Scott,
congratulations for a very professional looking website. I liked the music as well.
Good luck with your new endeavour!
Andrea

Man, only a few things I would really change.

First your demo songs...get those so they loop all over your site after you visit the page.

Next the "off the cusp" track that you have back a few pages...I think that would work great as the sites intro/main page song.

Next ( also on your demo page ). Some text I would change. Drop "these songs sound like this due to mp3 format" thats just insulting to those viewing/hearing your site. I think you would be much better off if you replace the " mp3 format " excuse...with a description of your live sound setup. Then you could also avoid the " but its sounds almost like a full band live!" lol you wouldn't need to even speak of that if you described your live sound setup...some crap about speakers this, mixer that, eqed for the room something. As for description of the demo recordings...just be direct and honest, let everyone know " to provide this demo mixture I utilized direct stereo recording from my main keyboard, for more on my live sound read below."

Beyond that...next live show you do RECORD IT. Record your keyboard direct, and mic whatever your speakers are to capture the air of the performance. Hell even put a mic to pick up the crowd, cause if you got laughing and happy folks with glasses clinking in the background. You live and good times will not be at all hard to convey...and out of an entire night your sure to have at least one song that comes off how you want it.

Hey Scott,

I think the site looks good. I'm glad you included the audio navigation bars on the pages that you embedded your sample mp3s. It's a good rule to follow, if you're gonna embed audio, give the user a way to control it.

On that note, I noticed that the first page, the home page includes an audio navigation bar but on my setup here, it gets hidden behind the large, centered main table. I wasn't sure why so I investigated. I noticed in the code that the nav bar placement is coded in a different way than the other two pages that also include the mp3s (Listen & About) which show up just fine on my setup. I proceeded to code the first page mimicking the other two pages and provided a URL to illustrate my point.

http://genny.lib.umn.edu/scottlanghoff/pagetitle.htm

I'm not saying I'm right, just wondering if that is what you had intended. If you intended it to be the way it is currently coded, then I have to report that I'm not getting the nav bar on the home page using IE6 at a 1280 X 1024 resolution.

Another thing I noticed is in the TITLE tag of the pages. You're using "Page Title". Put in something snazzy like, "Scott Langhoff's Greatest Web Page Ever!!" or an equivalent.

The mp3s sounded great, by the way.

-mike

Since the goal is to maximize site effectiveness, I looked at it from dial-up on a five year old HP monitor. Then, I used newer equipment...DSL and a flat panel monitor.

* Load time on dial-up was fine.
* On the oldest equipment, I couldn't read
the reverse type very well...a real eyestrain.
* No access to music at all on the old equipment.

Design is attractive, but sometimes, you have to make design concessions to make things work in the majority of situations. That means that tinted-reversed type out of a dark background is sometimes a real problem.

This is sort of like listening to the mix of an audio piece on the worst equipment likely to be used (I'm thinking audio for a film played at a retail store). Sometimes, you need to mix for that situation, rather than making a great mix for a premium stereo or surround system.

Goos site..just my take on things as a producer of collateral materials for businsses.

Keep up the good work,


Russ

Scott:

Your site is exceptionally nice. Thanks for sharing the details with us. Rice

Hi, Scott,

I have downloaded all your music. Fantastic work. As to the MP3 music, do you know that every MP3 file got a built-in header in it that bear the information about that file. You can add like: title, album, author, time, etc information into it. I donow see those information. you can use a wonderful software called Media Tagger to edit it . http://www.volny.cz/media-tagger/eng/

Those information will help people identify that those music actually comes from you.

About the Quicktime player, I know Firefox is not compatible with it. My firefox workes with RealPlayer very well.

Hello

I'm testing this site over on the Yamaha style forum as well.

A couple problems were mentioned:

"As a dial-up user, I did not go
far: I was offered the total demo at over an hour, and when I stumbled
on a one-minute demo, it was scheduled at 10 minutes' download."

"Clicking on the buttons on the left-hand side of the screen causes the centering of the whole screen to shift left. Very distracting visually."

Anyone else having this or any other kind of a problem I need to know about?

Thanx

Scott

Using mp3 files as autoplay is rather large for the
dialup connections, better use midifile or just a link
to the mp3 file to make it optional for the visitors
to play or download the music.

The pages look OK in both Firefox and IExplorer at my
PC, but some older web browsers may have problems?

GJ