dies a natural death!. Members are encouraged to add their submission to the ongoing thread at any time (or whenever they have a holiday tune ready!).

2.) Eternal had brought up a very good point regarding having members include their avatar in their recital submissions. In the past, I have mistaken many of the recital submissions as Bob Muir's and now Monica's. Of course, it just takes a second to figure out that they did not submit every single piece themselves!, but if there is an easy way to include the avatar with the submissions, I'm all for it. .......[if anyone knows how to do this easily, please contact Monica as I don't have a clue!].