Version 0 2 - "The Sound of eBay"

The Sound of Ebay engine is a robot, that 'writes' a small song, based on values it retrieves in a 'preprocessed' form from a php-script, that analyses the html source-code of eBay.com user-accounts. Opposite to the Sound of Mercadolibre the 'songs' can be requested via a web-interface at http://www.sound-of-ebay.com. The requests get stored in a MySQL-database, that gets queried by one or more clients (based on SuperCollider). The clients are not running on a webserver but on a usual Apple MacIntosh PC (G4, G5 or Intel-processor, MacOSX ≥ 10.4.x) that send the generated audio back to the server as an MP3.

In the first version of the eBay-Generator all songs were generated in a real-time process. I.e. the songs were "played" and recorded like in a tape-recording. Yet this approach very often resulted in flawed results - about 50% of the tracks had unintended clicks - and also the program proved to be very unstable, resulting in program-crashes after 2-3 generations. Even though MacOSX (the generator is currently running under MacOSX only), which is said to be very low-latency, certain flaws seem to be unavoidable …
Thus I decided to try a approach for this second version which resulted in a fairly stable though not as flexible as version 01 program. Basically each generation consists of 4 steps:

  1. processing incomming data (from an arbitrary eBay-useraccount) and generating a "score"
  2. rendering the resulting score into an AIFF-file
  3. rendering the AIFF into an MP3 via lame, a command-line tool for MP3-encoding
  4. sending the result back to the server using cURL (including the name of the requestant and comments)

Still this current version must be regarded as experimental. A release of the generator as a stand-alone client that can easily be installed on any modern Apple MacIntosh is planned though I cannot tell when this is going to happen - my capacity is limited …

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