Virtual Recording Studio

YouTube, Flickr, and VRS Projects

Embed YouTube videos and Flickr Sets in your VRS Projects

All around us a multimedia revolution is taking place.

VRS started out as just a way to share music project tracks and mixes, but on the way social networking, mashups, and Internet APIs happened.

Our goal has always been to create the best Internet music project management and collaboration system possible. We're not interested in creating another video or picture sharing site. There are already so many good ones available. But video and picture sharing has become a staple of Internet collaboration.

That's why we integrated YouTube and Flickr into the VRS TelR system. But we can do more:

Where it makes sense we will start adding YouTube and Flickr embedding in VRS. Our next step after TelR was to enable embedding right in your VRS Projects - in the Remarks area.

We have now completed that capability. Using our standard [Youtube=...] and [Flickr=...] You can now embed YouTube videos and public Flickr sets in the Remarks section of your VRS Projects.

We hope this will allow our members to communicate and collaborate even better. And that translates in better music.

Update: And now you can now embed YouTube videos and Flickr sets in your VRS Project Forum posts!

Thanks for letting us be a part of your music.

Integrating Flickr

Showing public Flickr sets in your TelR stream

Our next step after integrating YouTube videos with VRS TelR, was to allow VRS members to integrate their public Flickr sets within VRS TelR.

And now we've completed that great new feature. VRS members can now embed their public Flickr sets right in their VRS TelR stream. And just like embedding a YouTube video, embedding a Public Flickr Set is simple.

First Make sure your Flickr Set is Public.

Next Login to Flickr and Select: You > Your Sets

Then select the Set you want to embed and click on it.

Now note the Unique Set ID - It follows "/sets/" in the Flickr URL of the Set. For instance, in the Set URL:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/52448014@N04/sets/72157624465620681/

The unique video Flickr Set ID is: 72157624465620681

Now, anywhere in your new Tel simply put the following:

[Flickr=72157624465620681]

That Flickr Set will now appear in that Tel.

Please Note: Initially this new feature will only allow one Flickr set per Tel.

As always, we'd love your input to let us know how to improve this, and any other VRS feature.

Integrating YouTube

Showing YouTube videos in your TelR stream

We've begun work on making your TelR stream more than just text information. We originally Thought about creating video and picture upload areas within VRS - but that makes no sense when free web sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Flikr, Photobucket, and others already do a great job at that.

What makes more sense is to allow you to embed your existing videos and pictures from these great web sites right into your Tels.

We've started with YouTube, and if that proves to be popular, we'll add more web sites. So please send us your suggestions on other hosting sites that would improve your TelR stream.

Integration is simple: Just note the unique YouTube video ID - It follows "watch?v=" in the YouTube URL of the video. For instance the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeaBNAXfHfQ

The unique video ID is: JeaBNAXfHfQ

Now, anywhere in your new Tel simply put the following: [YouTube=JeaBNAXfHfQ]

That YouTube video will now appear in your TelR stream. It's that simple.

Please Note: Initially this new feature will only allow one YouTube video per Tel.

As always, we'd love your input to let us know how to improve this, and any other VRS feature.

Fingerprints

Making sure they got what you sent

So... You uploaded your tracks to VRS. But in the back of your mind you have that nagging thought: Did my track get uploaded OK?

See... The Internet is pretty reliable, but once in a while, things go... Wrong.

But, this is your music, and you poured your heart in to that take, and you want to be sure that all your collaborators are getting exactly what you uploaded.

Now you can be sure.

We have now implemented MD5 fingerprinting of all uploaded tracks and mixes. To make sure your tracks are uploaded without any problems, simply download one of the many MD5 hashing programs available. Then do an MD5 hash of your track before you upload it. Now you know the fingerprint of your track of mix.

After you upload your track, point your mouse at the track, or mix number, and VRS will display the MD5 fingerprint that it generated. If they match, you can be assured that VRS got the track exactly as you meant it.

You can also ensure that you downloaded your fellow collaborators' tracks and mixes without any errors by reversing the process: Point your mouse at the VRS track, or mix number before downloading it, noting the MD5 fingerprint of the track. Then run an MD5 hashing program on the tracks after you have downloaded them. If the fingerprints match, your downloaded tracks matches what is in VRS.

We understand that most collaborators won't find this new feature critical. But for our members that want to check that their tracks and mixes uploaded/downloaded without errors, this new capability is priceless.

Our first review

Read about what we think of our new custom Warrior guitar

We normally don't do equipment reviews. There are lots of other web sites that focus on musical instrument reviews, and they do a much better job than we could.

Instead, we try to spend as much of my time as possible enhancing and improving VRS. But after our experience with J.D. and Warrior guitars, and after receiving our first ever custom built guitar, we felt it really warranted a review.

Give our review a read, and let us know what you think.

Refinery

Getting ever better...

We've been spending some time over the past couple of months looking at all the VRS screens and navigation. And we think there is still a lot we can do to make VRS easier and more fun to use.

We admit that we are primarily musicians, secondly computer geeks, and lastly interface designers. So we tend to spend a lot of our time trying to figure out what would make VRS easier and more fun to use. And then some more time trying to figure out how to do it.

We can't say we always get it right the first time, but it is very important to us, so we continue to tweak VRS to make it more useful and more enjoyable.

Out latest refinements have been implemented in the VRS project screens, and frankly we think they are pretty great. Of course, what really matters is what you think. So Log in, take a look at the changes we have made, and let us know what you think.

Update: We've now updated the Signup, People, Profile Display, SongShop, and TelR screens.

Update: Now all the Project Edit and Update screens have been updated.

VRS For Studios

Version 3.9

We have now completed VRS For Studios version 3.9 RC1

For our VRS For Studios customers that want to try out the latest VRS features, we are now making Release Candidate 1 (RC1) available. You must be an existing VRS For Studios customer to try out RC1. But we anticipate that the full VRS For Studios 3.9 product will reach General Availability in less than a month.

We are particularly proud of this version, because it is our first Unified Code Base release. What that means in simple terms is that VRS For Studios 3.9 is the exact same code base as we use here at TheNetStudio.com. Obviously there are some differences between the two products, since they serve two different purposes. But they are essentially the same product.

Why would we do such a thing?

Because we don't want to limit your ability to collaborate. If you feel more comfortable running your own collaboration server, on your own hardware, under your management, we want to make that possible. Because limiting you to TheNetStudio.com for your music collaborations would not be removing the limitations to music collaboration. Would it?

And we are, and have always been, all about the music.

The VRS Team

Guests Are Welcome!

Have a guest over for some music collaboration.

VRS Guest Access is now in BETA!

We've rolled out VRS Guest access for all VRS projects. Now, Project Creators/Producers can invite Non-VRS members to participate in their projects. All you need as a Project Creator/Producer to invite a guest to your project is their Email address.

VRS Guests can upload Musician Tracks, submit remarks, and download all the Tracks and Mixes in a Project. You can have up to 4 guests in each project. And each guest can be set to have access for 1 week to 1 month. And there is no need to remove a Guest, because VRS will automatically expire each guest when their access time has passed.

Guest access is limited, but if your Guest(s) need more access to your project they can always sign up for a permanent VRS UserID, which is FREE!

This is just another way that we hope to help our community make more music. And to continue tearing down the limitations to music collaboration.

Happy Birthday to us...

Has it been three years already?!

Wow... It's been three years since our little music collaboration system showed up on the Interwebs...

We've learned a lot in those three years... But the main thing we have learned is: Never stand still. Never stop innovating, and never stop adding the new features that our community wants.

As we celebrated the holidays with family and friends, a thought occured to us: What about guests? We had guests come stay with us for a few days, and some for longer. They had no interest in moving in to our neighborhood, but they wanted to hang with us. And we thought: Maybe VRS users could benefit from that idea.

What if we allowed Project Creators to invite Guests to their Projects for just a week or two?

And VRS Guest Access was born.

Soon VRS Project Creators will be able to invite Guests to collaborate on their Projects with just a Guest's email address. There is no need for a Guest to signup for VRS. And guests can upload Musician Tracks, add comments, and download both Tracks and Mixes from that Project.

We figure, once Guests see what VRS can do, they'll probably want to signup too. But, either way, every VRS Project can have up to 4 Guests. And each one of those Guest can be active for one to four weeks.

Guest Access took a lot more effort to code than we anticipated - but it was worth it. We are currently in our final testing of this great new capability, and if all goes well, we should have it ready for our community to use in a week or so.

And, we can't say it enough: Thanks for letting us be a part of YOUR music.

VRS Track Uploads

More Members, Bigger Projects!

We're pretty excited. VRS Continues to grow, and VRS members are collaborating on ever more complex projects.

One consistent thing we hear is that collaborators are uploading bigger and bigger Tracks for their projects, but sometimes they are not sure whether the upload is working or not.

So we have updated VRS to show you the status and progress of your Track uploads. This will help our collaborators to know if their Track uploads are progressing, or have stalled. Please Note: We have only tested it with IE7 and Firefox 3. So, If you use another browser, let us know and we will see if we can work with you to test this great new feature in your browser.

UPDATE 11/07/09: We have now implemented the upload progress meter for the Safari and (sort of) Chrome browsers. And we have succesfully tested both on the PC platform. If you are either a Safari or Chrome browser user, please let us know what you think.

We are commited to making VRS not only fun to use, but the best music collaboration system available.

VRS Profile

More features, more updates

You may have noticed some new construction around here recently. We've been pretty busy over the last month or so, updating and improving the VRS Profile display.

Now you can add your Twitter stream to your profile (Did we mention we love Twitter).

In addition to seeing a VRS member's added Twitter stream, you can now also see their most recent Public Tels and Public Projects by displaying their profile. And as always, Private Projects and Tels stay private.

We continue to improve VRS to help collaborators make new and interesting music. VRS is, after-all, all about the music.

Projects or MicroBlogs

Now You Decide

As we continue to add more features to VRS, it is becoming an increasingly flexible way to manage your music projects, and work with new musicians and old friends.

Some people see VRS as a Music Project Management system. Some see it as a communications, and social networking tool. We see it as both, and we understand that some of our members prefer one of those features over the other.

So we decided to let you decide what you see when you login to VRS.

We have added a new profile feature that allows you to tell VRS to display either your Music Projects or your TelR microblog at login. If we get enough feedback, we could expand this feature. But for now, you can decide which of these two screens you want to see when you login.

We hope this will make VRS even easier for you to use and enjoy

The VRS Team

Twitter

We LIKE Twitter

We've been using Twitter for about a year now.

At first we thought it was a really cool idea for chronicling the progress of VRS, and letting everyone know about the newest features we have finished.

But last week our DNS vendor was knocked offline by a DDoS attack, and many of our users could not reach TheNetStudio.com.

We simply posted our IP Address to Twitter, and like magic, our community was able to use TheNetStudio.com again.

That's when we realized how powerful Twitter is as a way to communicate to our community when there are problems with TheNetStudio.com.

So, please Follow us on Twitter to keep track of not only our new features, but any problems that we need to let you know about. And we promise to keep our navel-gazing to a minimum

The VRS Architect

Silver and Gold

And Platinum

Silver and Gold... Silver and Gold... Everyone wishes for Silver and Gold.

For those of you that have been maxing out the VRS file/project size limits, We have added three new levels. The first level is, and always will be FREE. You get 500Meg of disk space for each project, 24 Tracks, and a maximum file size of 50 Megabytes.

If that is not enough space, you can move up to VRS Silver Edition. Silver gives you 32 Tracks, and a maximum project size of 2 Gigabytes.

Still not enough? How about VRS Gold Edition. Gold gives you 56 Tracks, a maximum project size of 5 Gigabytes, with individual file sizes of 75 Megabytes.

Feh you say? Still not enough for your projects! Fine... You can move up to VRS Platinum Edition. Platinum gives you 99 Tracks, and 10 Gig of disk space for each project, with 100 Megabyte file sizes.

Oh... It's true... we are still beta testing the new structure, but if you have some projects that need more disk space, or larger file sizes, drop us a line so that we can put you into the beta test.

The VRS Team

Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8.

We usually hang back for a while before we dive into a dot-oh release of anything, but this is different.

VRS has always looked best in FireFox. And equally as good in Chrome, but IE6 and IE7... Not so much.

We decided early on that we had to make VRS FUNCTIONAL in IE, but not OPTIMISED for IE. Rather, writing VRS to web standards seemed like a better idea somehow.

We took some heat for that, but we figured that eventually Internet Explorer would support all the standards we used. And today is that day!

We are very excited that VRS now looks the same in FireFox, Chrome, and IE8!

There are still some little idiosyncracies here and there, but we are in the process of making the minor adjustments needed to make VRS render the same in all three browsers.

So if you want to experience VRS the way we meant it to look, you can now use any of those three browsers.

We hope that this will make your Music Collaboration experience a great one!

The VRS Team

VRS For Studios

Version 3.5

We have now completed VRS For Studios version 3.5

If you really like TheNetStudio.com, but want to run a private VRS server for your own recording studio, or for projects you produce, VRS For Studios might be just what you are looking for.

We realized early on that many recording studios and independent Producers are using all types of Internet File Transfer technologies to share their project tracks and mixes. The problem is that those technologies are often very limited. They are not really designed to manage recording projects, or to separate who can upload, access, or even delete tracks or mixes based on their role in each separate project.

With VRS For Studios you have all of the great management and project separation capabilities that you see in use at TheNetStudio.com. And since VRS For Studios runs on your Windows server, behind your firewall, you maintain complete control of it.

VRS For Studios Version 3.5 represents all of our latest features rolled into the VRS For Studios product.

The VRS Team