Everything around here's breaking. The first channel on my Presonus Bluetube magically broke during the night. As you can see, the first channel input is pegged to the max even though there's nothing plugged into channel 1:

And for the past couple of months I've been aware the phantom power light on my Behringer Eurorack UB1204-PRO is always on regardless of the switch setting on the back:

(It's the red light beside the blue one. Spooky!)

I guess I'll open up the BlueTube and see if there's anything obviously wrong inside. Wait, first I'll shake it.

Update: shaking did nothing. I opened it up and there was nothing broken looking. Poked around a bit and tugged on wires and things, powered it back on and now it works again. La-di-da.

Update 2: It broke again after a couple days of working fine. Presonus says $65 + shipping to repair. Blergh.

I've open-sourced my little Google Maps email signup gizmo that I use on my live page and when visitors sign up for things (blogged about it here and here.) You can grab the script here:

Brad's Mappy Email Signup (google code project)

It's another quick and dirty project from Brad Labs, cleaned up a bit from my implementation of it. But it's been working very nicely and I'm super happy to have the data for live show planning purposes instead of relying on Eventful as a middle-man.

A long time ago I put out a call for album art for the new record and got a lot of great submissions in the forum thread. A few complications arose that I hadn't realized -- mainly that for printing I need a super high-res version. Plus a cover isn't enough for a CD, you also need the back, the inside and the disc face, etc, etc. I'd love to put the submitted covers in a gallery so people can use them as the cover art if they want.

Here are some of my favorites:

(credits: Douchegordijn, Ash, Forsten, onemorechris -- thanks to everyone who submitted!)

I also had a difficult time deciding what really fit with the album. I take that kind of stuff maybe too seriously and felt lost. When I was whining about my lack of direction a friend reminded me that the best way to find a focus is to go personal, find something meaningful to me. Without an anchor in reality I just float around.

ANSI art was a big part of my life during my isolated nerdy teenage years. That time was largely defined by dropping out of high school, hanging out on BBS's, having no friends, playing video games, rarely going outside and antidepressants. The songs on Out of It are all about those sorts of feelings, so I felt a strong connection. I'm not sure it's one many people will pick up on at first glance, but it's important to me that it's there.

And now I'm gonna go play some video games. Life is so different now!

Finally got around to making a muxtape and here it is. It's more or less the contents of my iPod Shuffle distilled down to 12 tracks.

If you've got a muxtape, please to be posting in the comments so I may check them out.

I'm in love with The Hype Machine. Specifically Hype Machine Radio.

Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator -- indexing the songs and bands written about and linked to on popular music blogs. Hype Machine radio is "a non-stop stream of popular and recent tracks posted by music blogs."

I've tried a lot of different audio streams over the years with no luck. I would rarely (if ever) find new songs and artists I wanted to listen to but The Hype Machine's been delivering that on a regular basis. That's pretty exciting for a music curmudgeon such as myself.

The aggregated aspect is very interesting as well -- I find even if I don't like a song that's playing, it's interesting to me that it's noteworthy enough to have been blogged. So I find I'm a bit more patient and tolerant with the music compared to regular ol' corporate radio.

I had given up on radio but now I need to figure out how to feed this into my living room.

Lured by a Metafilter group that plays, I bought Team Fortress 2 and have been playing a bunch. It's very fun, but Team Fortress 2 Karaoke: My Heart Will Go On may be the best mod I've seen:

(via tittergrrl)

I'm not one to be spooked by technology but among my geeky friends the one thing we can still get nostalgic about is hard drives.

For instance: I remember my first hard drive. It was twenty megabytes and that was a large amount of space, at least double what most of my friends had at the time. It was huge and slow and loud and expensive.

Today I saw this external 750GB hard drive (7200RPM + 16MB cache!) on sale for $159.97 CAD.

Huge and cheap, amazing, etc, etc. The kicker hits me when I read: "This Drive Holds: 660 days of around-the-clock MP3 audio". Man. Some sketchy perspective math:

• 660 days around-the-clock is 1.8 years of non-stop music, never repeating a single song.
• That's 15,840 hours.
• That's 990 days or 2.7 years of non-repeating music if we adjust for waking hours.
• 28 of these hard drives full of music would play for 75 years, the average American male's life-span. Again never repeating a song.
• 28 drives (18,627,840 hours of music storage) would cost only $4,464 CAD.
• Digital downloads to fill those drives would cost roughly 370 million dollars.

I wonder how many hours of recorded music are out there. The iTunes Music Store has only 6 million songs in its catalog which would do you for the first 34 years I guess.

I'm nearly all out of CDs of I Don't Know What I'm Doing and have a new album slouching slowly towards release. Thinking about dropping a few grand on plastic discs while I myself have downsized my once large CD collection to about 15 "keepers" is a tough thing to reconcile. It feels stupid.

I think I'm stuck with pressing CDs up for the near future. But what to replace them with?

I'm not sure there's a greater music video than this one of the Edgar Winter Group playing "Frankenstein":

The description is: "Feel ROCK's majesty condensed into 10 short minutes." Here's the play by play:

ryan: we're playing music... in the 70s!
ryan: keytar and sax. and that hair
brad: you can't play BOTH lame instruments! that's MADNESS!
ryan: oh, and he plays the drums too!
ryan: edgar winter is my new chuck norris.

I think Edgar should have worn a wizard hat.

A long time ago I wrote a thing called the Temple of Ego. It was inspired by a few other websites but basically the goal was to aggregate all the data you put out on other services, creating an overall stream of all your activity on the web. FriendFeed just opened to the public and it does just that. It's slick and does what it's supposed to do. I'm at http://www.friendfeed.com/bradsucks/

It's extremely simple but there's a lot of potential here. Searching, filtering, shuttling data from one service to another, openID, trust networks. With a nice simple API a lot of services could be built on top of it. It'd be the new meta-Twitter.

Scott Andrew's new record Save You From Yourself is out. Check it out, he's OG-Internet. Congrats, Scott.

There's a lot of enthusiasm about Guitar Rising -- a "real guitar" version of Guitar Hero. Just to be a stick in the mud I'm calling shenanigans: machine parsing guitar playing has been the holy grail of guitar nerds for quite some time. So unless the authors of this game have figured out something that all those folks working on guitar to MIDI translators for the past twenty years have failed to do, it will probably suck ass. And if they have figured that out, why not sell a multi-hundred dollar plugin to guitarists instead?

Here's a picture I took when I was sorting socks a few months ago:

Look at all these different bastards! What for? Can the human race not agree on a black sock style?

What I'd like is a standardized black sock specification. So I could always buy replacement or additional socks that match the ones I already own. Please: open source community, W3C, Creative Commons -- somebody help make sense of this important issue.

Trent Reznor released some facts about the Saul Williams record he produced and then released digitally for $5 [nin.com]:

Saul's previous record was released in 2004 and has sold 33,897 copies.

As of 1/2/08, 154,449 people chose to download Saul's new record. 28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning: 18.3% chose to pay.

Of those paying,

3220 chose 192kbps MP3 19,764 chose 320kbps MP3 5338 chose FLAC

Thoughts:

• 28,322 * $5 = $141,610 which for a solo artist and zero marketing investment seems pretty decent. Of course partnering with a super famous established artist like Trent helps.
• With 154,449 downloads and earnings of $141,610 that works out to earning $0.92 per download which vastly exceeds all bandwidth costs.
• 154,449 seems like an extremely low number of downloads. The hype for this album was primarily in nerd-centric venues so I'm assuming the majority skipped the ecommerce shit and went straight to torrents for their downloads.
• This isn't counting other digital sales avenues -- did they put it on iTunes? That's where most people are buying their digital music these days, not going direct to the artist's website.
• I think putting such a low limit on what people could pay was a dopey idea. If we're going to be dealing in intangible value, why not let consumers decide for themselves?
• Are there really that many FLAC users out there?

All in all I think it was a success even if they feel disheartened. Trent admits that he spent too much on the record. I'd be interested to know what the costs amounted to. I can't even conceive of spending $40,000 on a record let's say and having $100,000 left over would keep me in beer and guitar strings for another year or two.

Anyone out there using allpeers? I've been wanting a way to easily share MP3s with friends for a while and allpeers seems pretty nice, though I've yet to get it to work in the Firefox 3 beta.

I'm 'frenetic' on there if you'd like to add me and make me listen to your favorite songs.

I've been jealous of Gimme Some Candy for a long time. I've hassled them to let me in but they're not accepting new artists. It's a great idea -- a tip jar with benefits. Supporters can buy items and leave a little message that gets displayed on the artist's homepage.

So I've written and released an open source clone that's pretty easy to set up. It's called Gimme Some Money. The default items are a star, heart and cookie but they can be swapped out. You can see mine (using the default icons) over on the right sidebar.

Requirements: PHP 4+/MySQL & a Paypal account

Update: fixed an IE/Opera bug and updated it to v0.86 (thanks to jason for pointing out the bug).

Hope everyone's having a nice holidays. I'll have a belated open source Christmas present for other artists up here tomorrow when I'm less stuffed full of spätzle, potato dumplings and beer.

That wasn't too miserable. v0.06 of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store is up with a pretty big overhaul:

• bsdds has its own shopping cart now instead of using paypal's -- should allow alternate payment methods
• zero dollar downloads
• buyer/downloader is now redirected to the download page post-transfer if PDT is turned on in paypal preferences)

The shopping cart needs some CSS love but that'll have to wait as I got things to do.

Holy mother of Christmas I would like one of these Gibson Robot Guitars:

Also please add: unstoppable killing powers.

Just uploaded a new version of the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. Two big changes:

• No longer requires Amazon S3. Your store files can be local and links will expire after your given duration (mod_rewrite required).
• Variable prices via text input. Previously variable prices could only be selected via a pre-defined list in the drop down. Now buyers can specify whatever they want as long as it's more than zero.

Next stuff I'll be adding:

• Integrate a shopping cart I wrote so that other payment options are possible (Google Checkout/VISA/etc).
• Handle zero dollar downloads.

Hooray for work!