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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.