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• Adding C64 SID Music

  1er novembre 2012, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I have been working on adding support for SID files — the music format for the Commodore 64 — to the game music website for awhile. I feel a bit out of my element since I’m not that familiar with the C64. But why should I let that slow me down ? Allow me to go through the steps I have previously outlined in order to make this happen.

  
  
  

  I need to know what picture should represent the system in the search results page. The foregoing picture should be fine, but I’m getting way ahead of myself.

  Phase 1 is finding adequate player software. The most venerable contender in this arena is libsidplay, or so I first thought. It turns out that there’s libsidplay (originally hosted at Geocities, apparently, and no longer on the net) and also libsidplay2. Both are kind of old (libsidplay2 was last updated in 2004). I tried to compile libsidplay2 and the C++ didn’t agree with current version of g++.

  However, a recent effort named libsidplayfp is carrying on the SID emulation tradition. It works rather well, notwithstanding the fact that compiling the entire library has a habit of apparently hanging the Linux VM where I develop this stuff.

  Phase 2 is to develop a testbench app around the playback library. With the help of the libsidplayfp library maintainers, I accomplished this. The testbench app consistently requires about 15% of a single core of a fairly powerful Core i7. So I look forward to recommendations that I port that playback library to pure JavaScript.

  Phase 3 is plug into the web player. I haven’t worked on this yet. I’m confident that this will work since phase 2 worked (plus, I have a plan to combine phases 2 and 3).

  One interesting issue that has arisen is that proper operation of libsidplayfp requires that 3 C64 ROM files be present (the, ahem, KERNAL, BASIC interpreter, and character generator). While these are copyrighted ROMs, they are easily obtainable on the internet. The goal of my project is to eliminate as much friction as possible for enjoying these old tunes. To that end, I will just bake the ROM files directly into the player.

  Phase 4 is collecting a SID song corpus. This is the simplest part of the whole process thanks to the remarkable curation efforts of the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC). Anyone can download a giant archive of every known SID file. So that’s a done deal.

  Or is it ? One small issue is that I was hoping that the first iteration of my game music website would focus on, well, game music. There is a lot of music in the HVSC that are original compositions or come from demos. The way that the archive is organized makes it difficult to automatically discern whether a particular SID file comes from a game or not.

  Phase 5 is munging the metadata. The good news here is that the files have the metadata built in. The not-so-great news is that there isn’t quite as much as I might like. Each file is tagged with title, author, and publisher/copyright. If there is more than one song in a file, they all have the same metadata. Fortunately, if I can import them all into my game music database, there is an opportunity to add a lot more metadata.

  Further, there is no play length metadata for these files. This means I will need to set each to a default length like 2 minutes and do something like I did before in order to automatically determine if any songs terminate sooner.

  Oddly, the issue I’m most concerned about is character encoding. This is the first project for which I’m making certain that I understand character encoding since I can’t reasonably get away with assuming that everything is ASCII. So far, based on the random sampling of SID files I have checked, there is a good chance of encountering metadata strings with characters that are not in the lower ASCII set. From what I have observed, these characters map to Unicode code points. So I finally get to learn about manipulating strings in such a way that it preserves the character encoding. At the very least, I need Python to rip the strings out of the binary SID files and make sure the Unicode remains intact while being inserted into an SQLite3 database.

• Adventures In NAS

  1er janvier, par Multimedia Mike — General

  In my post last year about my out-of-control single-board computer (SBC) collection which included my meager network attached storage (NAS) solution, I noted that :

  I find that a lot of my fellow nerds massively overengineer their homelab NAS setups. I’ll explore this in a future post. For my part, people tend to find my homelab NAS solution slightly underengineered.

  So here I am, exploring this is a future post. I’ve been in the home NAS game a long time, but have never had very elaborate solutions for such. For my part, I tend to take an obsessively reductionist view of what constitutes a NAS : Any small computer with a pool of storage and a network connection, running the Linux operating system and the Samba file sharing service.

  
  
  

  Many home users prefer to buy turnkey boxes, usually that allow you to install hard drives yourself, and then configure the box and its services with a friendly UI. My fellow weird computer nerds often buy cast-off enterprise hardware and set up more resilient, over-engineered solutions, as long as they have strategies to mitigate the noise and dissipate the heat, and don’t mind the electricity bills.

  If it works, awesome ! As an old hand at this, I am rather stuck in my ways, however, preferring to do my own stunts, both with the hardware and software solutions.

  My History With Home NAS Setups
  In 1998, I bought myself a new computer — beige box tower PC, as was the style as the time. This was when normal people only had one computer at most. It ran Windows, but I was curious about this new thing called “Linux” and learned to dual boot that. Later that year, it dawned on me that nothing prevented me from buying a second ugly beige box PC and running Linux exclusively on it. Further, it could be a headless Linux box, connected by ethernet, and I could consolidate files into a single place using this file sharing software named Samba.
  

  I remember it being fairly onerous to get Samba working in those days. And the internet was not quite so helpful in those days. I recall that the thing that blocked me for awhile was needing to know that I had to specify an entry for the Samba server machine in the LMHOSTS (Lanman hosts) file on the Windows 95 machine.

  However, after I cracked that code, I have pretty much always had some kind of ad-hoc home NAS setup, often combined with a headless Linux development box.

  In the early 2000s, I built a new beige box PC for a file server, with a new hard disk, and a coworker tutored me on setting up a (P)ATA UDMA 133 (or was it 150 ? anyway, it was (P)ATA’s last hurrah before SATA conquered all) expansion card and I remember profiling that the attached hard drive worked at a full 21 MBytes/s reading. It was pretty slick. Except I hadn’t really thought things through. You see, I had a hand-me-down ethernet hub cast-off from my job at the time which I wanted to use. It was a 100 Mbps repeater hub, not a switch, so the catch was that all connected machines had to be capable of 100 Mbps. So, after getting all of my machines (3 at the time) upgraded to support 10/100 ethernet (the old off-brand PowerPC running Linux was the biggest challenge), I profiled transfers and realized that the best this repeater hub could achieve was about 3.6 MBytes/s. For a long time after that, I just assumed that was the upper limit of what a 100 Mbps network could achieve. Obviously, I now know that the upper limit ought to be around 11.2 MBytes/s and if I had gamed out that fact in advance, I would have realized it didn’t make sense to care about super-fast (for the time) disk performance.

  At this time, I was doing a lot for development for MPlayer/xine/FFmpeg. I stored all of my multimedia material on this NAS. I remember being confused when I was working with Y4M data, which is raw frames, which is lots of data. xine, which employed a pre-buffering strategy, would play fine for a few seconds and then stutter. Eventually, I reasoned out that the files I was working with had a data rate about twice what my awful repeater hub supported, which is probably the first time I came to really understand and respect streaming speeds and their implications for multimedia playback.

  Smaller Solutions
  For a period, I didn’t have a NAS. Then I got an Apple AirPort Extreme, which I noticed had a USB port. So I bought a dual drive brick to plug into it and used that for a time. Later (2009), I had this thing called the MSI Wind Nettop which is the only PC I’ve ever seen that can use a CompactFlash (CF) card for a boot drive. So I did just that, and installed a large drive so it could function as a NAS, as well as a headless dev box. I’m still amazed at what a low-power I/O beast this thing is, at least when compared to all the ARM SoCs I have tried in the intervening 1.5 decades. I’ve had spinning hard drives in this thing that could read at 160 MBytes/s (‘dd’ method) and have no trouble saturating the gigabit link at 112 MBytes/s, all with its early Intel Atom CPU.

  Around 2015, I wanted a more capable headless dev box and discovered Intel’s line of NUCs. I got one of the fat models that can hold a conventional 2.5″ spinning drive in addition to the M.2 SATA SSD and I was off and running. That served me fine for a few years, until I got into the ARM SBC scene. One major limitation here is that 2.5″ drives aren’t available in nearly the capacities that make a NAS solution attractive.

  Current Solution
  My current NAS solution, chronicled in my last SBC post– the ODroid-HC2, which is a highly compact ARM SoC with an integrated USB3-SATA bridge so that a SATA drive can be connected directly to it :

  
  

  

  ODROID-HC2 NAS

  
  

  I tend to be weirdly proficient at recalling dates, so I’m surprised that I can’t recall when I ordered this and put it into service. But I’m pretty sure it was circa 2018. It’s only equipped with an 8 TB drive now, but I seem to recall that it started out with only a 4 TB drive. I think I upgraded to the 8 TB drive early in the pandemic in 2020, when ISPs were implementing temporary data cap amnesty and I was doing what a r/DataHoarder does.

  The HC2 has served me well, even though it has a number of shortcomings for a hardware set chartered for NAS :

  1. While it has a gigabit ethernet port, it’s documented that it never really exceeds about 70 MBytes/s, due to the SoC’s limitations
  2. The specific ARM chip (Samsung Exynos 5422 ; more than a decade old as of this writing) lacks cryptography instructions, slowing down encryption if that’s your thing (e.g., LUKS)
  3. While the SoC supports USB3, that block is tied up for the SATA interface ; the remaining USB port is only capable of USB2 speeds
  4. 32-bit ARM, which prevented me from running certain bits of software I wanted to try (like Minio)
  5. Only 1 drive, so no possibility for RAID (again, if that’s your thing)

  I also love to brag on the HC2’s power usage : I once profiled the unit for a month using a Kill-A-Watt and under normal usage (with the drive spinning only when in active use). The unit consumed 4.5 kWh… in an entire month.

  New Solution
  Enter the ODroid-HC4 (I purchased mine from Ameridroid but Hardkernel works with numerous distributors) :

  
  

  

  ODroid-HC4 with an SSD and a conventional drive

  
  

  I ordered this earlier in the year and after many months of procrastinating and obsessing over the best approach to take with its general usage, I finally have it in service as my new NAS. Comparing point by point with the HC2 :

  1. The gigabit ethernet runs at full speed (though a few things on my network run at 2.5 GbE now, so I guess I’ll always be behind)
  2. The ARM chip (Amlogic S905X3) has AES cryptography acceleration and handles all the LUKS stuff without breaking a sweat ; “cryptsetup benchmark” reports between 500-600 MBytes/s on all the AES variants
  3. The USB port is still only USB2, so no improvement there
  4. 64-bit ARM, which means I can run Minio to simulate block storage in a local dev environment for some larger projects I would like to undertake
  5. Supports 2 drives, if RAID is your thing

  How I Set It Up
  How to set up the drive configuration ? As should be apparent from the photo above, I elected for an SSD (500 GB) for speed, paired with a conventional spinning HDD (18 TB) for sheer capacity. I’m not particularly trusting of RAID. I’ve watched it fail too many times, on systems that I don’t even manage, not to mention that aforementioned RAID brick that I had attached to the Apple AirPort Extreme.

  I had long been planning to use bcache, the block caching interface for Linux, which can use the SSD as a speedy cache in front of the more capacious disk. There is also LVM cache, which is supposed to achieve something similar. And then I had to evaluate the trade-offs in whether I wanted write-back, write-through, or write-around configurations.

  This was all predicated on the assumption that the spinning drive would not be able to saturate the gigabit connection. When I got around to setting up the hardware and trying some basic tests, I found that the conventional HDD had no trouble keeping up with the gigabit data rate, both reading and writing, somewhat obviating the need for SSD acceleration using any elaborate caching mechanisms.

  Maybe that’s because I sprung for the WD Red Pro series this time, rather than the Red Plus ? I’m guessing that conventional drives do deteriorate over the years. I’ll find out.

  For the operating system, I stuck with my newest favorite Linux distro : DietPi. While HardKernel (parent of ODroid) makes images for the HC units, I had also used DietPi for the HC2 for the past few years, as it tends to stay more up to date.

  Then I rsync’d my data from HC2 -> HC4. It was only about 6.5 TB of total data but it took days as this WD Red Plus drive is only capable of reading at around 10 MBytes/s these days. Painful.

  For file sharing, I’m pretty sure most normal folks have nice web UIs in their NAS boxes which allow them to easily configure and monitor the shares. I know there are such applications I could set up. But I’ve been doing this so long, I just do a bare bones setup through the terminal. I installed regular Samba and then brought over my smb.conf file from the HC2. 1 by 1, I tested that each of the old shares were activated on the new NAS and deactivated on the old NAS. I also set up a new share for the SSD. I guess that will just serve as a fast I/O scratch space on the NAS.

  The conventional drive spins up and down. That’s annoying when I’m actively working on something but manage not to hit the drive for like 5 minutes and then an application blocks while the drive wakes up. I suppose I could set it up so that it is always running. However, I micro-manage this with a custom bash script I wrote a long time ago which logs into the NAS and runs the “date” command every 2 minutes, appending the output to a file. As a bonus, it also prints data rate up/down stats every 5 seconds. The spinning file (“nas-main/zz-keep-spinning/keep-spinning.txt”) has never been cleared and has nearly a quarter million lines. I suppose that implies that it has kept the drive spinning for 1/2 million minutes which works out to around 347 total days. I should compare that against the drive’s SMART stats, if I can remember how. The earliest timestamp in the file is from March 2018, so I know the HC2 NAS has been in service at least that long.

  For tasks, vintage cron still does everything I could need. In this case, that means reaching out to websites (like this one) and automatically backing up static files.

  I also have to have a special script for starting up. Fortunately, I was able to bring this over from the HC2 and tweak it. The data disks (though not boot disk) are encrypted. Those need to be unlocked and only then is it safe for the Samba and Minio services to start up. So one script does all that heavy lifting in the rare case of a reboot (this is the type of system that’s well worth having on a reliable UPS).

  Further Work
  I need to figure out how to use the OLED display on the NAS, and how to make it show something more useful than the current time and date, which is what it does in its default configuration with HardKernel’s own Linux distro. With DietPi, it does nothing by default. I’m thinking it should be able to show the percent usage of each of the 2 drives, at a minimum.

  I also need to establish a more responsible backup regimen. I’m way too lazy about this. Fortunately, I reason that I can keep the original HC2 in service, repurposed to accept backups from the main NAS. Again, I’m sort of micro-managing this since a huge amount of data isn’t worth backing up (remember the whole DataHoarder bit), but the most important stuff will be shipped off.

  The post Adventures In NAS first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.

• How to Conduct a Customer Journey Analysis (Step-by-Step)

  9 mai 2024, par Erin

  Your customers are everything.

  Treat them right, and you can generate recurring revenue for years. Treat them wrong ; you’ll be spinning your wheels and dealing with churn.

  How do you give your customers the best experience possible so they want to stick around ?

  Improve their customer experience.

  How ?

  By conducting a customer journey analysis.

  When you know how your customers experience your business, you can improve it to meet and exceed customer expectations.

  In this guide, we’ll break down how the customer journey works and give you a step-by-step guide to conduct a thorough customer journey analysis so you can grow your brand.

  What is a customer journey analysis ?

  Every customer you’ve ever served went on a journey to find you.

  From the moment they first heard of you, to the point that they became a customer. 

  Everything in between is the customer journey.

  A customer journey analysis is how you track and analyse how your customers use different channels to interact with your brand.

  

  Analysing your customer journey involves identifying the customer’s different touchpoints with your business so you can understand how it impacts their experience. 

  This means looking at every moment they interacted with your brand before, during and after a sale to help you gain actionable insights into their experience and improve it to reach your business objectives.

  Your customers go through specific customer touchpoints you can track. By analysing this customer journey from a bird’s eye view, you can get a clear picture of the entire customer experience.

  4 benefits of customer journey analysis

  Before we dive into the different steps involved in a customer journey analysis, let’s talk about why it’s vital to analyse the customer journey.

  By regularly analysing your customer journey, you’ll be able to improve the entire customer experience with practical insights, allowing you to :

  Understand your customers better

  What’s one key trait all successful businesses have ?

  They understand their customers.

  By analysing your customer journey regularly, you’ll gain new insights into their wants, needs, desires and behaviours, allowing you to serve them better. These insights will show you what led them to buy a product (or not).

  For example, through conducting a customer journey analysis, a company might find out that customers who come from LinkedIn are more likely to buy than those coming from Facebook.

  Find flaws in your customer journey

  Nobody wants to hear they have flaws. But the reality is your customer journey likely has a few flaws you could improve.

  By conducting customer journey analysis consistently, you’ll be able to pinpoint precisely where you’re losing prospects along the way. 

  For example, you may discover you’re losing customers through Facebook Ads. Or you may find your email strategy isn’t as good as it used to be.

  But it’s not just about the channel. It could be a transition between two channels. For example, you may have great engagement on Instagram but are not converting them into email subscribers. The issue may be that your transition between the two channels has a leak.

  Or you may find that prospects using certain devices (i.e., mobile, tablet, desktop) have lower conversions. This might be due to design and formatting issues across different devices.

  By looking closely at your customer journey and the different customer touchpoints, you’ll see issues preventing prospects from turning into leads or customers from returning to buy again as loyal customers.

  Gain insights into how you can improve your brand

  Your customer journey analysis won’t leave you with a list of problems. Instead, you’ll have a list of opportunities.

  Since you’ll be able to better understand your customers and where they’re falling off the sales funnel, you’ll have new insights into how you can improve the experience and grow your brand.

  For example, maybe you notice that your visitors are getting stuck at one stage of the customer journey and you’re trying to find out why.

  So, you leverage Matomo’s heatmaps, sessions recordings and scroll depth to find out more.

  In the case below, we can see that Matomo’s scroll map is showing that only 65% of the visitors are reaching the main call to action (to write a review). 

  

  To try to push for higher conversions and get more reviews, we could consider moving that button higher up on the page, ideally above the fold.

  Rather than guessing what’s preventing conversions, you can use user behaviour analytics to “step in our user’s shoes” so you can optimise faster and with confidence.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  Grow your revenue

  By taking charge of your customer journey, you can implement different strategies that will help you increase your reach, gain more prospects, convert more prospects into customers and turn regulars into loyal customers.

  Using customer journey analysis will help you optimise those different touchpoints to maximise the ROI of your channels and get the most out of each marketing activity you implement.

  7 steps to conduct a customer journey analysis

  Now that you know the importance of conducting a customer journey analysis regularly, let’s dive into how to implement an analysis.

  Here are the seven steps you can take to analyse the customer journey to improve your customer experience :

  

  1. Map out your customer journey

  Your first step to conducting an effective customer journey analysis is to map your entire customer journey.

  Customer journey mapping means looking at several factors :

  • Buying process
  • Customer actions
  • Buying emotions
  • Buying pain points
  • Solutions

  Once you have an overview of your customer journey maps, you’ll gain insights into your customers, their interests and how they interact with your brand. 

  After this, it’s time to dive into the touchpoints.

  2. Identify all the customer touchpoints 

  To improve your customer journey, you need to know every touchpoint a customer can (and does) make with your brand.

  This means taking note of every single channel and medium they use to communicate with your brand :

  • Website
  • Social media
  • Search engines (SEO)
  • Email marketing
  • Paid advertising
  • And more

  Essentially, anywhere you communicate and interact with your customers is fair game to analyse.

  If you want to analyse your entire sales funnel, you can try Matomo, a privacy-friendly web analytics tool. 

  You should make sure to split up your touchpoints into different customer journey stages :

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Conversion
  • Advocacy

  Then, it’s time to move on to how customers interact on these channels.

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  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

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  3. Measure how customers interact on each channel

  To understand the customer journey, you can’t just know where your customers interact with you. You end up learning how they’re interacting.

  This is only possible by measuring customer interactions.

  How ?

  By using a web analytics tool like Matomo.

  With Matomo, you can track every customer action on your website.

  This means anytime they :

  • Visit your website
  • View a web page
  • Click a link
  • Fill out a form
  • Purchase a product
  • View different media
  • And more

  You should analyse your engagement on your website, apps and other channels, like email and social media.

  4. Implement marketing attribution

  Now that you know where your customers are and how they interact, it’s time to analyse the effectiveness of each channel based on your conversion rates.

  Implementing marketing attribution (or multi-touch attribution) is a great way to do this.

  Attribution is how you determine which channels led to a conversion.

  While single-touch attribution models credit one channel for a conversion, marketing attribution gives credit to a few channels.

  For example, let’s say Bob is looking for a new bank. He sees an Instagram post and finds himself on HSBC’s website. After looking at a few web pages, he attends a webinar hosted by HSBC on financial planning and investment strategies. One week later, he gets an email from HSBC following up on the webinar. Then, he decides to sign up for HSBC’s online banking.

  Single touch attribution would attribute 100% of the conversion to email, which doesn’t show the whole picture. Marketing attribution would credit all channels : social media, website content, webinars and email.

  Matomo offers multiple attribution models. These models leverage different weighting factors, like time decay or linear, so that you can allocate credit to each touchpoint based on its impact.

  Matomo’s multi-touch attribution reports give you in-depth insights into how revenue is distributed across different channels. These detailed reports help you analyse each channel’s contribution to revenue generation so you can optimise the customer journey and improve business outcomes.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  5. Use a funnels report to find where visitors are leaving

  Once you set up your marketing attribution, it’s time to analyse where visitors are falling off.

  You can leverage Matomo funnels to find out the conversion rate at each step of the journey on your website. Funnel reports can help you see exactly where visitors are falling through the cracks so you can increase conversions.

  6. Analyse why visitors aren’t converting

  Once you can see where visitors are leaving, you can start to understand why.

  For example, let’s say you analyse your funnels report in Matomo and see your landing page is experiencing the highest level of drop-offs.

  

  You can also use form analytics to find out why users aren’t converting on your landing pages – a crucial part of the customer journey.

  7. A/B test to improve the customer journey

  The final step to improve your customer journey is to conduct A/B tests. These are tests where you test one version of a landing page to see which one converts better, drives more traffic, or generates more revenue.

  For example, you could create two versions of a header on your website and drive 50% of your traffic to each version. Then, once you’ve got your winner, you can keep that as your new landing page.

  

  Using the data from your A/B tests, you can optimise your customer journey to help convert more prospects into customers.

  Use Matomo to improve your customer journey analysis

  Now that you understand why it’s important to conduct customer journey analysis regularly and how it works, it’s time to put this into practice.

  To improve the customer journey, you need to understand what’s happening at each stage of your funnel. 

  Matomo gives you insights into your customer journey so you can improve website performance and convert more visitors into customers.

  Used by over 1 million websites, Matomo is the leading privacy-friendly web analytics solution in the world. 

  Matomo provides you with accurate, unsampled data so you understand exactly what’s going on with your website performance.

  The best part ?

  It’s easy to use and is compliant with the strictest privacy regulations.

  Try Matomo free for 21-days and start Improving your customer journey. No credit card required.

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