hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0758.txt

Episode: 758
Title: HPR0758: Interview with Jon "The Nice Guy" Spriggs
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0758/hpr0758.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:02:03

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Hello everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and today we're going to have an interview with John the Nice Guy from cchits.net.
Hello John, how are you doing? I'm very well, thank you, how are you?
Not too bad, thank you very much for coming on and talking to us here on HPR.
So can you tell us a little bit about yourself first?
Sure, so I'm John the Nice Guy sprux. I've been working in IT for about 10-11 years now.
But the company I work for, I have a very specific role that I play within that company
and there's not really any chance to kind of expand your boundaries within the working day.
And that's fine, if I wanted that sort of a job I'd be working for Google, please hire me Google.
But no, it's fine, it's a good job and it pays the wages.
But in the evenings I get a little bit of an itch to code on stuff and every now and then I produce these weird and wonderful projects
and some of them you might even have heard of, but this is probably the first one that's ever going to have crossed anyone's radar
is actually being a project of any interest.
But aside from that, I live in the UK. I'm currently living in the Northwest near Manchester,
but I grew up just on the outskirts of London, hence the unusual northern accent that isn't there.
Are you going to be going to, I'll camp this year.
I'm certainly planning to be there.
Last year if you were there you may have actually seen another one of my projects,
which was the timetabling system was fine.
Hopefully they're using it this year, but I don't know. I'm planning to be there definitely.
Okay, good. I happened to have been there last year or on day the year before.
I was at the first two look radio ones and then kind of life and three kids got on the way as it will happen.
I'm about to discover going into my first, well, six or twelve weeks into my first job.
Yeah, that's as you discover the meaning of life and your relevance.
Well, I think it's very interesting that this is the first kind of interview that I've done about CC hits since my child was born.
Definitely time sink.
In the bestest possible way, but yes, absolutely.
I know exactly what you mean.
It gets easier once you get over the first year of trying to keep them alive.
And that gets easier.
And it also gets harder.
Let's focus on the positive.
Exactly. CC hits.
Tell me about it.
So CC hits.net is a it started out as a project to publicize and promote creative commons licensed music.
That's creative commons licensed music.
Okay, so for those that don't already know, creative commons is an organization.
I believe they're in the States who produced a set of guide like, well, it's a license.
It's like a copyright.
No, it uses copyright to enforce a license.
And that license is is very permissive.
So if you are aware of any of the permissive software licenses like the GPL or the BSD licenses,
then it's the same sort of concept you, you know, you give your work away.
And then you, anyone can use it.
The difference between, it's most of the creative commons licenses are slightly more along the same lines as the copy left style licenses,
which is, okay, perhaps that's again jumping a little bit too far into it.
So in essence, each of the licenses encourages reuse.
But they become more restrictive, the more kind of tags you get to them.
So there's four main tags in the creative commons licenses.
So there's by attribution, which is where any piece of work requires,
any reuse of the work requires attribution, the original artist.
And it's the same for, you know, if you're with a book, with a film, with a piece of music, you know, any of the, any, any art form can be licensed with a creative commons tag.
Yeah.
There's, there's a share alike, which says that if you reuse this work, you have to use the same license conditions.
No, no derivatives says that you can't reuse this piece of work, but you can share it.
So you can't make a derivative work from it, and a derivative work would be if you've got a book,
it would be to make it into a film or an audio book.
If you've got a piece of music, a derivative work of that would be to sample it or to make a film from it.
And those sorts of things, and the last one is a non-commercial license, which basically says you can't reuse it in any situation where you might make money from it.
So typically, bands that are trying to encourage consumer adoption of their music might consider licensing or licensing it under a non-commercial tag,
because they can, because they're the owners of the work, they can re-license it to somebody once they've heard it,
and they say, I want to use this at my place of business in my advertising campaign in my film.
But you have to go back to the artist and ask them for that.
Likewise, a lot of artists that are trying to make everything come through them before it's reused would request,
would use a non-derivative license, because then it means that they control when it's reused and how it's reused.
Without stopping people from saying, have you heard this great band, they're fantastic, and giving a copy to each of their friends.
So that's Creative Commons license piece of music. Well, the license is generally, and effectively the licensed music is just music that has a license tag from Creative Commons.
It's fantastic, very, very well explained here on HPR, we're going through a process of re-licensing from CC by SA to, sorry, CC by NC to CC by SA.
So basically we're dropping the non-commercial tag.
Right, okay, let's go.
So I'll see these and stuff.
So tell us a little bit about CC hits, why you built it then, given you have this music available.
Okay, so like with any crazy idea, there's always like a few different things that come together and encourage you to go down a route of starting something.
The first was that I'm involved in, what, used to be a lot heavier, more heavily involved in, but less so now.
I've been involved in the hacker space for Manchester, the building is called Madlab, and the group that meets there is Hackman.
And I was involved in that for around about a year and a half, or thereabouts, and went to a few events, and people were putting on, you know, bits and pieces of music.
And I was kind of niggling in the back of my head. I knew that there was something about, you know, you've got to be careful about what music you play and that you've got permission to play it.
And so whenever I was there, I was trying to encourage people to listen to podcasts like the rat hole radio podcast and the bug cast.
So, you know, great podcasts.
Absolutely. And just listening to them by yourself is brilliant, because you get involved in the show as a person.
You know, both rat hole radio and the bug cast, just to name two, I mean, there's other great music shows, but they're the ones that were, I was interested in at the time when I was doing this initially.
They both had live shows. So, in some occasions, I'd get into the IRC channels at the same time as the shows would be recorded. You'd get involved in the conversation.
And I thought, yeah, these are really great shows to play in, you know, a social environment.
So, I get to get to hack man and I plug in my MP3 player and tune it up to play the podcast and somebody says, oh, there's a lot talking in this, isn't there?
And I thought, oh, you know what, you might actually be right there. So, I'd skip on a minute and they'd still be talking and I'd skip on another minute and they'd still be talking.
The playlist for the show and I'd think, oh, actually, you know, for, you know, an hour's shows, you know, you've got maybe six tracks here. They're not all going to be 10 minutes apiece.
Are you, are you saying Dan Lynch talks a lot?
I'm just reciting what happened on that particular occasion. I'm not possibly saying that a show called Rat Hole Radio may potentially rat hole his own content every now and then.
Not in the slightest. Dan's a very good friend of mine. And I don't want to offend him.
He provides a lot of excellent background information.
That's exactly what it is. A lot of background information. And don't get me wrong. Like I said, when you're listening to the shows yourself, that's the sort of thing you really go for.
I really go for because you feel like you're involved in the show. You feel like, you know, the banter that you're having in the IRC at the same time as the shows going on.
Being picked up by the people that produce in these shows, it works really well for a live show that's intended for individual and an individual's consumption.
But when you're trying to play it in a, in a venue to a group of people that really are only interested in something to break up.
The monotony of, you know, a soldering iron hand leaning over a circuit board, smelting solder onto that board, or, you know, programming some code.
They want something to distract them rather than, you know, something that they're going to fall asleep through.
So basically you want to back some background music.
So my initial thought was, well, I'll just find, you know, three hours worth of creative commons music and just sling that into a feed and play it.
And, and then I found a podcast that did that.
And I thought, actually, I kind of like knowing what the tracks are.
So I need a little bit of talking, but it was around about the same time as this came up that I discovered my wife was pregnant.
And I thought, committing yourself to producing a podcast, you know, that involves an awful lot of talking.
Maybe, maybe me doing a podcast, not such a great idea.
I really want to, by this point, I'd really started getting into some of the creative commons music.
And I was really starting to get quite, feel quite positive about the fact that I wanted to produce a show that was promoting creative commons music.
So I'm thinking, no, I really don't want to put, really don't want to do a podcast, really want to do a podcast.
And around about the same, well, I kind of heard the, for a little while, the Linux Outlaws podcast and other podcasts that Dan Lynch is involved in.
He, they had like some information about the community.
So it was, you know, how you find the IRC channel, how you get involved in the identical group, how you get involved in the Twitter group, where the forums are, you know, all these sorts of things, you know, get involved at,
and they did all that using a robotic voice, which they called,
Oh, I was a no.
Oh, I am not Einstein, but Hulk, it was something to do with something along the lines of the Hulk man.
And that was, that was a play on something that Dan had played in one of the radio shows and, and it all, I mean, it was all kind of a little bit self referential and it was, you know, it's fine, funny and stuff.
And I kind of thought, so there's text to speech has come on quite a long way since, you know, I played with the utility that came on the Soundblaster card, you know, back in 94, 95 sort of time.
Oh, you know, maybe, maybe there's something to be had here and maybe I can, maybe I can, you know, do something with this.
So, I had a bit of a dig around and found festival and trying to find out how to, how festival works and somebody posts a link to a little
web script that had written to produce a text file that could then be read by festival.
And, and I thought, well, that's really good. And then there was a drop down of all the voices you can have.
Oh, I like picking from voices and finally found a female voice and, oh, that sounds quite nice because a lot of the text to speech voices that I'd heard until now, they kind of were playing on the fact that a lot of these voices do sound like the speech generator that
Professor Hawkins uses. And I thought, you know, everybody has that. Hello, my name is blah, blah, blah, blah and I think you should be listening to this.
And I just, I just thought, you know what, let's, I want, I want a different voice to that.
So I made a point of finding a voice that that I thought was probably the best one from the pack and it turned out to be a female voice and it was a nice voice.
So, so yes, I thought, okay, so I've now got a way I can introduce the show and I've got a track that I can play.
Can I mix it all together? And I write really bad PHP, which is a website scripting language.
I don't think you're the only one though.
Well, I mean, at least I recognize the fact that my PHP is not good. But I kind of went out of the, I went out and I, I've been going to a group in Manchester for a while and kind of was talking to them about this and people were saying, well, you know, you could, you could write an API.
And API would make all this a lot easier and I suddenly realized that what I can actually do was, was script the whole lot using a combination of bash and curl and socks, S-O-X, which is the sound exchange, I think is what it stands for.
So, I'm now, I'm now at a point where I've got all the tools that I need to produce a podcast without ever having to actually set up a microphone.
And I thought, fantastic. All I need to do now is get some people to start submitting tracks in and I'll be fine.
And I know all these podcasters, they'll all submit stuff to it. So then I went to an event in Sheffield called PodCroll, which was where a group of podcasters all get into a room and drink, which obviously went down well.
And I kind of went on there and I pitched it to, you know, these 10 podcasters and they were all really positive about it. And then one of them said, but I don't play creative commons music.
And I said, well, you should be shouldn't you? And he said, well, maybe I should, but it means that I don't know the license of the tracks that I get in, because artists just send me stuff.
And I thought, okay, that's great. So out of these 10 podcasters, I've got one podcaster, which is Dave Lee from the podcast. And he podcasts probably around about between 25 to 30 to 50% of his tracks that he plays, he submits to CC hits.
And it's between Dave and I, we've worked quite hard together and we've got together a couple of scripts that you can use to upload stuff into into CC hits.
And Dan Lynch has started pulling a few of the tracks that he plays in there. And I've been speaking to a couple of guys from a podcast called the music manual podcast.
And you know, I'm starting to draw bits and pieces together. And with each group of people that comes into CC hits and start submitting tracks into the system, I get more and more kind of an idea of, you know, what else does CC hits need to do.
And so that's kind of where I am now. I've got a template for each show. And I've got three shows that are produced by CC hits. There's the daily show, which is a, like I said, it's a show that's produced every day.
And it select one track that hasn't been played by the site at all through its history. And it plays that track in the feed. Now to be fair, because of some issues in the code, because it's bad PHP.
In since November the, I can't remember what the date of the first one was, but sometime late November up till today, we have had exactly one duplicate.
So we did that one show. So in 200 and something shows, we're up to 200 and something shows.
Maybe 100 and 800 early 200s. I have only had one track that has gone missing. And that was because it was a duplicate.
Please don't ask how I got to that. Because it's my original intention has been create something that's really simple works really easily. Never have to touch it.
So essentially, essentially what you CC hits is, is a place where you can subscribe to this daily show in your feed reader, your podcast, catching your pod catcher. And it will take that show and put it on to your media player for you.
So once you've got the daily show, it encourages you to get involved in voting. And that's not, you know, go out and vote for your local MP or, you know, vote on the stuff that you're really interested in.
And what you're voting for is, do I like this track or not? And that's really key to CC hits because the daily show feeds into the weekly show.
And the weekly show plays the last seven days worth of tracks. Now that doesn't sound like it's in need a lot of voting and it doesn't.
But it also plays the top, the highest voted upon tracks from the previous week. So out of 14 days worth of tracks, there are 10 tracks played on the show.
And it's down to the voting of the people that listen to the shows that decide whether or not the three tracks from the previous week turn up in the weekly show for the following week.
So that's kind of interesting. And I started to notice that, hey, I'm going to say, if I've, if I'm getting people to vote for the weekly show, I could have a, like a top 40 show, you know, like a, like a, almost like a proper radio station.
I could have a top 40 track show. Yeah, the pubs. So I thought, okay, that's, that's what I'm aiming for here. So now each month, there is a top 40 track show.
And that takes all of the votes that have been placed over the entire life of the site. And it says to make it a little bit fairer every time your track is played on a weekly or a monthly show.
It loses five percent of its votes. So that should in theory mean that the same track shouldn't be at number one, two, three, four, five that were there in the first week.
Yeah, that's how it should be. It's not quite how it has turned out because the difference between the top five tracks and the next track is something like 60 votes.
So you can keep losing five percent of your votes, but you're never going to get under.
Yeah, it's going to be until until sort of round about the point where it's about to exit the chart completely is the point at which you will stop having those those same tracks at the top. But you know, we're getting it's close.
Of course, I was going to say, of course, the tracks that are at the top are the ones that have got, you know, huge following that are really interested in those those tracks. So Dan Lynch, he's he's banned 20 pounds sounds that tracks near the in there.
Yeah, Horoscope, yep, they're in there. They got they got they got quite a lot of votes really quickly. Actually, I was I was really impressed with that because for for quite a long time.
Jimmy Carter by 20 pounds sounds was number one for like a really long time and suddenly out of nowhere came Horoscope, which I was really impressed with.
Because that was kind of what was that was what I really hoped it would be was where it would it would you know, you'd get tracks that people were really interested in and they would suddenly go right to the top.
So, you know, it would have not been more sense to have the voting based on the, you know, the amount of time that it's on the system.
I don't know divided by the number of days that it's number of votes divided by the number of days or something.
Well, to be fair, I mean, I kind of toyed with a few different voting systems in my head when I first went into this.
The fact that the same group of tracks had been, you know, so highly rated for so long.
I'm kind of thinking as we get when we get towards the end of our first year, I might change the way that the charts are produced then.
I'm also going to start experimenting with things like it'll be the top 40 tracks by unique artists.
So, if you've got two tracks by the same artist in the chart, only play the first one, not the second one.
So, that will then reduce the impact the top one has by the 5%, and eventually the second one will overtake it.
And, you know, again, it's all about trying to get a balance here, but I mean, like I said, the difference between third place and fourth place is 70 votes.
And, between fourth place and fifth place is a tell line between fourth place and sixth place is 50 votes.
So, there's quite a big gap between, you know, a few other places.
So, yeah, I mean, certainly I would be interested in hearing, you know, some of the listeners' perspectives on, you know, alternative ways of doing the voting.
And, one of the benefits to the way that the site has been produced is it's all available for anyone to have a look at the code that makes it work.
It's all hosted on a public get repository.
So, anyone that knows their way around PHP more than happy for them to get involved in the coding, you know, see if they can do something better.
I mean, certainly the look at the site is, is atrocious. So, you know, if you can improve on that, bring it please.
What's, what's the like?
So, it's a GPL version three.
Is, is the like, rudely cool would be very happy with you.
Well, I mean, I've, I've been interested in a few projects that have been a GPL license for a while.
And, the way that I kind of look at it is, is that if you're looking at a networked resource,
like a web service, the difference between the GPL and the SD licenses at that point is pretty much moot from a user's perspective,
because they can never do anything with the code as there, because even though it's GPL code, the only people you need to share that code with is the people that are running the website.
And I thought that wasn't really very fair. So, when I found the AGPL license, and the first time I was really, I knew about it.
But I never really kind of did anything with it until I got interested in Identica and the status net project, or the lconic as it was,
who made very clear that they were an AGPL project.
So, just again, just to explain the difference between the GPL, the GNU general public license and the AGPL, the GNU Afro general public license,
is that the GPL requires that anyone that runs a copy of the code should have access to the source code that created it, which between,
you know, if I've got a Linux or GNU Linux, depending on how you prefer to describe it, a Linux distribution, you have to have access to all of the source code that makes all of the GNU GPL licensed code in that distribution.
But when you're looking at it from a website perspective, like I said, it's only the webmasters that have to share the differences to the code.
So, if I make like a WordPress plugin for sake of argument, and I hand it to you, and you make a change to it,
because you are not sharing that change of code with anyone, you don't have to make your changes available to anyone.
But with an Afro GPL licensed work, any time that resource is made available, as a network to resource, you also have to make available a copy of the source code.
So, I agree.
And take your entire site and do, you know, traditional Irish music network based.
To be honest, the one instance of it that I've been expecting to start for some time, and I've been quite surprised that it hasn't, is a pod safe version of CC hits.
So, that it's not that the tracks have to be created commons licensed, they just need to be safe to be played on other podcasts.
Because, certainly the guy that I was talking to early on, that said, you know, I don't know what the tracks are, I don't know what the licenses are that I'm playing, I just know that I'm playing a track.
Well, he could put that track into a pod safe charts, charts system that, you know, is based on the CC hits code.
We just haven't got there yet.
Well, I've performed myself to know that the music is licensed under a particular code, because if a guy sends you a CD, was their intention to allow you to redistribute it or not, or with the CC license, at least you know where you stand.
Well, yeah, I mean, one of the unfortunate downsides to people's understanding of the creative commons licenses is, and this was something that I was kind of aware of when I got into CC hits.
But I only really figured out that how much of a problem it was when I was talking to a radio station that we're talking about using CC hits, the CC hits charts on their show.
And they said, well, well, I've had a look through, you know, the top 10 of the top 40 tracks that are on your site.
Of those about 15, we think contain material that we can't play.
And I was like, oh, right, okay, why is that? And they said, well, it contains samples from non-creative commons material.
So they can't use it without getting permission from the license holder.
And as I started to look into it, I realized that, yeah, actually, they're right.
Different regions around the world have different understanding of this sampling agreement.
You know, some America in particular has a fair use agreement where you can play a certain amount of time and that's fine.
And other countries I'm not entirely sure where.
But other countries seem to have no qualms whatsoever about now taking the entire backing track from a song.
As long as you're not materially reusing the artist's work, but the backing track doesn't seem to be odd, you know, those sorts of things.
And that kind of started to make me a bit nervous.
And as I was kind of looking around at other stuff, I seem to recall sending a particularly angry rant on identity here at one point about, oh, you know,
I can't believe that such and such a website don't place their.
The submissions from their users more closely and someone came back and sort of said, well, why should they?
You know, there is no way that you can guarantee that a track is creative or commons licensed.
And I've kind of sat back and kind of went, oh, you know what he's right.
So to a certain extent, I mean, if you.
It's kind of hampered getting involved with commercial radio stations.
Because effectively, I'd have to do discovery, discovery process on every single track that's being played.
Otherwise, it doesn't meet the UK have a communications regulator would often.
And you know, you have to, you have to have, you have to ensure that it's not materially, you know, effectively ripped off from another artist.
But also, if the work is not in the English language, you have to have a full English translation to play it on a UK site.
Oh, please.
If you want to play it in a commercial, you know, if you want to make it a play over the airwaves, you have to have a full English translation so that they can check and make sure that doesn't contain any obscenities or hate text or, you know, things like.
I mean, yeah, but at the same time, it does, it does kind of hamper how you can do it.
So I was then kind of looking at, you know, I want to make another database column that says has been vetted for UK, you know, off-com regulations.
And then, you know, a similar one for, you know, another, another column which says, you know, is in the UK language or has no language at all.
You know, and then you start looking at, well, you know, do I actually want to go down this route when realistically all I wanted to do was promote Creative Commons X.
And...
Well, that kind of prevents you from, you know, giving this to shops and the like, so they don't have to pay.
So that's, I mean, that has kind of put a bit of a crimp in it. And yeah, at the moment, my main focus is making the code.
So it's more understandable by people that may want to get involved in developing on it.
So that in, you know, six months to a year, it's time when, you know, the code is starting to look a bit cleaner.
And potentially, I've got a little bit more time to spend with my son, you know, that is...
I can start maybe thinking about handing some of this off to someone else or getting more people involved in the project.
So that we can start doing things like, you know, making sure that, you know, the text that we've basically got what I mentioned,
that the column that says, you know, is vetted for off comm use or, you know, and then start saying to commercial radio stations.
You know, we've got this pool of music which has been vetted for use on a radio station. Do you want to use it?
Yeah, over.
But, you know, I mean, at the same time...
Well, that's, I just hate down the road.
And because of the way you structured your project, there's nothing to stop.
And somebody submitting a patch.
And then you, you know, people verifying the database, you attract against the database.
I mean, this is something that can be added on at a later date.
Can I just go back to, you know, you seem to be struggling to get people adding stuff to the website?
How, say that I was an artist, which I'm not accepting my dreams.
And I wanted to submit some creative commons music or get in touch with some artists who would submit stuff on creative commons.
First of all, I would have two questions.
What type of creative commons license do you accept?
And secondly, if you could walk me through the workflow of what I need to do to show some new things.
With regards to the first part, the license that we accept, we accept any creative commons license.
So that's CC by...
Sorry, as I mentioned before, there's different types of license.
You've got credit commons by attribution, which is usually abbreviated to CC by...
CC by Sheralike, that's SA.
CC by Sheralike, NC, non-commercial.
By NC, ND, no derivatives.
Basically, there's a matrix of six licenses that you end up with just with the various permutations.
And there's also creative commons zero, which is not a license, but a waiver, which says that...
Because territories outside the US don't have...
Some territories outside the US don't have a concept of public domain usage.
CC by is intended to provide the same status of a work as...
Public domain, but without using the term public domain, which may not have the same meaning in all languages.
So the artist is giving a waiver, a permanent waiver, a cruiser or a work forever.
But the copyright still remains with them.
One other license, which isn't in there at the moment, but I'm hoping to add soon, is...
I believe it's a French license, which is Art Libre, which is basically the same sort of concept.
And it works out more or less to the...
By no derivatives license.
But I'm still looking into exactly how that works and whether that would work with the site.
Because the license conditions aren't as easy to find as a link in text in the websites that I'm scraping data from.
I'm not using that just yet, but again, within a month, two months, six months, that should be in there as well.
So that answers your question around what licenses we can accept.
With regards to the workflow of getting traffic into CC hits.
It's actually...
It's a combination of really straightforward and at the moment bloody difficult.
There is a script, a PHP script.
PHP is not just a web site development language.
It can also be run from a command line.
And this script, as it stands at the moment, you can just put in the few...
I think it's six metadata bits that the site needs, which is the track name, the artist name, the track URL, the artist URL.
Whether the track is work safe or not, and the file name.
So if you've got those bits of metadata, you can put them into a text file, run that text file using the PHP program.
And that will upload the track to my site.
But that means you need to have PHP and a library for PHP, which is called curl.
So once you've got those two bits, it just works.
Provided you don't mind sitting there and typing in the bits and pieces to make it work.
One of the things that I have been doing for the last four weeks is taking the bit of code that runs
the upload script and turning it into a web page that somebody can go and use.
The reason that it's taken so long is effectively for most of the use that I expected to see with CC hits
was with podcasts using one or two websites like Jemendo, which is a great creative commons music repository,
and has a huge amount more tracks, creative commons tracks than CC hits has.
But they have a different focus, their focus is to get an artist to put an album of music on the site.
CC hits is looking for the best of the best creative commons track that are out there at the moment to promote those ones,
to promote the best stuff that's out there.
So I was expecting people to say, well, I've played these ten tracks from Jemendo.
So they go into their text file and they do my show contains track number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
6, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc, etc.
And the script just goes, all right, OK, so we want 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and so on.
And I'll just pull down all of that metadata from Jemendo, including the file name,
the artist URL, the track, the URL to get information about the track, the name of the track, the name of the artist,
and just squirt that to CC hits.
But to make sure that, you know, if you've already downloaded the track because you're playing on your podcast,
you can tweak that a bit, you can say, well, don't bother downloading it because I've already uploaded,
I've already got it on my system, so get it from here and use that.
And taking that kind of framework and kind of squidging it a bit and, you know,
having it work like a web page does, it didn't quite fit together the way I wanted it to,
which is why I said I'm working on making the site work better.
Well, that was kind of one of the first things that made me realise that that was what I needed to do,
was where I was taking a load of libraries that I'd already written for the upload script,
and they just didn't fit into the way that CC hits worked as a website.
So right at this moment, that upload script, or alternatively if you just want, if you're a bit of a command line junkie,
you just want to use curl, you can just use curl to upload it.
And it's really straightforward, but as I said, it just takes that pinch of pre-work to get it to do it,
but I'm working on it.
So again, if anyone wants to get involved in helping me get more sites documented,
I'm currently, the uploader works with Jemendo SoundCloud.
There's three of them, three more.
It's supposed to be working with the free music archive.
I finished working on the, there's a scraper, because their API doesn't work the way that CC hits expects it to work.
Yeah, I understand they're making some changes to that, but that's not there yet.
So free music archive, we're using a scraper.
And also sounds, is it sounds, or section z, section z.com, that's being picked up imminently as well.
So basically, I'm looking for sites that play creative commons, you know, promote creative commons music,
because frankly that stuff's really important.
And so yeah, I'm quite aware of the fact I've become really impassioned and really waffly since you last asked a question.
So I'm going to shut up for a second and see if you've got any more questions.
So that's actually cool.
So rather than just picking and playing any creative commons, songs, what you're essentially doing is you're going through the filtering process of where some guy,
our girl, I'm using guy in the genera term here, we'll listen to all go songs and then we'll just pick out the cream of the crop.
It makes me think of one of our guys here, Poki, who went and downloaded all the song fight music.
And in his episode, he says that, you know, 99.99% of it is questionable.
And there are a few gems in there and he's been adding them to his show.
So that got me thinking, well, you know, is that something that here in HPR, we could try and encourage people to start tagging on some creative commons music to the end of their shows.
And then we could feed that back into...
Absolutely, I mean, I've been working, as I said, with a couple of podcasters.
And if you're in...
I would love to get more tracks into CC hits and from a source like HPR where you've got, you know,
a large quantity of people that are quite, quite discerning and quite careful about the tracks that they like to listen to.
They're really quite particular.
Yeah, yeah.
And diverse.
I mean, you know, one of the aims that I originally had for CC hits was for it to be a lot like a commercial UK radio station.
Obviously, that's where I'm from.
So that's the kind of...
That's what I kind of imagine a radio station should be like.
But the more I talk to people outside the UK, the more I realise that actually, I think UK radio stations are quite unique in the way that they play from a relatively wide track list.
You may not think that at the time when you're listening to it.
But they have quite a wide field of track of tracks that they play from.
And, you know, the shows that they produce are more or less.
They tend to have shows that look case to a large quantity of people.
And it's only when you start getting to sort of the later night shows and things like that that you start to get more of the, you know, the smaller demographic shows.
I think it's probably the best way to describe it.
You know, you'll have the reggae show or they'll have a drum and bass night or a metal show.
Yeah, so, I mean, initially, I was quite...
I might even have been quite critical of a few suggestions that had come in.
And in hindsight, I was actually really stupid, sort of saying, actually, no, I don't like that track you're submitting.
The one kind of thing that I don't... I'm actively encouraging people not to submit is anything that's longer than sort of nine or ten minutes.
We have one track that's on the site that is more than ten minutes and it's actually 18 minutes long.
But it was...
It was the first time I'd heard a piece of dubstep that I really actually enjoyed.
And I kind of went, wow, I need to have this on CC hits.
And it was only after I'd submitted it, I realised just how long it was.
And I thought, well...
Because I'm... I'm... prior to CC hits, I was very much a metalhead on one side.
And I had a sliver of late 90s house style music, kind of those were the two categories of music that I went out with my way to listen to.
And doing CC hits has really opened my eyes to kind of how great some of the other stuff that is that's out there.
And, you know, the only downside to stuff being over ten minutes is that you lose the opportunity to play more of that in a shorter show.
So if my intention is to get more people to play and positively promote creative commas music, then realistically we need...
We need it to be playable.
But again, you know, if you've got...
I think what I said at the time was, you know, as long as I have no more than one track that's more than ten minutes in a month, then I'm happy.
And so far it seemed to have, you know, only had the one, so it's not too bad.
Sorry.
So do you... that's the music?
Yes.
There's two things.
People that want to upload stuff to the site have to request an uploader account from me, purely because I don't want it to become kind of just a dumping ground for anyone and everyone to put everything.
And everyone to put anything they want in there.
So basically there's like a two-step operation that someone that submit wants to submit the tracks to the site has to do.
They have to run a web... try and access a web page.
It will return an error saying that it wasn't able to access the web page.
So tell me what the user name was, you used to try and run that action.
And I basically go in and I tick a box that says can upload.
There are two further tracks.
So two further tick boxes, one which says is automatically permitted to authorize a track, which basically when a track is authorised, it can be played on the site without question.
At the moment, everyone has that tick box switched on as well because there previously wasn't an isn't uploader box.
It was previously is authorised to upload tracks or not.
And now it's cannot load a track, but isn't authorised or cannot load a track and is authorised.
So there's also another one which is an admin and that is an administrator of shows so they can create a show, add a track to a show, rename the show, change the URL for it, those sorts of things.
But it's only in their own shows.
So again, podcasters all tend to be in that first tick box as well.
Every morning, I have a script which runs and tells me all of the tracks which haven't yet been played.
And basically I check that every morning to make sure that I'm not down to two tracks left.
When I hit get to two tracks, it means that at some point over the next two days, I need to remember to get onto my computer and find some more tracks to play because other people haven't submitted them.
I have the same problem over here in HPR, but I don't have the luxury of being able to pull the shells out of the air.
Now you can just do it as a CC.
Show.
Absolutely.
CCS.
Yeah, I mean, that's the kind of the one thing.
And what I'll tend to do is I'll look at the names of the tracks.
And if there's anything there that kind of makes me go...
A set.
Oh, set seems a bit long.
Let me just have a look at how long that runs for.
And I've had that in one, two cases.
Somebody submitted from Blipfest not too long ago.
They submitted the two 30 minute long sets from Blipfest.
And I kind of thought a set isn't one track.
That's a kind of that's a whole DJ's act on stage.
So I have to admit I did remove those two.
The only other thing that I look for is because I use festival to generate all the bumpers,
all the bits of introduction and outro snippets of text.
If I spot something that's in there that looks like it wouldn't sound the way that it's written,
that makes sense.
I will go in and make sure that whoever was that uploaded it marked it as being...
Because there's two other fields you can add to when you make your submission to the site,
which is track name sounds like an artist name sounds like.
That's not the names of the fields that you have to submit, but basically that's what it is.
So things like 20 pound sounds, which is written 20 LB sounds.
And change the artist name to saying 20 space, P-O-U-N-D-S, space sounds.
That's one of the only other things that I check.
And to be honest, as we go along the people that are less efficient at marking a track
with unusual names, unusual spellings of names,
I'm probably going to be the only people that get there, is authorised, tags turned off.
And that's not because they're not authorised to submit a track into the site
because they still have the uploader tag on their user account.
But it's purely just so I can go in and say, actually, these need to be checked
to make sure that they sound right before they go in.
But even that's not disastrous.
If you get something that sounds like gibberish, you might even be more inclined to look at the show notes
and find out what they were actually called.
I don't know.
I've not really done a whole lot of investigation into who listens to the show.
To the extent that every time I've looked into maybe adding some kind of analytics to the site,
it's always been, well, that's not really anywhere near anything that's particularly important right now.
The important thing right now is getting enough music in there that we don't need to worry about that.
We don't need to worry about if we want to create a show that plays eight hours of music
that's suitable for playing in a workplace that isn't a non-commercial tag track.
Okay, that was actually one of my next question.
How can filter down the particular types of tracks by license thanking you?
I can because I have the database passwords.
Most people can't.
But this is definitely something that we could, as a community, submit a patch to you
to put a PHP page up on the website to generate that sort of stuff.
There is actually a wiki, which details kind of all of the things that I want to do to CC hits.
This will be in the show notes.
Which is code.cchits.net.
And somewhere near the bottom of that, there's a thing that says there's a wish list,
which is a cross between an issue tracker and a road map, you can get involved there.
And effectively, that is intended to be like a public debate about what is going to happen
to the site in the long term.
So there's things like add per show votes to the track entries, which we now have.
Add not say for work reporting to tracks, which we don't.
So, for example, if when I submit something to the site at sort of two o'clock in the morning
and I'm, you know, half awake and I miss somebody saying rather rude words all the way through it.
And somebody else comes along and says, I can't believe that's in there.
They should be able to take a bus and that says this might contain something that says rude things.
And that would then take it out of the approved status.
Would mean that it doesn't make it into the weekly show or the monthly show.
Or, yeah, I mean, I haven't really worked through all the mechanics yet of how it's supposed to work.
And that's why it's in the wish list because it's something that we wish to do.
And basically, if people have got suggestions on things that they want to do in there,
then go to the, go to the wiki and edit the wish list and put stuff they want in there.
John, I'm going to basically wrap this up now if that's okay with you.
Because we're running over now.
Not that we can continue talking if that's okay with you.
But I just wanted to say that
what they shout out to some HPR people who listen on HPR who are into the music.
If they're interested, the links to CC hit stat net will be in the show notes.
If you're interested in coding, there's something here for you as well.
If you are interested in putting together is CC hits best of show.
That's absolutely something that we on HPR will be happy to carry.
We have all songs considered, which hasn't been on in a while,
but where people can submit any songs that they like.
And the like of a meta show within HPR.
And of course, I'm sure you're looking for people.
I think I've just made some notes here.
You're looking for people to help you with the design of the website.
You're looking for people with coding.
Yes.
And you're looking for people to submit to their miss anywhere else that you need help.
If you are involved in making music, playing music, promoting music,
or if you know of sites that are playing Creative Commons music,
I would love for you to get in touch with me so that I can talk to you
about either getting the tracks played on CC hits, submitted to CC hits,
or even just credit people that are playing tracks.
Because that's one of the main things that I've made a point of right from the beginning with CC hits
is that even if a particular show that has played a track that's on the site
do not want to submit their tracks to CC hits,
the fact that you've played that track, I want to credit you
because you're playing something that is fantastic.
And so any time I spot a track that's been played on a site,
I make a point of adding it to CC hits that they've been played there.
Okay, cool.
And this is actually, I'm just thinking of some of the podcasts that I listen to
that have music at the end of their shows.
This would be definitely something that I'm going to email them about
and just say, would you consider adding your podcast to, you know,
to the CC hits?
Yeah, that would be brilliant.
That would be brilliant.
One thing I think people need to know is the quality of the music on CC hits is excellent.
I do listen to a lot of podcasts.
But in work, I tend to just like to have music podcasts on.
And CC hits, when I initially subscribed,
I expected to be deleting, you know, 90% of the music,
which is kind of what I'm getting on other people's shows.
But I've found that it's more like 20% or even 10%.
That a lot of the music is knocking around.
And I know looking at my podcast directly,
I'm looking at a list of 20 or 30 different songs that I just can't, you know, delete.
You know, some of them I'll listen to for a while and then delete them.
But I know I like it face to hot.
The podcast, what am I going to do?
Should I move them into a music directory or what?
And it's also prompted me to download a lot of the artists albums and stuff.
Sure.
And I always do make a point of voting for the albums as well.
For the songs as well.
One of the things that I'd like to get to in the next year
is actually to have one extra show.
I don't know when it's going to be,
but it's going to be a selection of random tracks, maybe five tracks.
I'm not sure yet that are in the top half of the chart,
but aren't in the top 40.
But I'm not there yet.
I mean, it's something that's in the, in the to do list.
I'm not even sure if it's in the wish list,
but it's somewhere in the to do list that I want to get to that as soon as possible.
You can get, I'm just looking at the above page here
and you've got a direct link to your database.
Correct.
I can click here and get the database.
You can get a full expo of the database info.
Under Creative Comes 0 license.
So I could just download this database,
make my own feed and do some magic data manipulation
and use your database.
Yeah, absolutely.
And not only that, the API gives you all the same information
that is on the track pages.
Every, every single track,
all the data that's in those tracks is in the API.
So the database is free.
Yep.
All the software that you're using to run is free is in freedom.
Yep.
A music itself is various forms of free.
Yep.
This is, yeah, it's just fantastic work.
I'm going to buy a beer when you're at,
at our campus for sure.
Very generous of you, sir.
Thank you very much.
And I know that that will probably be enough to knock you out
if you've got a small baby.
Yeah, just the one.
I'll be a cheap date.
Yeah.
Okay, is there anything else that we missed?
No, no, I think, I think that's everything.
Oh, the email address to get in touch with me is show
s h o w at c c hits.net that c c h i t s dot net.
And that's you actually read that.
I read everything that comes into that.
Absolutely, everything that comes into that.
Fantastic.
Well, I hope some of the listeners to HPR will
after listening to this man with this episode.
Well, it's, it's very interesting.
So, so far, I've been enthralled listening to you.
Talk about it, but I hope a few of them will step up
and, you know, kind of get involved in the site and somewhere
or another and that we can at least maybe get some.
Somewhere that we as a podcast here can start submitting
shows over to c c hits.net.
That would be fantastic.
And as I said, it's really straightforward to do it.
So I look forward to getting in touch with more of your
podcasters.
Thank you for listening to Half the Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by caro.net.
So head on over to c a r o dot n t for all of her team.
Thank you very much.