[Standard disclaimer: Every week Topspin releases updates to its software platform. Each week we code-name the release after a band we love. This week's release is code-named "Son Volt/Toto" and as such this blog post is about a software release code-named the same. It does not mean Son Volt or Toto are working with Topspin, as much as we may wish that to be true. Also, any musical opinions expressed in this release announcement belong to Topspin's Tim Read and should not be taken as official Topspin opinions. Enjoy. -ian]
And once again we release. It’s a habit at this point.
This release is the merger of Son Volt and Toto: Two big releases rolled into one by a common thread. Let’s briefly discuss the music because the app changes this week are worth more time.
SON VOLT is one of the bands that formed in the wake of Uncle Tupelo (and was more heavily based in my old home of St. Louis). Jay Farrar and Tupelo drummer Mike Heidorn. In general, Son Volt provided the country to Wilco’s alt (not that early Wilco didn’t lean heavily in alt-country territory, but by comparison…)
Worth checking out:
Drown
Tear Stained Eye
Caryatid Easy
… if you dig Wilco and never checked out Son Volt – you should.
TOTO is included for historical reference. A long-time resident of the Topspin Guilty Pleasures list, especially from the early warehouse days of 2007 when we discovered a bizarre version of Hold The Line (below)
Why not:
Easily the best version of Hold The Line ever..
A unique take on Africa (skip to 1:50 if you’re not digging the intro)
And for the Arquettes… Rosanna
SHIPPED: TRANSCODER V4 INCLUDING UITS
If you’ve wondered why it’s been somewhat quiet in the last week or two, it’s been due to the preparations necessary to ship version 4 of the Transcoder, aka Son Of Mothra. This is one of the most substantial changes in underlying architecture in a long time, and will allow us our next steps as we scale up the growth of the application. In addition to supporting more formats than any retailer on the planet (MP3, MP3HD, AAC, Apple Lossless, FLAC, MP4, JPG, PNG, etc) our transcoder is faster than ever, fronted by both a cache and Akamai’s Content Delivery Network (so it’s never down), and can support labels who require UITS from their retailers. Does your shopping cart have all that? Existing Topspin users: your transcodes should be faster, more reliable, and won’t appear in your catalog until they’re *complete*. We have seen a few kinks but for the most part it’s been working smoothly since Wednesday. Let us know if you see anything out of order.
AND MORE
With some help from the early adopters, we’ve also made some improvements to the weight based shipping – and more are on the way.
Stay tuned for Uncle Tupelo next week…
