Our music lives on

Comhaltas Ceoltoirí na hÉireann is a group dedicated to the preservation and promotion of traditional Irish music. As part of their preservation, they have amassed a massive collection of recordings: both video and audio, photographs, sheet music, lyrics, and scanned books.

When I first walked amongst the archives, it’s significance and importance was immediately obvious. Traditional Irish music had survived plantations, world wars, civil wars, and much more. For the last sixty years, volunteers had been dedicating their lives to creating this archive, all to ensure that our music will live on.

And now it was going online, all 1.5 terrabytes of it. And that was our job.

A YouTube for Trad

In December 2008 myself and our client Breandán Ó Nualltáin travelled the country, visiting the various archives, from Gurteen in Sligo, to Cois na hAbhna in Clare. We met with the collectors and curators. We travelled to the University of Limerick and met with students and lecturers—the excitement around the music was infectious. When we discussed the project, eyes would light-up. At the time, the only way of accessing the music was by swapping iPods with other students. The thought of a “YouTube for Irish music”, as it was understood, was radical.

Incremental improvements

Myself, Eoghan and Breandán worked through many iterations of the interface and the visual design. Considering that the last designer Breandán worked with was Jason Santa Maria (then of HappyCog), we knew that his expectations and standards would be high. There were over 30 iterations of visual design for the application and you can see them some of the key ones here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28.

The technical challenge was equally significant: to build a bi-lingual Rails app capable of searching through every type of media in the archive, along with a backend allowing users to add to the already massive archive and a transcoding platform as the original source for this music is as likely to a dusty vinyl as it is a Nokia 5850.

When the design was approved and the application complete, there was then the small task of seeding the archive with 16,000 audio files, hundreds of videos, several thousand photographs, hundreds of newspaper clippings, many of which are still being imported as I type. This archive is not just about history however—each day new musicians add new tracks to it, ensuring that from here onwards we won’t lose anything. Yes, we make backups.

Thanks

It would be impossible to write this blog post without extending our gratitude to two people who went above and beyond to ensure that this project was a success.

Firstly we need to thank our client Breandán who’s tireless enthusiasm and hard work kept us going through difficult periods. We’ve never had a client who could chat with me about user experience design, before intelligently debating typography with Eoghan, and then sit down beside Darragh to knock out a few hundred lines of Ruby. We’ve never met anyone with such a strong depth and breadth of skills, and it was truly fantastic to work with him.

Secondly, as anyone could see, the technical challenges here were immense, and Darragh rose to the challenge and absolutely nailed it. There is no other way to put it.

This has been, without doubt, the most significant and rewarding project of Contrast’s history to-date. Seeing it launched yesterday by An Taoiseach Brian Cowen was a proud day for us. The response on Twitter has been positive, our favourite tweets have been along the lines of the following…

Building the digital archive was not an easy project, to put it lightly. It tested every member of Contrast to their breaking point. Yesterday, version 1 officially crossed the finish line, it’s live, it works, and our music lives on.