Generating Web Content on the Road
Stevie Barrett
RSAMD September 2001

Context
The 2^nd and 3^rd Year students on the B.A. (Scottish Music) course at Glasgow’s Royal Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) organised a seven day tour of the Scottish Borders, called ‘Waulking the Tweed’. During the tour they performed traditional and contemporary music on a variety of instruments ranging from solo voice through to 20 member group singing, and from solo snare drum to full highland bagpipe.

The tour ran from 15^th — 21^st June 2001.

Tour Manager, Iain Fraser (http://www.iainfraser.com) suggested in pre-tour meetings that the tour be promoted in part over the World-Wide-Web. Initially this involved the creation of a single, static page of HTML on the RSAMD’s webserver (www.rsamd.ac.uk), simply echoing the advertising already in hardcopy. However, further discussions with Stevie Barrett, HOTBED Project Manager (www.hotbed.ac.uk) at the RSAMD, pointed to the possibility of a more dynamic approach to the use of W3 in tour promotion and dissemination.

It was suggested therefore that a website be created that would facilitate the daily dissemination of tour news, pictures, and music (from each and every gig). Stevie would be joining the tour to provide four separate, but related, services:

1. The provision of live sound engineering
2. The recording of each concert for archive interest and web dissemination
3. Photography of every gig
4. The maintenance of a tour website

Initial Considerations
It was quickly established that the RSAMD’s firewall would seriously impede the creation and maintenance of the service required. The general maintenance of the site, as well as the transfer of sound files and images, would require FTP access outwith the Academy’s IT infrastructure, which the firewall would not allow. It was decided, therefore, that external, third-party hosting was required.

100 Megabytes of webspace was purchased from Easyspace (www.easyspace.com) as well as the domain-names ‘scottishtour.org’ and ‘scottishtour.org.uk’. Stevie designed a skeleton site structure using Dreamweaver 4 on the PC and Dreamweaver Ultradev on the Mac, as well as Fireworks on both machines to create graphics for the logo and navigation rollovers, etc.

The site was organised into 4 main sections:

• Home, to provide background information on the tour
• Diary, listing the dates of each of the gigs, as well as further information of venues and ticket prices, etc. in further subsections: e.g. diary/denholm, diary/berwick, and so on.
• Meet the Musicians, which contained a JPEG photograph of the musician group with an HTML image map (created in Fireworks) which allowed the user to click on a given musician to go one level further to biographical info. on each musician: meet/malcolm, and so on.
• Gallery, to hold the images from each day of the tour.

In addition, Links and Contact sections were created in the navigation block.

The Scottish Music Department own an 800 Watt Stereo P.A. for use by the students. This includes a Mackie 16 channel mixing desk, as well as an assortment of Shure SM58 and SM57 mics, and an AKG C1000s. The Music Department provided a Tascam Pro Portable DAT recorder with a Sennheiser Stereo mic.

Stevie had concerns about the quality of the recordings if the DAT was simply fed from the live mix on the desk. He also suggested the procurement of a digital camera for the photography and a laptop to work on the site on-the-road. As a result, he approached Sound Control (Glasgow), Quiggs of Glasgow, and Scotsys (Glasgow), about the possibility of sponsorship for the tour in the form of recording equipment, a digital camera, and a laptop computer respectively.

Sound Control generously provided the tour with the following: a T.C. Electronics Finalizer, a Behringer Composer compressor, a Yamaha dual 31 band graphic EQ, and Lexicon MPX 100 and 200 digital reverbs.

Quiggs of Glasgow were also extremely helpful and provided a Kodak digital camera.

Scotsys deliberated over our request, but felt unable to help. This necessitated the use of Stevie’s own desktop Macintosh, a 9500 — G4 350 conversion, running Dreamweaver Ultradev, Fireworks 3, and Emagic Logic Audio Gold v4, Apple i-Tunes, and RealProducer.

On The Road
Given the absence of a laptop, a static base was set up at Iain Fraser’s office in Jedburgh, where the Mac was placed.

For the gigs in larger venues the full P.A. and as many as 8 microphones were used. However, for smaller venues where the P.A. would have proven too much, Stevie used the stereo Sennheiser (centre stage) and two satellites (SM58) stage right and left.

The recordings were routed directly from the desk to the MPX100 for ambient space treatment, then digitally to the Finalizer for overall mix rounding and gentle limiting, and then digitally straight to DAT.

Photographs were taken using Quiggs’ Kodak camera during the day and throughout each gig.

Each morning the camera and portable DAT were taken to Iain’s office. The photos were uploaded to the Mac and edited: cropped and resized. Copy for the news was provided by the students and was typed directly into new HTML pages created in Dreamweaver. The photos were added and the site updated.

It became obvious within the first 2 days of the tour that more room was needed on the scottishtour website, so a News section was added to the Home area, and a Music section was added. The fresh diary and news elements were transferred through FTP using Dreamweaver.

The tunes were selected from the previous night’s concert and transferred from the DAT into the Mac (using SPDIF coaxial digital connection via an Emagic Audiowerk card in the Mac) and recorded into AIFF format using Logic Audio. Logic was then used to normalise each track and ‘top-and-tail’. Each tune was then processed using both i-Tunes and RealProducer to create the respective MP3 and Realaudio stream files. These files were then placed in the website music folder and a textfile (.ram) was created for each .rm (Realaudio) file, detailing the URL the browser should point to. [This is a necessary step for Realaudio streams, so that they can work with HTTP.]

Dreamweaver was then set to upload the audio files via its own FTP client once again. Unfortunately a transfer rate of ca. 26 kbps was all that could be attained. Given the fact that each mp3 was about 5 Mb in size alone, this was a lengthy process, especially if the connection to the ISP was dropped.

Once the music files were uploaded, the music homepage was edited accordingly and the Diary and Home pages were given links to the new files.

Conclusions
Scottishtour received a great deal of positive feedback, often from people who would have liked to see the tour but were unable to come. Also, a number of audience members mailed to say that they went to the site to enjoy once again some of the music they had already heard. The comments on quality of delivery and information were likewise very positive. The BBC took material from the site daily and www.scottishtour.org received a number of hits directly from the www.bbc.co.uk.

However, the number of visits to the site could have been increased dramatically had the site been created earlier, with appropriate metadata and description. (Although scottishtour was registered with over 300 search engines, their spiders could take up to 6 — 8 weeks to crawl the site.) This would have helped publicity for the tour enormously.

In addition, technologies designed to aid in the creation of dynamic web content (e.g. PHP, Perl, etc.) would have been helpful, given some planning and groundwork. For example, having a form for the entry of news, rather than creating the HTML (albeit with Dreamweaver) from scratch every day might have helped.

Having a laptop computer with the necessary software and hardware required for web creation and sound recording/editing would have been another advantage. The restrictions on movement due to having a fixed base caused a great deal of logistical problems that could have been avoided. Similarly, having one person devoted to the upkeep of the website and another doing the recording/sound engineering would have increased productivity and lessened the strain.

Overall, the exercise has proved thoroughly worthwhile however, and has demonstrated that dynamic web content can have a significant supporting role to play in this sphere. The site was, and continues to be, a well-used, content-rich resource, and should serve as a template for further work in the future.

www.scottishtour.org/waulking

please mail comments to s.barrett@rsamd.ac.uk

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