Blow the candles

It was on a glorious day of 2003, the 7th of March to be more precise, during the night when the portal was finally open to public.

Yes, i remember it like if it was yesterday...

The portal was supposed to be launched for new year, but so much code was unstable and prone to bugs and piracy, that it was all delayed.

Trying to find a screen shot from those early days isn't easy, for those that remember it, the menu was on the left side of the screen and was vertical. The flash player didn't come until a couple of weeks after the launch, even though it's hard to believe, it wasn't copied from another mp3-hosting site... In fact ebel was the only "mp3-hosting" that used a flash player.... They all worked with m3u files and needed your pc to be configured correctly to read it. After less than a month the number of people that couldn't read songs because of that were too high and thus i had to find a better solution. Thought about a java player. But at the time there was also issues on java configuration ^^ , then i thought about flash, that i knew could stream mp3 in it. So i checked it out, googled a lot... And found 1 flash mp3 player. It was ugly, and really not well coded... Though i didn't know specifically flash programming at the time, i dug in and changed the graphics with jpeg's made by one of our members (Survivor), and then added a special layer to load the artist and title directly from ebel. And out came the flash player 0.1

over the time i reworked it, and finally rewrote it all from scratch to make the v2 version. That integrated even more with ebel. The current flash player enqueues songs from ebel when you click on listen, meaning that song are added in it's playlist when you click on songs on the website. It gets the track infos directly from the site, you can post a comment and give your subjective opinion on the song. Soon you'll be able to add songs to your favorites, save the playlist, open a previously saved playlist, and add random songs.

But the flash player isn't the only innovative feature or concept launched by ebel.

Even though these days a lot of options exists for young artists like your selfs, myspace,youtube,jamendo, etc....

Back in 2002 the web was very poor in that domain. The only sites viable that you could upload your music to was mp3.com and vitaminic ( i think it was already there but found it after ebel launch).

Needless to say those sites were just a hosting site and offered very little to the artist (besides customizing the page and having stats on your songs).... I personally myself was composing "seriously" since 2000, and was quite frustrated with the lack of feedback. My friends thought my music was 'cool' but didn't understand it. Thats how it all started.

Anyway,

E-bel is now 4 years old, 10.000 songs online on the site, received over 15.000 songs since it was launched.

Electrobel has the ability to become as big as you can dream off. It all depends on how YOU contribute to the site.

big things that happen to Electrobel happen thanks to YOU, i contribute every way i can, but face it, i'm mainly a computer geek that makes some music, I'm not a musician or someone from that 'milieu'. I wish i was, but i'm not. I don't have all the connections or informations some of you have, fact is, some of the best things that happened to ebel happened thanks to the contributions of a member. A Member that thought "Electrobel is giving me many great things, allowing me to make my music and have it heard without compromise. Maybe it's time i get a little back to all that was given to me". I have thus decided to start a Thank You page, mentioning all the people that have helped ebel in a significant way over the past 4years. some examples ?

Kinet for making the whole t-shirt experience possible Bart / JeMenFish for countless contributions and cooperations with electrobel Survivor for making the first ebel skin, even though it's all been redrawn by myself now, he helped give ebel's look Zed / Netrax for making possible the first ebel hosting with a good deal. S-Cape and Kwen for making the Cafe Central events possible **Gozno ** for the escalier events of 2006 **DTR ** for handling the holland portal Suredj for handling the french portal **Liquidbass ** for the help on the netlabel, on the UK portal, and traveling to den haag to party with us langweiligheit ** for inviting ebel to holland ** Dirk from beurs for ebel events at Beurschouwburg FlashyJ to handle webmastering things when i wasn't available Administrator for recently taking over some aspects of the site, and staying in the shadow etc... (This is just a quicklist, i'm not putting the complete list on the site until i'm sure all that contributed are on it, by fear of forgetting someone)

It is because those members gave something back that ebel grew a little more, and gave new opportunities to everyone. I don't want to quote nixon, but think about what you could give back to ebel.

We are always looking for sponsoring, places to play, cooperations, moderators, good ideas, ...

I cannot find a good way to end this mail, i'm still hesitating between the vulcan or the jedi message..... or maybe i should do it britney style and shave my head ? :p