The Hawkwynd Radio Website is more than just a display of now playing info. It is a a compilation of metadata from several sources to bring all the parts together on one easy to use interface, providing data about the current playing artist, the release information as well as members of the group.
The Tesseract – Tessa
The Tesseract is an application I developed to aquire the music metadata from various database API’s and collect the data into the database for display while the song is being played. The main application relies on several resources across 3 different API’s and compiles it all into one database on Hawkwynd Radio’s server. I named it the “Tesseract” (Tessa for short) from the Iron Man movies because I’m a nerd and it’s cool, and it fits the need nicely.
Tessa is primarily a PHP based application, with jQuery calls to obtain the data displayed on the page. Simple but quite powerful, it continues to evolve and updates are constantly ongoing to improve performance as well as design for mobile users.
Cover Art Modal (Album covers)
The album cover art is displayed, and is also a link to a modal window that provides additional information about the album’s release year, and label. It also displays the file format information (FLAC/MP3, etc). Having the album cover displayed brings back the memory of when we used to listen to vinyl records as the only means, other that the radio for enjoyment.
Group Members Listing
To the right of the album art image, the song title and album name, followed by the current active members or participants from that particular release. Each item in the list contains a link (eye) which opens a modal window displaying the members’ information, as well as a photo if available for that member. Good information for learning more about where a band became what they are, and where the members may have gone after they left.
Release Track Listing
The track listing for the release is displayed at the right, which displays the songs on the album with each song’s duration time.
Active status display
Beneath the main window, in the active status area (blue bar) is displayed the Tessa version, the format of the current playing song, the shoutcast server up time, as well as how many unique listeners are currently connected to the stream. It’s nerdly data that I like to see because I like it, and it provides some additional information without me having to go to another panel to find it.
The collapsible About panels
The collapsed blue panels contain entertaining and informative metadata obtained through the Wikipedia API about the artist and current release (if available), as well as the history listing of the last songs played within the last 60 minutes, in addition the artists’ discography. The discography listing displays the year of the release, the release title, and the label it was released on. A good resource for finding other music by that particular artist when building a collection for the artist.
More Nerdly Statistics
The nerdly statistics displays the relevant data about the Keep contents and the database activities. I like to look at this to see the FLAC – MP3 ratio. The vast staff are continuously updating the music to replace the MP3 files with FLAC files for better sound quality. The “Songs Served” is a counter of the number of songs Hawkwynd Radio has played since we went active with out 24/7 broadcasts back in 2019.
I will be going into detail about how all this works in my technical releases coming soon. (working on it now)
The whole application runs in the web browser, primarily jQuery, PHP/MySQL rest requests, refreshing every 10 seconds so when a song ends and a new one begins, the page is updated and the content is replaced with the new content obtained by The Tesseract.