134: Myspace

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 02:26, 12 March 2015 by Meneldal (talk | contribs) (MIDI isn't always bad sound quality)
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Myspace
It's like they got together and said 'what do we miss most from the internet in 1998? that's right, embedded MIDI!'
Title text: It's like they got together and said 'what do we miss most from the internet in 1998? that's right, embedded MIDI!'

Explanation

Did you ever visit a website that, not long after the page finishes loading, suddenly plays a song? It's annoying to you, but if others are near your vicinity, you will attract a lot of unwanted attention, especially if the song is played at a loud volume. Compounding this would be the possible inappropriateness of the song that is suddenly playing.

The five seconds to stop the music (finding the "pause"/"stop" button, muting the computer audio...) is too long in such an incident.

Since MySpace allows wide customization for members pages, many users have embedded music players which auto-run when the page is visited.

The title text refers to the fact that old pages, back in the late 1990s, used embedded MIDI files. MIDI files may have terrible sound quality (while lossless, it is limited in the amount of sounds that can be reproduced), but, more importantly, MIDI files that are embedded in the page would not only play automatically, but also have no way to stop playing. The viewer would have to leave the website or externally mute the audio.

Transcript

[Computer screen showing a myspace page.]
Oh man, you and everyone in earshot are gonna love the first five seconds of this song!


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Discussion

It should be noted that MIDI files don't necessarily have terrible sound quality, they are just a lossless wrapper around a music sheet. The player therefore is where the sound quality is the issue. 108.162.217.23 19:23, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Not sure (because this machine has no audio, and I'm accessing an archive of the site) but the Yvette's Bridal Formal site was always an examplar of... well, loads of things, but definitely including music. Bagpipe music one page, IIRC. Anyway, it had disappeared, last time I checked, but I have the link http://web.archive.org/web/20110718150459/http://yvettesbridalformal.com/ (might need to be better URLified with %3A%2F%2F or whatever it needs in there) that at least gives the visual... experience? 178.98.31.27 00:58, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Could this also describe the fact that often only samples of a few seconds (usually more than 5, though) are available? --Chtz (talk) 11:10, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I still get thrown back, when I hear the song that my first girlfriend had on her Myspace profile in 2007-2008, as I visited it regularily and the song became heavily connected to her. The profile was abandonend at some point in 2008 but still exists, including clichee smooching photos of us. I am not sure if the autoplay also still works. --Lupo (talk) 08:07, 30 September 2019 (UTC)