I'm quite excited about the direction that Tabulas is headed towards. Because of all the libraries now being slightly better organized, I can focus on rapid development of new features.

I'm still spending a lot of time tracking down, fixing bugs, and adding back the old features (I believe communities just went up), but that doesn't mean I can't speculate about some cool future developments for Tabulas!

First I want to outline some cool features for users in the near future.

Adding music to your Tabulas

I have always detested embedded music on websites, but this doesn't mean that I haven't been actively trying to find good solutions in allowing users to share streaming music from their websites. I just discovered Radio.Blog from Dodo, and this is the perfect solution!

Radio.Blog has two components: A small 1KB program the user downloads to compress their MP3s for web consumption, and a server-side script which actually handles the streaming. To see what the server-side program looks like, go here. It uses essentially uses Flash to handle the streaming of the file ...

What's amazing is that each file is *perfect* for uploading through forms! The compressed files run roughly 2-3 megs apiece ... (The Aesop Rock MP3 was originally 10megs... now 2.5 megs). This means that if any user downloaded the radio.blog client program and compressed their MP3s ... they could in theory simply upload the file to Tabulas and it woudl automatically add it to their radio.blog (which would be easily integrated by Tabulas!).

I'm seriously getting incredibly excited about this feature; I may stay up all night and hack it out on my account.

This, of course, would mean that I would give free users 2 or 3 free media file uploads (the music files would count against your media file uplaod)... but this is pretty exciting stuff. Imagine if I could also store what files you upload ... and then use Neeraj's awesome algorithms (and integrate this with AudioMatch) to give users direct access to the artist matching algorithms for AudioMatch.

Dude, you guys have NO idea how hyped I am about this. So hyped I'm not going to write the rest of this post. Instead I'm going to go work on this hack :)

Edit: There are huge issues regarding the scalability of this. I am only going to offer it to paid users. Viewers of my journal who are paid/beta status, I should have a rough copy ready by tomorrow. I've had to use some nasty hacks to get this working...