File mp3 upload

Fighting Upload Overload

Byline: Gary Eskow

Those of us who hooked up with AOL early on and have stayed with the company know how difficult it is for AOL to handle files larger than a megabyte or two. Other services may do a nominally superior job of shuttling around bulky data, but the fact of the matter is that AOL and its competitors are best suited to carrying mail. If you have heavier files to hoist you must look elsewhere. That's where this article, which explores FTP, comes into the picture.

I'll start with an example from my own life: www.garyeskow.com (shameless promotion here), which I use to advance my career as a composer and journalist. Since I recently developed a relationship with Jeffrey James (www.jamesarts.com), who promotes the work of composers and performers and who secured a performance of my most recent composition, a string quartet called The Amazing X Ray Machine by a Ukranian quartet and asked if I could email an mp3 of the MIDI demo I recorded to him. The plan was to also make it available to the quartet through my site.

This request put me into roughly the same spot as those of you who need to transport large video and audio files through the Internet. The Amazing X Ray Machine is almost 11 minutes long. After using BIAS Peak to encode the original 24-bit master as an mp3 file, the composition still weighed in at 15MB. How could I transfer it to my site and make it available for others to download?

The answer: FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Of course, many of you are already familiar with FTP servers from clients such as advertising agencies who are wise to this infrastructure. If you've shot a :30 video for an agency, and they've asked you to FTP a rough cut to them in a specific compression format, they no doubt have an FTP server. You simply need a way to drop your file onto that server.

But for the moment, let's assume that like me, you will need to organize both ends of the FTP exchange yourself. First, some definitions.

FTP is one three popular methods of transporting data over the Internet. The most common of these, SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) is used by AOL and other letter carriers to handle the lightest loads; your daily emails.

HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) is attractive to web designers because it handles graphic files that are larger than mail. If you need to move big files though, you must use FTP, a no-frills way of transporting and storing large chunks of data. There are no colorful icons involved; just a deadweight lift and move operation of material that the other protocols cannot accomodate.

Back to my example. My website is hosted by Jumpline (jumpline.com), which provides web hosting and domain registration services. But what does a host do? "It's like we're renting space at a mall," says Jumpline's Derek Harper. "We provide space to all kinds of people, mostly small businesses."

That means that if you - or in this case, I - already have a website, you won't have to purchase the more expensive server software. "Those who want to access your music will be able to do so through their web browsers, which can download FTP files," says Harper.

OK, so I'm covered on the server end. Now how do I set up an interface for posting and downloading the files?

Since both my web designers, Paul Aston and his wife Tina Lonstron of the Aston Design Group (www.paulaston.com), and I are Mac users, I used Fetch (www.fetchsoftworks.com) to upload The Amazing X Ray Machine to a corner of my site that only they could access. They then built a new page onto my site where the file will reside for download.

Here's the blow-by-blow on that part of the operation: After downloading and installing the Fetch software, I ran it for the first time and was taken to the New Connection page. This page required me to enter data for three fields, Host, User ID, and Password. All of these fields referred to my website. I entered the required data, saved the information as a shortcut to make future log-ins less time consuming, and was then given a behind-the-scenes look at my website, organized by folders.

Below the area that showed the details of my site were a pair of tabs labeled "Get ..." and "Put Files." My task was to upload my quartet, so I clicked on the Put Files tab and navigated my way to that file. Clicking on the mp3 itself initiated the upload.

I expected the upload to go quickly, but we've been experiencing some bottlenecks on our family network (two PCs and a pair of Macs are networked together and access the Internet via cable modem). Fetch developer Jim Matthews suggested that I should expect a transfer rate of up to 50,000bps, but my system was well below that level and actually failed to upload the file at all the first two or three attempts. I've contacted my cable company and am in the process of troubleshooting this, but Matthews says that it's important to understand that uploading and downloading files are separate procedures.

"It's easier to design a system that downloads fairly quickly," says Matthews. "Much of the design comes from the cable system model, which is based on an information flow that goes in one direction. When cable companies added the Internet to their roster of services, the uploading component was something new. Plus, more people download than upload, so the companies don't allocate as much bandwidth to the upload direction."

A second pair of tabs labeled "Mode" and "Format" gave me some additional options, but Matthews says that leaving both in Automatic will work fine in almost every case. "Fetch recognizes all of the most common file types, including JPEG, MPEG, QuickTime, mp3, AIFF, and WAV. If you're using a more obscure format the Mode and Format options let you tell Fetch how to handle the files properly."

Working with FTP was a learning experience for Aston and Lonstron, who use MacroMedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks to design the sites they develop. This software package includes an FTP component and so they used it, rather than Fetch, to retrieve the quartet I'd placed on the site.

Aston and Lonstron then built a temporary page, which we labeled "The Demo Room." Eventually, we'll have a link to The Demo Room on the main page of the site. But for now, if you'd like to listen to the piece, go to the site's main page, click on my left eye, and you'll be ushered into The Demo Room. Click once on The Amazing X Ray Machine to play the file or control/click on it to download the piece to your desktop.

"FTP is a great tool," says Lonstron. "It lets us access large files such as photographs and music that our clients send to us. It saves the time and expense that would be required to transfer these files to storage media and send them via post. It's really very easy!"

I agree. Although I scratched my head a few times before the concepts jelled, the process of sending files with FTP is actually very simple. There are nuances: If you want anyone to be able to send you files but only a limited number of people to have access to them, you'll want to bone up on what an anonymous FTP server is, for example. But I'm very excited at not having to burn CDs and send them off to Aston and Lonstron. I'm sure we'll be communicating this way with greater frequency in the future, and so will you once you try FTP.

Gary Eskow, a contributing editor for Mix magazine, is a freelance composer and journalist who lives in central New Jersey. He can be reached through his website at www.garyeskow.com .

Ipswitch's WS_FTP

IPSWITCH, LEXINGTON, MASS., IS the manufacturer of one of the most popular FTP software packages for the PC: WS_FTP Pro ($39.95 retail) and W_FTP Server ($395).

"Almost everyone who uses the Internet to transfer files can gain from integrating FTP into the process," says Mike Aalto, Ipswitch's public relations manager. "Even the casual swapping of mp3 files can be sped up using a product like WS_FTP. If you and I both have a copy of this program and access to a server - it doesn't have to be ours - we could send data to each other quickly." Aalto concedes that the greatest demand for products like those Ipswitch makes comes from companies that are networked together. Using a gradated password hierarchy, files can be made available to different levels of company employees.

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