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Posting Songs & Demos

You’re here to write songs, so the website has been designed to do most of the heavy lifting for you. Amongst other things, it will:

  • Keep track of the number of songs you’ve posted
  • Display a little “winner” icon when you reach the 14-song target
  • Let you know when people have left a comment on one of your songs
  • Let you know when people mention you in their comments elsewhere on the site
  • (For a small donation) let you upload songs directly to the website when you submit them
  • Create an embedded player for playing back the song (for some hosting providers including the FAWM website itself)

When can I start posting songs to the site? The “Add song” button will appear on the website when it’s midnight on the International Date Line on February 1st. That’s 10pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time, 1pm Central European Time, noon Coordinated Universal Time and Greenwich Mean Time, 7 am Eastern Time, and 4 am Pacific Time.

And when does posting stop? The “Add song” button will disappear when it’s no longer February anywhere in the world, which is at noon Coordinated Universal Time and Greenwich Mean Time on March 1st.

Help! I’m not going to finish this song in time! If you’re working on a song and you realise that you’re not going to finish by March 1st, don’t panic! You can always use the Add Song button to create a placeholder for it. While you can’t add a new song after the site stops accepting new songs, you can still go back and edit a song and update its demo until the site closes March 15th. However, the number of people who stick around to listen to songs after the end of February will be fewer.

Where do I upload my songs? For a small donation, FAWM offers internal hosting so that you can upload the song directly to the website when you submit it. This makes the process nice and easy, and the song can be listened to once it’s been posted with a single tap or a click of the mouse. The FAWM site has been written so that if you add the URL of a song you’ve uploaded to music sharing sites like BandCamp or SoundCloud, an embedded player will appear on the song’s page here. It’s possible to create an account for free at both of these sites. The embedded player is useful because it will play the song without the listener having to open a new tab or open a different website, which makes it more convenient for them and is likely to mean that your song will get more listens.

What format should I upload my songs in? This will depend on the hosting service you use. If you use FAWM’s own file hosting you should upload your songs as mp3 files. Please note that there is a 10mb file size limit. This works out as about 10 minutes for a 128 kb/s mp3 file.

Most other hosting sites recommend that you upload songs as .WAV files in CD quality (16-bit, 44.1 kHz) as they will then transcode the files to ensure decent playback quality across all sorts of Internet connections. For example, when you first create an account at BandCamp, they impose a size limit of “291MB per track, which is of course the exact size of Inamorata and Narration by Conrad Roberts from side 4 of Miles Davis’ Live-Evil (assuming we’re talking 16-bit/44.1 kHz, which we always are).” Once you’ve made $20 in sales at BandCamp, the file limit for individual tracks is raised to 600 Mb and there is no limit on the size of an album or the number of tracks that it can contain.

SoundCloud accept a variety of lossless file formats like WAV, FLAC, AIFF, or ALAC but also support a wide variety of lossy (i.e. poorer quality) formats including OGG, MP2, MP3, AAC, AMR, and WMA. They won’t let you upload a song that lasts for more than 24 hours or is more than 4Gb in size.

The embedded player on the FAWM website also supports songs that are stored as files on experimental platforms like Funkwhale and Bandlab. You can also post a direct link to any *.mp3 or *.wav file hosted on your own server, or services like Dropbox but please note that the URL you use must be secure, that is it must begin with https:// and not plain old http://

You can still add a link to a song hosted elsewhere on the Internet but the embedded player will not appear. Instead, someone visiting your song’s page will see the URL of the stored file (there will be a little icon alongside it to alert the listener that clicking on the link will take them to a different website and a message informing them that “FAWM takes no responsibility for the content of this link.”)

Please note that FAWM cannot provide technical support for demos that aren’t hosted on the FAWM website.

Why has my song been marked as NSFW? The FAWM website will check the liner notes and lyrics of any song you post and if it finds language that you wouldn’t want your boss to hear you using, it will identify the song as being Not Safe For Work (NSFW). This is intended to prevent embarrassing incidents and/or anyone listening to FAWM songs from being invited to attend a meeting with someone from Human Resources.

Can I post videos instead? Yes, and this is encouraged. We’d love to see them! If you use the URL of a video hosted on YouTube or Vimeo to the FAWM “Demo URL” field, it will appear as an embedded video on the song’s page on the FAWM website. If your video also includes an unexpected appearance by a household pet, even better!

Why won’t my song play back? There are a number of different reasons that can prevent playback of embedded files. The most common one is that the song has been set to “private” on SoundCloud or BandCamp, which will prevent it being used by any other website. For the same reason you must set the “Allow embedded player” option on your song if you’re uploading a video of it on YouTube.

If you’re using FAWM hosting, the most common reason is that the file size is too large. Occasionally some apps seem to mess up how they encode mp3 files, but this can be fixed by opening the file in a different audio editing app and exporting it from there instead.

Do I have to let other people hear my songs? No. You can set your profile’s settings so that an individual song is marked as private. People will see that the song is there, but they can’t listen to it, or read your liner notes and lyrics. You can also change your profile settings so that every song you post is private by default. But we recommend not doing this, because it’s the feedback that you get on your work during FAWM which will really help you to develop as a songwriter.

Can I limit who can hear my song? Yes. You can make your songs freely available to everyone whether they’re a fawmer or not, you can limit their availability to people who are logged in to the FAWM website, or you can make a song private, so nobody but you can listen to it.

Can I share my songs? Yes, if you’re using FAWM’s file hosting. When you submit a song you can choose to allow other fawmers to download it by making sure that the “Allow downloads” option is checked.

Can I stop people downloading my songs? The only way to reliably do this is by making a song private so that nobody else can listen to it. Even if you don’t enable “allow downloads” when you submit a song to our server, there are many different ways of recording any sounds your computer makes and then saving them to a hard drive or memory stick. Sadly, that genie got out of the bottle decades ago.

Can I download songs by other fawmers? It depends where the file is stored. If the song is hosted on the FAWM website and the fawmer has enabled downloads, right-clicking on the embedded player will display a drop-down box which includes a “Save audio as…” option.

Should I write lyrics first, or record the music? Whatever works for you. There are no hard-and-fast rules to this. Some fawmers stick religiously to one approach because that’s what they enjoy doing. Some of us will try any method at all if we think we can get another song out of it.

What’s the best advice you can give a newbie? Always have a pen and paper within arm’s reach. If you get an idea for a song, write it down right away rather than telling yourself that it’s such a stroke of genius that you’re guaranteed to remember it for the rest of your life (spoiler alert: if you don’t write it down, you’ll wake up tomorrow morning and not have the faintest idea what it was.)

Tip

Don’t leave spaces in your file names; some file systems don’t allow spaces and so they will replace them with strings of characters (%20) which may mean you can’t find the file again because its name has changed. The best practice on the FAWM website is to include the song number and your FAWM handle in the filename so if people find it years later, they’ll know whose it was, e.g. 06_ThatFAWMGuy_Their-awesome-song.mp3

The Add New Song page

When you’re ready to add a new song to your profile, click on the Add New Song button. It’s as simple as that. You’ll be taken to a new page where you can fill in the details of your latest creation.

Title

What your song’s called. This is the only required input.

Upload Demo File

If you have FAWM file hosting, just click the Browse button and select the mp3 file of your song. When you click on the Submit button at the bottom of the page, the file will be uploaded automatically. This is very cool and a good reason to donate and get file hosting!

Song Privacy

Click on this button to choose between making your song visible to just you (private), only to logged-in fawmers, or to the whole world (public).

Demo URL

Copy the URL where your demo is hosted (such as Bandcamp, Soundcloud or YouTube) and paste it into this field.

If you’re using FAWM file hosting, this will happen automatically once you’ve used the Browse button above to select the file on your device.

Allow Downloads Button

By default, allowing downloads is disabled. You need to explicitly tell the site to allow users to download your file.

Note

Even if you don’t enable “allow downloads” when you submit a song to our server, there are many different ways of recording any sounds your computer makes and then saving them to a hard drive or memory stick.

Liner notes

Use this field to provide additional information about your song. What inspired it? What were you aiming for? What sort of specific feedback would you like on it?

Note

There is a 2,000 character limit on this text field.

Lyrics

Use this field to enter the lyrics to your song, if it has any. For a variety of reasons, some fawmers may have difficulty making out your lyrics, so providing them in writing can be very helpful indeed. You are likely to get more comments on a song if you post its lyrics.

Note

There is an 8,000 character limit on this text field.

Skirmish

If you are taking part in a skirmish, click on the field to display a list of all active skirmishes, and select the one you’re participating in with this song. If this is a non-skirmish song, you can leave this field blank.

Weekly Challenge

Click on the field to display a list of all the weekly challenges and select the one you’re participating in with this song. If this isn’t being submitted for a challenge, you can leave this field blank.

Feature on Profile

Clicking on this button will highlight the song on your profile page in a different colour and move it to the top of your song list, so it’s a good way of showcasing what you think is your best work. You don’t have to have a featured song, of course—it’s totally up to you.

NSFW

Click on this button if the content of your song includes material that is Not Safe For Work, small children, or animals.

Note

The site will automatically flag a song as NSFW if it detects such content, even if you don’t enable this button.

Collaborators

If you’ve created this song with other fawmers, you can add their names in this field. You can add more than one collaborator. The field will search for user names in your watchlist and offer suggestions as to which fawmer you’ve worked with.

Note

Your collaborators must be added to your watchlist before you can add them to this field.

Submit Button

All done? Then you’re good to go. Click on the submit button and the site will create the song’s page for you and add it to your profile. If you’ve included a Bandcamp, Soundcloud or YouTube URL for the demo, an embedded player for it should appear which will allow fawmers to listen to or watch your song. If you’re using file hosting, FAWM’s own spiffy embedded player will appear which does the same thing.

It’s worth going to the song page and checking that the demo plays correctly and that there aren’t any typos in your lyrics or liner notes (don’t worry; we’ve all done it. Some of us do it every time). If you spot a mistake, click on the Edit Song button to go back to the editing mode we’ve just explained, fix it, and then click Submit again.

Your song is now ready to meet its public!