Releasing a Good Karma Music Album

In this steps, we need to 1) check and correct filename convention, 2) check and fix mp3 meta data, 3) zip album

This post describes steps to release a Good Karma Music album for downloading. We’ll be using Brian Conroy’s “The Light That Never Dies” as an example.

Prepare album zip file

Filename convention

MP3 files should be able to be sorted by track order easily, such as “album name + track order + track name”, or “track order + track name”.

“The Light That Never Dies” mp3 files did not have track order in the file name, such as:

Singing The Sun Up.mp3

We use contention “track order + track name” and rename it to:

01 Singing The Sun Up.mp3

You may notice we use “01” instead of “1” here for the track order. This will make sure track below 10, such as track 9, will be listed before track 10 and above.

Check and fix MP3 metadata

Use Kid3 Audio Tagger or other audio file metadata viewer to view mp3 files to make sure every mp3 file includes cover art and correct metadata.

Using Brian Conroy’s “The Light That Never Dies” album as example, it initially doesn’t have any meta data in the mp3 file as shown below:

Without metadata ( cover art, track name information) embedded in the mp3, user won’t have any song information when they play the music.

Update all tracks with required information ( cover art, title, artist, album name, date, track number, genre … ) as shown below:

For list of available genre, you can reference Apple Podcast Genre or Apple Music Guide

Zip album

Now you have files with correct filename, files with correct metadata. Create a folder with album name. In our example, that will be “The Light That Never Dies”. Then put 1) all audio files in the folder, 2) booklet if available

Zip file

Upload to Dharmaradio server

Contact DharmaRadio website admin to acquire FTP login information.

Upload to DharmaRadio server using FTP software, such as Filezilla, create a folder with the album name under dharmatalks folder, such as dharmatalks/the-light-that-never-dies/

The download path to the album becomes

https://dharmaradio.org/dharmatalks/[album-name]/[album-name].zip

such as

https://dharmaradio.org/dharmatalks/the-light-that-never-dies]/the-light-that-never-dies.zip

Right-click on the six-dot on the last raw of albums to duplicate the last raw of the albums if needed.

We’ll only add one album so delete the extra album and button on the right in the newly added raw.

Replace cover art, title, download button descriptor

Select the button, in the Advanced tab, enter a unique ID in the “CSS ID” for the album download button. For Brian’s album, we use “lightbuttonid”. Without this, user will not be directed to the download page.

Below the album download button, there’s a gray bar which is custom HTML code. This is where the download JavaScript code is. The code will based on the buttonID to redirect to the download page.

Click on the gray bar and edit the HTML code on the left:

At the end of the script, copy paste the block like the following, but replace the buttonid and redirected URL with your the button ID you entered in the previous step (in Brian’s album’s case, we use “lightbuttonid”, and permalink when you created the download page ( in the case for Brian’s album, it’s https://www.dharmaradio.org/sdm_downloads/the-light-that-never-dies/”

document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function(event) {
jQuery('#lightbuttonid a').click(function(){
window.location.replace("https://www.dharmaradio.org/sdm_downloads/the-light-that-never-dies/");
});
});

Click on “Update” to publish the page when finish editing. This will update the download page.

At this point, all the downloading functions are completed, but we want to publicize it by adding it to the Good Karma Music page and also add music page.