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Kid Beyond on Ableton Live – Quicktime movie of a beatboxer and how he uses Ableton Live. Pretty awesome. [via]

Justin Frankel (the creator of Winamp) has a new project called Ninjam. He announced it here today and it’s extremely cool.

Ninjam allows two or more people to jam through the net with real audio (no MIDI goofiness like past internet jamming software). It’s like Skype for musicians, though the music is delayed a few measures to keep everything in sync. You plug your instruments in, the software provides a beat. Then you find out what a crappy guitar player you are.

I had a chance to play around on Ninjam with Justin last night and it worked great. No masterpieces were made — though I got to lay down my brand new crappy guitar tapping skills — but the potential is amazing. And while we we were messing around with guitar and bass, I assume there’s no reason you can’t feed any audio source into there. So it could be keyboards, could be vocals, or it could be copies of Ableton Live jamming together.

I’m told a GUI is being worked on and a release is coming soon. I can’t wait.

MyVirtualBand.com – neat site for online music collaboration. (via Scott)

What Goes On – The Beatles Anomalies Page – an exhaustive list of mistakes/curiosities in the entire Beatles catalog. (via Ask Metafilter)

Music technology dictionary – a good glossary of music technology terms.

Tweak’s
Home Studio Guide – this is a fantastic guide to setting up a home studio.

For the home recorders out there, here’s a pretty good article on compression/limiting. The main thing that sets this article apart: it has audio examples.

As a ranty aside: why is this article one of the very few with audio examples? There’s no shortage of tutorials on the net for recording, but almost none of them have any audio with them and are basically worthless without that.

A while back I had an idea about starting a recording website where any tips you gave had to be backed up by audio examples, money where your mouth is style. But then I had other things to do I guess.

The Central Source for the Fight Against the Destructive Practice of Unsafe Mastering Levels (via J-Walk) is interesting and kind of funny due to the amount of anger the author seems to have about the issue. I’m no expert, but I do actually have a lot of the albums in The Big List of Squashed CDs and can’t say the mastering has bugged me on any of them.

There’s a contingent of people I’ve run into who are dead set against the trend of louder and louder mixes in pop music. Then there’s everyone else who basically couldn’t care less but will complain when your stupid song is the quietest one on their mix CD.

I am giving mixing the finger. BLOOP.

Spent a bunch of time working on mixing tracks for my album thingy today, they’re getting close to being done and I am getting close to going crazy. What can I say other than that the manipulation of sound is stupid and needs a punch in the neck when it’s not paying any attention.

Tomorrow I hit my first physiotherapy session to fix my gimp arm.

I wonder if there’s anything worse in life than recording vocals.

It seems hard to believe that there could be anything worse, but some people that I know insist that such things exist.

Boy I hope I never run into them.