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- Jan14
- Marshall Stokes is a fan of Bradley Thomas Watkins
- Dec162020
- Marshall Stokes has 1 new favorite album
- Oct172020
- Marshall Stokes is a fan of EatMe
- Marshall Stokes has 1 new favorite album
- May182020
- Marshall Stokes created 1 new blog post
Recent Blog Entries
- May18,2020Experimental Release Medium - no comments
- Dec7,2018Featured: Hollywood Drunks, Paper Sailboat, Dad School - no comments
- Aug15,2017Featured: Steve Weeks - no comments
Influences and Skills These are musical styles (genres), artistic influences, and skills that this user has listed. You can rate each item for this user by clicking the correspoding bar.
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Marshall Stokes
I started playing guitar in the mid '90s, learning what I could from my friends who were fortunate enough to take weekly lessons, and augmenting that with tabs to my favorite Zeppelin and Tom Petty songs. As I struggled through my teens, playing music was my primary source of artistic release, and I loved every minute of it. I even found that I enjoyed the brutal frustration that many musicians suffer through in the beginning, despite the fact that I nearly gave it up altogether many times during the first two years.
My other passions have always been computers, networks, interwebs, and the blinking lights and colored cables associated with those things. I am a geek.
I first combined these interests in the late '90s, formulating a plan to create a website that would enable amateur musicians to put their recorded music online and share it with the world. It was essentially a self-promotion tool. Unfortunately, I did not yet possess the technical knowledge and experience to bring such an idea to fruition at that time. The project was shelved before it even got halfway through the planning phase.
Years passed, and I found myself running a small web dev and consulting company with my wife and one employee. In late 2007 we teamed up with a couple of long-time friends and decided to take the biggest risk of our lives. We revisited my college-era idea of a website for musicians, and started drawing up a plan. We envisioned a website that prioritized freedom and openness for musicians and artists, and we designed a custom web platform that eliminated the most glaring shortcoming of all major music-related websites: The lack of a seamless music player. Why should you have to stay on one page to hear the music you want to hear? Why do so many sites insist on controlling your experience and limiting what you can do online? Why not provide freedom to music fans, especially considering that the technology is well within reach.
We created Uvumi.com with these concepts in mind. Everyone on the team is an artist of some sort, and we all strongly believe that the future of the music industry involves freedom of expression, freedom of art consumption, and massive self-promotion.
Uvumi is a Swahili word that means rumor, buzz, murmur, or hum. We thought that fit nicely with the DIY theme we are embracing.
CREATE YOUR ART, UNLEASH YOUR BEAUTY, SHARE YOUR WORK!
My other passions have always been computers, networks, interwebs, and the blinking lights and colored cables associated with those things. I am a geek.
I first combined these interests in the late '90s, formulating a plan to create a website that would enable amateur musicians to put their recorded music online and share it with the world. It was essentially a self-promotion tool. Unfortunately, I did not yet possess the technical knowledge and experience to bring such an idea to fruition at that time. The project was shelved before it even got halfway through the planning phase.
Years passed, and I found myself running a small web dev and consulting company with my wife and one employee. In late 2007 we teamed up with a couple of long-time friends and decided to take the biggest risk of our lives. We revisited my college-era idea of a website for musicians, and started drawing up a plan. We envisioned a website that prioritized freedom and openness for musicians and artists, and we designed a custom web platform that eliminated the most glaring shortcoming of all major music-related websites: The lack of a seamless music player. Why should you have to stay on one page to hear the music you want to hear? Why do so many sites insist on controlling your experience and limiting what you can do online? Why not provide freedom to music fans, especially considering that the technology is well within reach.
We created Uvumi.com with these concepts in mind. Everyone on the team is an artist of some sort, and we all strongly believe that the future of the music industry involves freedom of expression, freedom of art consumption, and massive self-promotion.
Uvumi is a Swahili word that means rumor, buzz, murmur, or hum. We thought that fit nicely with the DIY theme we are embracing.
CREATE YOUR ART, UNLEASH YOUR BEAUTY, SHARE YOUR WORK!
Comments (420)
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Sure, Gosig and I and all the others (Maik the Mouse, Tamika ...) want to carry on. It somehow turned into an all encompassing art project. By chance!
Thanx.
yours
rainer eric
I accidently deleted the folder "Zero". Is it possible to undo it. It contained more than 2400 pics.
yours
rainer eric
It has been ages since we designed and programmed profile photo management, but it sounds like we failed to consider a warning or confirmation step before blowing away an entire photo album.
If you need some kind of backup solution for your photo albums, send me an email and we'll figure out a way to guard against this risk.
Truly sorry for this, Rainer.
Cheers,
Marshall
Now I have to say sorry for replying late. But the uvumi page keeps me so busy that I run a wee bit out of energy. I still have a regular job. And I usually spend four hours a day for the uvumi page, often more - every day. That's why I considered giving it up altogether after I deleted a whole folder. However, then I decided to carry on and to reupload many pics. It will come to an end pretty soon anyway because in 2021 the flash player seems to be no longer supported. And without it you can't listen to music on the uvumi page and you can't upload pics anymore. Until that date I try to bring some light into darkness.
yours
rainer eric
In response to your latest reply, I have good news!
First, I am pleased to say that Uvumi will not be coming to an end. More on that soon.
Second, I may be able to provide you with a work-around for the approaching Flash kill-switch event. We may need to work together at first, so I will email you directly about that.
And finally, wow four hours each day? When this project launched and we saw so many people doing things with the platform that we never expected, it was instantly exciting and incredibly motivating. It meant we were on the right path in every way; from conception to release, every design and engineering decision had been true to our vision, and there truly is real value here for a vast global community.
I'll make sure you are able to keep using your profile if it is still right for you. And if you need to find something else, I will figure out a way to package up your profile content the best I can so you aren't faced with another nightmare such as spending the next three years individually downloading 28000 photos each requiring multiple clicks.
One suggestion if I may: I find the site not as easy to use on my Nexus One because of the Javascript continually moving popups such as the login box out of view. This is using the stock Webkit-based browser. Other than that I love it!
You can resize the height of the player queue and it will stay that way for the remainder of your session. When you first expand the player, click and drag from the bottom of the queue area (where it says "DRAG TO RESIZE") to make the drop-down shorter.
Hope that helps!
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