Singles. No, not that kind.

[mdlbear]

Spent much of the day working on an OSCON trip report. That reminded me of the disk I made for cflute last weekend with an Audacity project on it, so I spent most of my lunchtime walk thinking about "super-single" CD-R disks. The idea would be to bundle up the raw tracks for a couple of songs (gotta have an A side and a B side), multi-platform editing software (Audacity), maybe some cover art, the tracks' web pages, and so on. It could easily be a bootable Linux CD, perhaps based on Lamppix Mini, but you have to assume that many people would prefer to just pop it in and browse to it. Add some premixed tracks, and Songbird as a player.

There are (at least) a few moderately tricky things to work out:

• Scripts for building the disk. This is likely to be some variant on an existing mastering script, though the instructions for Lamppix Mini are simple enough that I should be able to write one pretty quickly.
• A corresponding website that users could connect to. I'm thinking of something combining a wiki with a git or Subversion repository, so that people could get together and have fun, and upload their variations. Audacity has the advantage that most editing is done by making changes in the project file, leaving the original audio files unmodified.
• How to pay for the horrendous storage and bandwidth requirements such a website would involve.

added: here's my previous post on the subject.