Times are changing. The Internet has revolutionized the music industry. The coming generation is looking to the Internet for their music source and Polybonk is ready for this change, it's ready for this exciting new era of music.

Polybonk.com
http://www.ubercart.org/site/4002 - Polybonk on ubercart Live Sites section

What puts Polybonk apart from almost every other online music store is our unique subscription service. By subscribing, you are instantly granted access to Polybonk's entire collection. It's kind of like if you were to imagine that you just walked into a music store where you could spend hours listening to your favorite music. By subscribing to this store you are allowed to take any or all of the albums home to keep. If you're not interested in subscription we give you the option to download a single track or album.

Here's one of my favorite quotes from one of our artists: "We use binary code through telecommunication systems that enables the remote manipulation of light by the user to instantaneously deliver mathematically compressed wave vibrations in exchange for the metaphorical representation of human effort." - Stalker.

Just some of the features Polybonk provides:

Subscription service - unlimited access to an ever-increasing supply of quality music.
DRM-free - You own the music you purchase.
Single purchase option - Bit self-explanatory
High quality music - Polybonk selects high-quality tracks and albums by talented artists.
High sound quality - All music is rigorously mastered to ensure high sound quality.
No region restrictions - Polybonk is an international music store and does not restrict downloads to a single country or small region.
Community - Polybonk's community gives you the opportunity to form online groups, where you can post images, potential album art and comments

Previous to using Ubercart I had build Polybonk using the e-commerce module. The e-commerce module was great until we realised some big limitations and how broken some of its features were. Ubercart literally saved us from having a completely broken site. I was amazed to see the how far Ubercart had come since last I had looked at it. After discovering Ubercart I immediently dumped our old mess of a site and built it from scratch using Ubercart which provided us with not only an amazing set of modules but an extremely friendly and helpful community of users!

Some of the modules we use heavily are Views, Panals and CCK to organise and display our content. To achieve subscription we use the wonderful module uc_subscribe made by the very generous detour.

Some of the other modules we use are organic groups which we use for our community section and a pretty interesting CAPTCHA called asirra CAPTCHA

We also built a unique preview player. Since the beginning we've been eager to give our customers a real feel for the music. We wanted to provide high quality mp3 samples which were longer then 30 seconds and which were easy to navigate. The player was first inspired by the method used at bleep.com. Further investigation unearthed a few major flaws with their player, since they rely on easy-to-crack, obscure security to protect their rather high-quality preview full length mp3 files.

How does our player work?

The Preview player is based on the XSPF Music Player Slim which plays an open-source playlist format called xspf. Inside our playlists there is a list of the 25 second slices of the track. The 25 second slices were originally 30 seconds slices which we then shortened again to 25-second segments. This is the reason that you hear a gap or clipping between segments. Once you press the play button the player fetches the necessary xspf playlist which will give the player a list of the 25 second slices of the desired track and cues the first section of the track.

01 Stalker - Pskik min_000.00_000.30.mp3 - First 25 seconds
01 Stalker - Pskik min_000.30_001.00.mp3 - Next 25 seconds
01 Stalker - Pskik min_001.00_001.30.mp3 - Next 25 seconds

By pressing the Next button will cue the next 25 seconds. The player is designed so you can quickly flick into any part of the track using the next and previous buttons.

It's taken me 2 years to get Polybonk to where it is now, starting with little to no experience with php and jumping around with CMS's such as xoops, joomla to finally drupal. I'd really like to say a big thanks to everyone here at Ubercart and specially Ryan!

I'd really appreciate as much feedback and suggestions as possible! Thank you