Ragamalika web application

[babusri]

I wrote a web app --- initially for personal use --- for listening to snippets of different ragas by just typing the first letter of the raga name; that I can use even when I am not online. It evolved from there: the snippets were initially supposed to be 2 to 3 minutes long, but they are longer; added an option of playing ragas selected randomly from the list; the raga name can be queried towards the end of snippet. There are close to 100 ragas.

If you are interested in listening to the ragas, you can enter this url in your browser: http://raga-malika.appspot.com. The instructions are displayed on the web page. It requires flash9 and all modern browsers on Windows, Linux and Mac have flash support. In theory, it should also work if html5-audio is present but I have not verified this. It didn't work on my ipod touch. It may work on ipad if it has html5-audio support.

Caveat:
I wanted fast (immediate) response when using a decent broadband connection and so I reduced the quality to 24kbps and mono. It sounds good to me but you may disagree. Also, this reduced bit-rate will keep the cache size manageable.

The app caches the audio for the ragas that are played --- even for a short duration. You can clear the cache by clearing the browser cache. If you don't have a good broadband connection, you may want to avoid clicking 5 or 6 letters (or several "Play another raga" button clicks) in quick succession. This may result in interruptions to the playback. But if you have 512 kbps or higher speed broadband, you should be able to switch fast. The advantage of caching is that you can play the snippets offline (as long as you don't clear the browser cache).

If you don't have a fixed-rate (so called unlimited usage) broadband plan, you should assume that each song is about 1 or 2 megabytes. I don't want this free app to cost you money in the form of unexpected broadband charges.

I hope this is useful and fun. Please report bugs. There are a couple of known issues but they are minor.

Babu

[vasanthakokilam]

Babu: I like it very much. It worked for me very well, the instantaneous music play back is a pleasure.

Your web site is also good for the 'guess that raga' kind of group quizzes..

Can you display the raga name when we click on a button? I see there is a button 'show raga', so that may be a work in progress.
Or use what Arun does in his blog, which is to set the text color to be same as the background so it will not be visible. We can see it by highlighting.

[rajeshnat]

Babu
This is really wonderful app, liked it , can you make a smaller clipping of not more than two mins just to get the raga ,see the answer and move on(you take your time). Reallly cool app.

[Nick H]

It is stubbornly silent for me.

Then I returned to your post and found that it requires flash. I use flashblock --- but there doesn't seem to be any Flash symbol or place that I can click to "allow Flash from this site".

Flashblock is a very, very popular Firefox addin, preventing such a lot of useless and annoying visual effects and unwanted videos; a great many people use it. On the other hand, taking into account all the what-if-the-user- situations, I have to admit, must be a real pain in the neck...

[babusri]

Nick,
Sorry about that. You should see a Flash symbol now.

Babu

[ShrutiLaya]

It's nice, sound quality of the couple of Ragas I tried is good, but

the raga name can be queried towards the end of snippet. There are close to 100 ragas.
Babu

is a bit of a nuisance, because you have to listen for several minutes even if you think you know what the raga is. I would request that (1) the "Show Raga Name" button should activate immediately, and when clicked, should show the raga name, WITHOUT stopping the audio (2) A Pause/Continue button to stop and think about the music, or resume to listen to more of the song. This will make learning more effective, and also allow a "Quizmaster" mode where teams can play off against each other (For this, a song timer would also be helpful!)

- Sreenadh

[Nick H]

Nick,
Sorry about that. You should see a Flash symbol now.

Babu

Wow! That was fixed quickly!

Thanks

[babusri]

Babu: I like it very much. It worked for me very well, the instantaneous music play back is a pleasure.

Your web site is also good for the 'guess that raga' kind of group quizzes..

Can you display the raga name when we click on a button? I see there is a button 'show raga', so that may be a work in progress.
Or use what Arun does in his blog, which is to set the text color to be same as the background so it will not be visible. We can see it by highlighting.

Thanks for your feedback. The "Show Raga" button works. It is just that I enabled it only near the end of the song as mentioned in the web page. Now, I am enabling it after 2 minutes of playback.

Babu

[cmlover]

Very nice!
Pl make available it as a shell program so that we can load snippets from our own hard disk and make a self quiz for self or friends. I guess the program will be simple enough to implement..
Thanks
(it will be a good exercise for oldies like me to develop memory skills..)

[vasanthakokilam]

Babu: Thanks. I tried it now and it works.

You can put the name of the button all the time and disable the button for clicks. Add a small note that it will become active two minutes into the song..

How do you feel about enabling it at the beginning itself, let the user decide when to click it?

CML, good idea.