All the best from me for 2012! Let me mention some changes I’ve made to media.io since the last post.

What’s new?

• You can now share media.io with your friends using ShareThis. Personally, I’m not a fan of 3rd party widgets and I had to clean up ShareThis’ widget to make it less invasive to your privacy and to make it load faster.
• Korean translation. media.io is now available in Korean.
• Romanian translation. media.io is now available in Romanian. You might ask yourself “why Korean and Romanian?” – it’s got to do with the love media.io gets from particular countries.
• Less resampling. To compensate for flaws in oggenc, I was resampling files to 44100 Hz on the old VPS. This has now been removed, resulting in better quality Ogg Vorbis files.
• Performance improvements. It might seem hard to achieve, but I’ve found one or two tricks that make media.io load even faster worldwide. Every second counts.
• 100 % uptime in December 2011. While not really a new feature, the server media.io runs on has been rock solid in December with absolutely no downtime measured by Pingdom.

That’s it for now. Enjoy converting your music files!

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Yesterday, I’ve released the following changes at media.io:

New Audio Formats

media.io now supports four more audio formats. These weren’t the most requested but they were easy to add.

• Monkey’s Audio (.ape files)
• Shorten (.shn files)
• TwinVQ (.vqf files)
• TrueAudio (.tta files)

Bug fixes

• The list of formats was incorrectly shown to mobile devices. The jQuery plugin I use to display the list of audio formats wasn’t really working for mobile devices.
• Uploads are now ordered correctly. Previously, new uploads would be added to the file list at its end. Now, new uploads are added at the beginning. This should help on the download page.

What else is new?

• Italian translation. I’ve had media.io translated into Italian. I like having localized versions because they make things easier to many people.
• Improved Polish translation. I had a colleague go over the Polish translation and improve it.

More is coming. I am still working on the “email/share” feature. If you know where to look, it’s already there.

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Another year has passed and media.io is now two years old. Here’s what happened since the last update:

A Dedicated Server for media.io

On 30th of August, I moved media.io to its own, super-powerful server. Here are some examples of how the move affected the service quality of media.io:

• media.io loads 200 ms faster worldwide. Page generation at the old VPS took a while whereas the new server generates the pages in less than 20 ms. This has a nice impact on page loading speeds, as well as reducing the bounce rate by around 1 %.
• More than 50 % less conversion errors. On the old VPS, media.io couldn’t convert many audio files because of the very old operating system that didn’t support newer audio formats such as AMR or WMV 9. On the new VPS which runs Ubuntu 11.04, I see over 50 % less conversion errors.
• Faster conversions. The increased CPU power also shows in the time spent waiting on the conversion page which is reduced by around 6 %.

New Audio Formats

media.io now supports the AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate Audio Codec) and 3GP (essentially MPEG-4 or Quicktime wrapped around several low-bandwidth audio codecs) formats. AMR especially has been a long-standing issue with many people trying to convert AMR.

What’s new?

• Improved caching. Accidentally downloading the same file again should now cause it to be served from your browser’s cache if it is stored there.
• Regression for DNS migrations. In case of a DNS migration, visitors contacting the new server would cause errors which I would get as emails.
• Swedish translation. Jakob von Essen has donated a translation of media.io in Swedish. Many thanks!

Future Options

Even though I find it hard to guarantee anything, what are some of the things you’d like to see at media.io? I know multiple files are very popular, as is sending the download page to someone. I played with the idea of developing Chrome and Firefox extensions. Would this be of interest to you? Please speak up in the comments. Thanks.

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[media.io] loads many times faster than google.com; your whole homepage has fully rendered before I’ve noticed the loading wheel in Firefox starts spinning.

While it’s true that media.io loads faster than Google in Sweden where the author of this quote is coming from, it’s sadly not true for all places on Earth – media.io is 200–300 ms slower in New Zealand and here and there in the USA, too.

On the other hand, you can see that web performance has a tremendous impact on the perception of your service so it really pays to invest in web performance.

6 Tricks to load faster than Google

While I cannot afford the infrastructure Google has in place, media.io’s performance benefits from the fact that Google’s homepage isn’t what it used to be: At more than 150 KB and over 10 HTTP requests – most of which are not well cacheable –, it’s easier than ever to be faster than Google. Here are five tricks I use to make media.io really fast.

1. Inline all Style Sheets

   Best practices say that a CSS Style Sheet should be one external file. For most sites including media.io, I don’t care. Even if you have only one Style Sheet URL (which you should), the extra HTTP request adds valuable time to the time before the browser will start rendering anything, slowing down the first page view. Plus, the loading main document might cause the browser to open another socket to load the Style Sheet which adds time.

2. Load all widgets post onload

   To make the StumbleUpon badge that I use load faster, it is inserted on the page only once the user starts moving its mouse over the page. With jQuery, this boils down to $(document).one('mousemove', function() { $('#widgetcontainer').html('...'); }).

3. Put all files larger than 10 KB on a CDN

   The largest files on my websites are usually the JavaScript files. Since bandwidth drops with increasing distance to the server, I keep all files larger than 10 KB on a CDN. I have done a bit of research here. Note that 10 KB is just my gut feeling since a perfect value would be very difficult to calculate.

4. Re-use the home page connection for small resources

   After downloading the home page, I load two more small resources through the still open connection: The CSS sprite and the favicon. While I could place the CSS sprite on the CDN, it would load in parallel with the JavaScript, forcing the browser to open a new connection. By loading the CSS sprite over a lower-bandwidth connection that’s already open, I save time over opening a new higher-bandwidth connection.

5. Load all JavaScript asynchronously

   Loading JavaScript asynchronously is now a mainstream technique which has tremendous potential of increasing parallelism in web browsers, as well as reducing time to display. All JavaScript on media.io is loaded asynchronously. Of course, it is compressed by Closure Compiler first and served GZIP compressed.

6. Inline on-page JavaScript

   JavaScript that is needed on all main pages (think JavaScript libraries) is concatenated into one JavaScript file. Extra JavaScript that is only needed on some pages is included on the page in an inline script block.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Support for Speex

media.io now supports the open-source Speex low-bandwidth, voice audio codec (files ending on .spx). This was a suggestion that I actually found easy to implement for once. In other words, you can now convert Speex to MP3.

New Dedicated Server

I’m currently setting up a server dedicated to media.io. The server is very powerful with an Intel i7 950 CPU, 24 GB of RAM and two SSDs. The VPS media.io runs on the at the moment is under very high load and the new server will ensure fast conversions and will also help against people being unable to connect to the site. Downloads should be faster, too.

Bug Fixes

• A regression in the program execution code caused very few conversions to fail. This was resolved.

Apologies for today

Because of a configuration problem, uploads and downloads were saved to directories that weren’t cleaned which caused the disk on the server to fill up. At around 19:00 CEST, the last bits were allocated and it took me about half an hour to clean up the mess.

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Last weekend, I rolled out a new version of media.io that features the following changes:

500 MB Upload Limit

I’ve raised the upload limit to 500 MB from 250 MB.

Support for MP2

media.io now supports the MP2 format so you can convert MP2 to MP3 online.

Other Bug Fixes

• In very rare cases, an error in Groovy would prevent conversions. This has been fixed.
• Support for invalid range request headers. Some buggy clients send indices in range request headers in the wrong order. This is now supported.

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Since the last update, I haven’t added any new functionality but instead concentrated on getting bugs out of media.io. I now have a system in place that helps me finding problems with browsers quickly and the outcome of this is that the following bugs were identified and fixed.

• Bugfix for missing Content-Length header during upload. Some clients do not tell the server how long the upload they’re sending is. This is now working fine.
• Bugfix for changes in Internet Explorer 9’s CSS opacity handling. In IE 9, Microsoft has removed the older filter CSS property to change the opacity of elements. The impact of not implementing this soon enough was that few IE 9 users were able to use the site (those using the compatibility view were not affected, I think).
• Bugfix for files with + in their names. Files containing + in their names could not be downloaded. Thanks to mrzerga for reporting this.
• Bugfix for file not found errors in Internet Explorer 8. Some bugs only affect users of certain browsers which can cause them to go unnoticed for long. Sadly, downloads of files with spaces in them (in other words, most files) never worked in Internet Explorer 8 due to a combination of IE’s HTML mangling and my hope that certain things would work the same across browsers. This bug affected a lot of people and made them unhappy, judging from the survey responses.
• Enhancement: No more ActiveXControls in IE 7 and greater. Internet Explorer has implemented a native XMLHttpRequest object from IE 7 on. This is now used in preference over the MSXML ActiveX control the XMLHttpRequest API originated from. This means that, even if your computer administrator has disabled ActiveX controls, you can still use media.io.
• Enhancement: Better conversion page for mobile phones. The conversion page for cellphones is now almost the same as the regular conversion page for desktop browsers.

There you have it. Enjoy using media.io to convert MP3 files!

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More and more people use media.io as an MP3 converter from their cellphones. Even though the number of mobile visitors is still small, it is constantly growing.

If you run into a problem on media.io when converting music, be it from Android, your iPhone, your iPad or another mobile or portable device, please let me know. I don’t have all devices but I can usually figure out quickly why something doesn’t work.

Thanks and enjoy media.io from everywhere!

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Correct Download File Names

A bug that existed since… the beginning of media.io: When you downloaded a file that contained non-ISO-8859-1 characters (technically speaking), you would get broken file names. To be honest, I never noticed until someone from Russia told me. Crazy.

Faster Downloads

To make downloading faster, I implemented gzip compression for downloads. In April, this reduced the amount of downloaded data by 13 %. Less data to download means faster downloads for you (and less money if you are billed by bandwidth consumption).

MIDI

media.io now supports the popular MIDI format so you can for example convert MIDI to WAV.

media.io in Estonian

Thanks to Olav from Estonia, there is now an Estonian translation of media.io. Thanks, Olav!

Other performance improvements

I’ve made several small tweaks to increase site performance. The home page should now load in less than 2 seconds – worldwide.

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Last Sunday saw the release of a number of changes to media.io. Here’s what’s new:

Support for 21 Tracker Formats

Back in the early 90s, I wrote tracker music on my Amiga 500 using MED and sometimes OctaMED and I’m proud to announce that media.io now supports 21 formats by various trackers.

This feature was made possible by the nice folks who wrote the VideoLAN VLC player and the ModPlug library. For those interested, here is a VLC forum thread that details my settings.

In addition to the tracker formats, support for .m4r has also been added.

Here is a full list of new supported file extensions:

• .mod
• .s3m
• .xm
• .it
• .669
• .amf
• .ams
• .dbm
• .dmf
• .dsm
• .far
• .mdl
• .med
• .mtm
• .okt
• .ptm
• .stm
• .ult
• .umx
• .mt2
• .psm
• .m4r

Translations

media.io has been translated to seven languages:

1. German
2. Spanish
3. French
4. Dutch
5. Polish
6. Portuguese
7. Russian

Thanks to the translators.

Smaller Changes and Bug Fixes

• Some music files could not be converted because their tags were invalid. This has been solved.
• Performance improvements. Resource loading was optimized, leading to faster loading pages.
• Redirections for previously used URLs were created. This helps avoid 404 errors.
• Download links were removed. This was a feature that wasn’t well understood as many temporary URLs were posted to Twitter, leading to many 404 errors. A similar feature will be back some day.
• No more “Extended Version.” While the Extended Version was working to some extent, it was clearly not working well so the feature was deleted. A different solution will come in the future.
• Files that no longer exist are ignored. Some people spend hours converting files and since files are deleted after an hour, media.io would attempt to re-convert them.
• Files that are internally renamed before conversion were not shown. Some file extensions are just aliases for others and media.io renames them internally.
• Very rarely, some files could not be uploaded. This has been fixed.

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I’ve just published some changes to media.io:

New Audio Formats: AC3 and µLaw/AU

media.io now supports AC3 and µLaw/AU. Converting AC3 to MP3 and the other supported formats is a bit experimental (since AC3 supports multi-channel audio).

Quality Improvements for Ogg Vorbis

Armed with close to 100.000 data points, I looked for file format conversions that just didn’t work as well as they could. One of the problems that I found were conversions to Ogg Vorbis with sampling rates other than 44.100 Hz. From now on, audio files converted to Ogg Vorbis will always be resampled to 44.100 Hz.

No more AdSense Ads

While AdSense wasn't ever going to make me rich, eCPMs have taken a nosedive in February. Unfortunately for Google, I'm not willing to sell my visitors for 0.5 € eCPM so there are now different ads from Amazon which will probably perform awfully (like all ads from Amazon that I tried).

As always, thanks for the feedback you have send in through surveys and the UserVoice forum.

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It’s been a busy start into 2011 for me. Here are the things that are new at media.io:

Extended Version

media.io now has an Extended Version (formerly pro accounts) that lets you convert multiple files and also upload larger files (500 MB right now, up from 250 MB). For now, the price is only 1 €. Access to the Extended Version is valid for 24 h.

Bug Fixes

Since the last update, the following problems were corrected:

• Some browsers send full file paths. Paths are now removed.
• Question marks in file names were not removed. Question marks in file names that might have been caused by downloading files are now removed.
• Advertising performance improvements. Google’s AdSense product has traditionally been slow and getting slower almost by the minute. With two little tricks, I was able to reduce the bandwidth of AdSense by about 50 %, leading to faster loading pages.
• Many mobile browser bugfixes. Many modifications to the mobile audio conversion page and the home page ensure that even low-end mobile browsers can now use media.io.
• More debugging data for me. While this will not impact visitors, better logging helps me better understand what formats work well and which ones don’t. This has also been reflected in the privacy policy
• Underscores in file names were not removed. Occasionally, people try to convert audio files that end on “_,” such as “foo.mp3_” These underscores are now removed.

New Audio Formats

media.io now supports wave files which are simple WAV files with a different file name.

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New File Formats

After a small update, media.io now supports the WavPack Audio Codec. This means you can now convert WV to MP3 and other formats.

Also, I have enabled three new file extensions:

• .mpga This is actually MP3 audio.
• .rbs Again, an alias for MP3.
• .ram Most of the time, .ram files are metadata files which do not contain audio but it seems there are occasional exceptions.

Pro Accounts

I am still working on pro accounts though most of the coding is done. You might see pro accounts appear at media.io in January 2011. Thanks for your patience.

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media.io has had several updates over the last two weeks, here’s

what’s new

• media.io moved to a new Server. media.io is now on a much more powerful server than before. This should help a lot with uptime and availability.
• I solved a potential bug when multiple files had been uploaded.
• I incorporated some changes from a user test.
• Support for Musepack. Now you can convert Musepack files (ending on .mpc) at media.io.
• Support for Real Media and Real Audio. In addition to Musepack, you can now convert .rm to mp3 and all the other formats, as well as converting .ra files.
• Mobile browser support. I admit I haven’t really tested this but you should be able to use media.io from your iPhone, iPod or similar devices. Older mobile browsers, like IEMobile and Opera Mobile probably don’t work.
• Distributing files from a CDN. To make media.io load faster, I’m using Rackspace’s Cloud Files CDN.

That’s it for today. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me.

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media.io will soon support mobile phones and other small devices. Not
all of them (especially not IEMobile on the Windows Mobile based HTC
Trion here), but a majority of newer devices. Soon, users of Android and
iPhone devices will be able to convert audio online at media.io.

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I’ve published a new version of media.io today that has several new features.

New Features

• You can send anyone a link to download a file you’ve converted. Many people suggested I add this. The download link is valid for 30 minutes.
• After downloading your converted audio files, you can start over. This way, files you have already downloaded will not show up again. Again, I’ve been asked to do this.
• You can see which file extensions are supported, in addition to the maximum file size. This was something that might have annoyed one or two people so I implemented it.
• There are now buttons to link to media.io If you have a site and would like to promote media.io, I’ve prepared some banners for you. Enjoy.

GUI Changes

In addition to these new features, I have implemented one or two subtle changes to the GUI. It’s now all white, as well as having Verdana as the body font which I find more legible than Arial. As usual, you will find screenshots of media.io “before” and “after” below.

Bug Fix

One thing I’m very excited about is a seemingly tiny problem I found a while ago and that I solved the same day. Fixing this bug has decreased audio conversion error rates by absolute 2.76 %, relative 38.48 %. For five lines of code changes, this is awesome.

As always, I hope you enjoy converting MP3 to WAV online and all the other file formats at media.io.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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My personal opinion is that I’ve never done anything that was this hard to launch and turn into a usable service, and at the same this easy to scale to well over 1000 visitors a day.

I can’t really say what I’ll do for media.io next but I hope media.io will help more and more people.

Enjoy.

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With enough time, you can literally test everything and see if it makes a difference. I recently concluded a massive multivariate test at media.io that tested:

• Three different fonts.
• Five different background colours.
• Three different logos.
• Three different line styles.
• Two different button styles.

Overall, over 140 different variations were tested on half the traffic of media.io.

Some of the test results include:

• Chosing Arial over Verdana and Tahoma increased conversion rates noticeably. Personally, I would rate the font readability of Arial lower than Verdana (especially at 12 px) but it seems that users prefer Arial.
• Background colours and logos affected conversion rates a lot, too, whereas…
• …link styles didn’t.
• The impact of button styles in this design didn't make a lot of difference either.

In response to the multivariate test, I have redesigned the media.io website slightly – and made it even faster. Below this post, you’ll find the usual “before” and “after” screenshots. I can’t comment yet on what the net gain in conversion rate of this redesign was but we’re looking at a number of around 5–10 %.

Reliability Updates

On 2010-08-17, I implemented a subtle change with massive implications for media.io. I did some deep analysis on crash dumps and configured the application so that the seemingly random crashes should be a thing of the past.

Server Migration

I’m also working on moving media.io to a new server that features more up-to-date software. Many people are trying to convert audio that the old software I’m using now can’t convert (this includes floating-point WAV or Windows Media v9).

A new server with more up-to-date software is now 90 % set up. In the next couple of days, I will redirect half the traffic of media.io to the new server. When you convert audio online at media.io, you will soon be randomly routed to one of the servers.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Support for .m4b files and Advanced Systems Format

media.io now supports .m4b files, as well as Advanced Systems Format (formerly called Advanced Streaming Format or Active Streaming Format) files (those with an .asf file extension). Supporting this was really easy so thanks to the people that suggested these formats.

User Feedback

It’s been a while since the last post about user feedback so let me reply to some of your comments again.

Great site! Perfect in simplicity! I would like more encoding options, such as VBR and choice of codec, such as LAME.

I am already using LAME to convert WAV to MP3 so that only leaves VBR. Ogg is VBR by design and I am using LAME’s VBR modes, too.

[…]media.io is an uncomplicated straightforward and at the same time versatile, online, and free(very nice). Thanks for doing this!

Thanks for the praise, glad you like it.

I would like something that will help me boost the audio quality and make it louder.

For that, I would recommend a real audio editor such as Sony SoundForge or Audacity if you want it to be free.

the title of the website is weird, n kinda hard 2 remember

Well, maybe. But I can’t change it now that the site is live. :-)

it would be really nice if you supported video formats, I love how your service is ad free!

Thanks. I have thought about supporting video formats but the problem is video is taking up really crazy amounts of bandwidth and since I don’t make any money from media.io, it wouldn’t be wise to open the door to huge bandwidth bills.

Reliability and Uptime

I have some things in the works that should make the site a lot more stable and also support some problematic formats (floating-point WAV, Windows Media 9). Stay tuned!

As always, if you like media.io but would like it to support something, post it here.

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Support for AIFF

AIFF (file extensions: .aiff and .aif) was high on the list of requested file formats. Now you can convert AIFF to MP3 online, as well as converting AIFF to other formats. Supporting .rm files (Real Media) might be next.

Downtimes

The last two weeks have been pretty bumpy – media.io was down several times. In response, I have increased my monitoring a lot which will help keep the site online.

Bug Fixes

A bug that affected people using Download Accelerators (caused by my buggy implementation of HTTP Range requests) has been fixed. Some people have reported incomplete downloads in the past and this should fix it.

Reliability

One thing I’m working on is collecting data why some files can’t be converted at media.io. I know of a few bugs in the tools I use but sometimes, these tools also cannot convert the files you’d like to convert, such as floating-point WAV files. Over time, I want to increase the conversion success rate until everybody’s happy.

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