It’s been a few weeks of trying micro-blogging with Twitter and Tumblr and here are my reviews.

Twitter

I’ve been back and forth about Twitter (my page is here). At first it was neat but useless to me. Then I had a couple of friends in there that I was interested in keeping in touch with. Then I lost interest in it, then I went back. Sometimes I can’t believe I’m bothering with it, other times I wish I had more friends. Kind of like real life.

Twitter’s certainly a decent idea and I believe it’s on to the next evolution in IM. But if you can’t convince all your pals to get a Twitter account and deal with the hassle of updating it, then you’re not going to get much out of it. Which leaves only hardcore net nerds talking to themselves… to each other.

Tumblr

Tumblr’s been fun and I’m still using it (my page is here). I don’t know if anyone’s reading my tumblelog but I feel like I’m creating a little meme repository that I’ll be interested in looking back on in the future. So it has some inherent value to me as a user regardless of whether my friends sign up.

It’s desperately lacking tagging. I like its simplicity but the addition of tagging wouldn’t overly complicate it and would add so much to the service. Different ways to view my data, ways to view site-wide tumblr entries under tags, etc.

Conclusion

While both sites are nice, ultimately I’m exhausted with new services and would like to combine them. I was originally thinking that Twitter and Tumblr would go great as a combined service, which touches on my semi-obsession with a temple of ego or Mugshot style service.

Steven Garrity pointed out Jaiku to me last night, which (I’m assuming) is a European Twitter clone. But instead of simply being a one-off status posting service, it also merges all your feeds (del.icio.us, flickr, picasaweb, blog, lots more) into one timeline that unifies your online identity.

Way back I posted my hesitation about using a Firewire audio interface. While I love technology, years of abuse at the hands of SCSI, USB and many other acronyms has made me scared and wary. After dual booting my laptop and stripping XP down to its most efficient, I wrote to M-Audio asking why my Firewire 410 inputs kept hanging whenever I, like, used them. This was the reply:

Hi,

You’ve seen a lot of problem with the newest Dell laptop. The new dual processor have made computer to go faster than ever, but when there is IRQ sharing (or if the IEEE 1394 adapter is on a virtual IRQ), the chipset seems to be less robust with resource sharing.

I would recommend you to try a PCI firewire card (or PCMCIA or ExpressPort Firewire cards) to get rid of any IRQ conflict.

http://shopping.yahoo.com/s:Network%20Adapters:4034-Adapter%20Type=FireWire%20adapter:4035-Interface%20Type=ExpressCard

If I give a hundred dollars to everyone on the planet will all my problems go away?

So bands on MySpace are limited to posting 4 songs. Lame in this age of massive affordable bandwidth but OK. I can’t change my songs around because lots of people have them added to their pages and I’ll break those. But OK. Then there’s this Myspace announcement today:

You know how you can list four songs on your band’s MySpace page? Well, thanks to the fine peeps over at Bodog Entertainment you can now add a 5th song. More music means more ears, more ears mean more plays, and more plays mean way more exposure. Add Bodog Entertainment as a friend and up your band’s song list to five on your MySpace Standalone Player.
Get your 5th song heard.

Wow, that’s ballsy. I mean it’s one thing for everyone else to treat the MySpace friend system as the dumping ground of the internet, but for MySpace itself to just whore it out like that takes some nuts. They must really not care.

Update: Ryan points out that when you Google your new “friend” Bodog you find out he’s really into online gambling. Check their Wikipedia page. I’m still surprised MySpace did this and now even more surprised News Corporation (MySpace’s owners) are cool with potentially being accused of marketing gambling to the kids.

Maybe we can all add Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man as MySpace friends for a sixth and seventh songs on our musician pages! Hooray!

Create Digital Music has some great videos and information (1, 2) on the Dr. Who Theme. Here’s one with the composer:

And here’s one with Delia Derbyshire who was responsible essentially for “producing” the theme and giving it so much of its sonic character:

Whenever I feel frustrated with my audio setup here I’m going to re-watch that video.

Mugshot (thanks JB!) almost does what I want as a central identity feed aggregator (see my Temple of Ego post). But it’s missing a few things to make me happy:

• You can only import feeds from services they’ve specifically programmed. Being able to use any RSS feed would be better.
• Because it’s missing Google Reader starred/shared items & Picasa Web Albums, etc.
• Let readers customize Mugshot feeds. Say a reader wants to subscribe to my Mugshot feed but isn’t interested in my Flickr photos. They should be able to toggle that.

Are there any other services like this out there?

This is a great and very effective hip-hop anti-piracy PSA from 1992:

Also you may be wondering what MC Double Def DP is up to now.

This week I’m trying out micro-blogging: Twitter and Tumblr.

I like the casual approach of both, but Twitter requires more work than I’m really willing to give such a tiny thing. I like how it works as a chat channel via IM though even with only Scoble and Chris on there it got too noisy for me to handle. Google Talk status messages work fine as a “what’s up” kind of thing and I don’t have to deal with a whole new friend network.

Tumblr is fun for casual blog crap I wouldn’t put here or in del.icio.us or over on In4mador!. Adding stuff to it is a multiple page procedure though (their bookmarklet doesn’t do chats or quotes) and I’m not quite sure what to do with it or why I’d keep at posting to it.

Setting up all this live show stuff is officially kicking my ass. I am angry and hurt and tired. I’m about ready to put together a live show of me configuring software for an hour and a half and call it “Working-on-a-Performance Art”.

My mind is blown — BLOWN — by how annoying this all is with the tools currently available. I’m jealous of DJs. It’s like nobody designing software wants anyone to change chords mid-song anymore. “You mean you have two SEPARATE chord sequences in a song? That’s unsanity!”

I got some emails from musicians using Live who feel similarly and Peter Kirn from Create Digital Music listened to me cry on the phone. Matt from Flux Minor shared his live Ableton project with me. His approach was to render individual channels (drums, bass, etc) of the entire track instead of recreating it loop-based as I was.

It gives you less flexibility but he assured me they haven’t felt the need to alter arrangements on the fly while performing. So I ran off in that direction as it sounded a lot easier. I was four songs into the rendering and recreating process when I realized Ableton Live can only send program changes to external gear (like my GT-6) at the launch of a new clip. So if you’re not setting it up all crazy like I was before you’re SOL for program changes.

Guess I’ll go kick something.

I’m releasing the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store.

It’s a tidied up version of the DRM-free digital download store I use in my store. I made it for myself but realized this was something most artists could use so I give it to you internet.

Please post feedback/bug reports/troubles here or in my forums. 

Hooray, I have a digital music store now! You can buy DRM-free Brad Sucks tracks in high quality 192k MP3, OGG or FLAC formats. You can also buy my entire album in whichever format you like with the album art and lyrics included. Buy buy buy!

I still feel strongly that people sharing my songs is vital to me as a musician, so I have no plans to stop giving my music away for free. But it’s clear that many people want to pay for high quality versions of my songs and I’d like to avoid the middle-man and DRM and offer that directly if I can.

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