One of the nice things about finishing the new album is that I can indulge my useless creative impulses again without feeling quite as guilty. Last couple of days have been a flurry of making a tagging (aka non-hierarchical – delicious/flickr style) audio sample organizer. I mentioned it earlier here and here.

With a lot of obsessive struggling and swears, all the main functionality is there (in “sloppy learning-windows-programming-as-i-go” style):

It indexes a directory and all its subdirectories for .WAV files, saving them to a local database. You can select folders in the tree on the upper left and you can select files on the right side and they'll play. If you right-click on files on the right side, you can enter tags (also known as labels and keywords). The tags are saved and displayed in the lower left panel. You can then click those tags to display the files tagged with them. This way a sample doesn't have to belong to only one directory.

Also drag and drop to most audio apps I've tried works fine, preferences are saved via XML. The buttons at the top are just for easy testing and the search does nothing.

Welp, after my last post on the subject and emails to the author of Sample Tagger, I broke down and whipped out the C#. After a bunch of hours, I have this:

It indexes a directory tree on the left, shows any .WAV files that are in it on the right when selected. Selecting a WAV file plays it (or you can hit the play button). And you can drag and drop the files into any audio application I've tried (Ableton Live & Sound Forge). Next is library saving and tagging I guess.

Can I also say how freaking annoying it is searching for Microsoft development related documentation and tips and examples on the web? Let's see, first there's the difficult-to-search-for terms: C#, .NET, ADO.NET, etc. Then there's all this other crap that gets in the way like ASP.NET, .NET being available in a billion different languages (C++, C#, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual Basic, J#, etc, etc) so even if you do find what you want, it's probably not in the right language or platform. Frustrating.

Seventeen years ago today Nirvana's Nevermind was released. I'm re-watching the Classic Albums Nevermind episode:

It's real interesting and worth a watch if you're a recording nerd or a music fan.

Personally I don't think the production on Nevermind holds up as well over the years as In Utero, but that's me.

Sample Tagger is exactly what I want for sample organization. Only problem? Loading and saving doesn't work (works on some files, not on others). I'm frustratedly staring at C# tutorials now and thinking about all the time I could waste making my own. Ugh.

Okay I haven't figured out much of a bandwidth solution so let's just party. All the source for Out of It is now on ccMixter here. Also there are acappellas on ccMixter separate from the source if you only want those. Here are the source files direct from me. I pray to the lord my server will survive this:

• Dropping out of School [33mb]
• Certain Death [24mb]
• Fake It [20mb]
• Bad Sign [31mb]
• There's Something Wrong [24mb]
• Gasoline [27mb]
• Total Breakdown [14mb]
• Understood by Your Dad [18mb]
• Out of It [22mb]
• You're not Going Anywhere [22mb]

You should upload anything you make to ccMixter and I'll list it on the song pages and like… you'll be part of song HISTORY!

I don't normally “web log” my feelings but I'm actually pretty nervous about this whole CD release. I was all “beh whatever dudes we'll see how it goes, just another day on the grind you know dog” until a couple hours ago when I became like "!!!! HOLY LORD". It feels like my future "as an artist" sort of hinges on it but then I feel that way about everything.

Honestly, I think the neurotic anxiety has been getting to me for a couple weeks but I've had tasks to keep me busy. Two weeks ago I was sleeping away peacefully and then I guess I tore at my forehead with my retarded talons. As you can see from the picture up there I managed to put a two inch scratch in my dome. That ain't relaxed behavior.

The CD release party is tomorrow night. It's sort of a drag though, you folks who read my blog and have been with me for a long time are not generally in my town so you won't be there. So that part breaks my heart kinda because I love you guys okay now the vodka's talking catch you later.

So the dark, paralyzing fear of having a new album coming out shortly is that maybe nobody will listen to it! So I pose you this question:

If you were (or are) an independent musician with a very limited budget and a new alternative/rock-style album scheduled for release in a few weeks, where and how would you promote it?

I'm mostly looking for places/people to send/pitch it to, but I'll appreciate more elaborate or imaginative suggestions.

The new version of social bookmarking site Delicious launched last week and overall I'm impressed. Search is snappier, the design is slicker and they didn't ruin it by taking out nerdy features like tag intersections. Delicious and Wikipedia are the only two sites that give Google a run for their money for search for me so I'm happy to see it treated well.

That being said, there were a few UI decisions I didn't care for and have created a Greasemonkey script to fix. Here's the before:

And here's Delicious with my tweaks:

My changes are:

• I bolded the link titles. I found them too hard to skim, which is largely what I do on Delicious.
• I turned the link URLs a light grey. For some reason the URLs were the easiest part to read for me and also just about the least important information.
• I coloured visited links purple. At least to my eyes, visited links on the new Delicious are only the slightest bit fainter than the regular colour. This makes it hard to know at a glance which links you've already visited, which is a pain especially when you're searching.

There are a few other changes I'd love to make, but my Greasemonkey skills are not the strongest:

• Tags should be moved to the left. They're the third most useful information to me (after titles and a description – which often isn't there), but your eye has to travel to the right to see them.
• Make the link counts easier to skim. The shades of blue they use for say, numbers 17 and 794 are barely different from each other. When I'm searching, I want to quickly know what the most popular links are.

I may get used to these issues, I'm a pretty fussy dude. But it's been a few days and I still find they slow me down. Anyway, it's still a good redesign and congratulations to the team for transitioning to it smoothly. There was no downtime that I noticed and the new site hasn't lost any functionality that I enjoyed before. Good stuff!

A friend of mine's been doing great weekly dance mixes at Lowpass – DJ. He's got a podcast feed now. It makes me look forward to exercising.

You can buy I Don't Know What I'm Doing in FLAC format again (click 'more buying options'). Out of It will be available in FLAC as well when it's released.

Haven't gotten too many submissions for the Fake It cliche video yet, but this one from Einar is awesome:

Yours doesn't have to be as professional looking of course, the more amateur the funnier.

I love Gmail. Conversation views, labels, keyboard macros and super fast search – it makes my life easier. One thing I also love are the email contact groups. It's like tagging for humans and I love to categorize the people who email me (podcaster, blogger, fan, booker, musician, artist, family, mortal enemy, etc). But it's not as easy to group people as it should be. Here's my easy to read prototype that I'd appreciate you forward to anyone you know at Google:

Instead of having to mouse over a contact name, get that card to show up, click More, click Contact Details, click Groups and select the group, instead I propose that all that be right in that popup. Amazing idea! I'm a genius!

Anyway, I'm sorry for the tone of voice. It's mostly due to the hour I just wasted trying to get Greasemonkey to do exactly this. I love you Gmail, I could never stay mad at you.

David points to this Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable on Amazon. The tags are wonderful. A small sampling:

snake oil (383)
ripoff (338)
waste of money (314)
throwing your money away (287)
unconscionable (267)
stupid (231)
immoral (204)
pure garbage (202)
cheat (191)
denon (50)
harry potter (47)
astronomically dumb (5)
tax on the stupid (5)
as effective as using dog hair (4)
fraud (4)
nonsense (4)
rofl (4)
time space (4)
wizards_made_th is (4)
a fine product indeed (3)
cable (3)
ftl (3)
how do they get through the door with ba... (3)
pt barnum (3)
shameful (3)
wtf (3)
59 inches (2)
audiofool hardware (2)
bogus (2)
corporate taxation of the uneducated (2)
cures cancer (2)
ecstacy godlike troll-killing superwmd u... (2)
eternal life (2)
ether-licious (2)

I've had a hate-on for “high-end” cables for a long time so this is wonderful to me. [via Joho]

(Made with the I Don't Know What I'm Doing lyrics and wordle)

Having now seen Indiana Jones 4 I am finally free from looking forward to anything by George Lucas, hooray! Indy 4 was terrible and at least as bad as The Phantom Menace. I'm not sure how it's managed a score of 78% on Rotten Tomatoes as I write this, but I have to assume that will be lowered by time and careful reflection.

Here's my ranty spoiler-filled list of things I can remember disliking:

• Indy being a bumbly moron
• Indy following around Dudey McMumbles for the whole movie going "what? what are you doing? what's going on?"
• Whipping out the Crystal Skull every other minute.
• Indy surviving a nuclear event in a refrigerator?
• The plot made no sense.
• Indy throwing a big ridiculous sissy-fit over the snake in the quicksand. "Say grab the rope"?
• No sense of urgency or danger. None of the characters took the danger very seriously so I didn't.
• Endless, tiresome exposition. Please, TELL ME MORE.
• The one-liners were so weak. "I like Ike"?
• Shia Tarzan
• Indy dramatically picking up his hat like eight million times.
• Why do the commies act exactly like Nazis?
• Commie chick is psychic I guess? But she can't read Indy's mind? And also not Huxley's? And also not Marion's? And also can't make a connection with the crystal skull? And also does nothing with her power throughout the entire movie?
• Why did the evil commies break into a US government top secret storage facility to get an alien body? They just poked at it and went "oh we have several other of these".
• Triple agent Mack, tricking Indy any ol' time he feels like it.
• Indy trying to save Mack after he gets betrayed again?
• Why did Indy get promoted to Dean?
• Why did Indy and Marion get married?
• Why are there karate ninjas hiding in every long-deserted ruin?
• "[Their] word for gold translates as treasure. But their treasure wasn't gold, it was knowledge. Knowledge was their treasure." THANKS FOR CLEARING THAT UP. TWICE.

I guess it might be easier to list the stuff I liked:

• Intro stuff with Indy was nice to see. Him teaching, reference to Marcus & his dad. :(..
• Shia as Mutt was good actually and managed to have an occasional bit of chemistry with Indy.
• I liked the big UFO ending, but it was set up so poorly and at the end of a really bad movie.

3/10

My friend Allen is working on a tasteful and mysterious series called "Fat Dinosaurs". I drew this to win his respect:

We'll see if it works!

Tonight Hit the Bong With Me [MP3], music written by Lee David in 1926. Sometimes you have to destroy a song to learn its secrets.

The borrowed PA in the practice garage went away so I reached into the vast (vast!) Brad Sucks war chest and bought two 270 watt Peavey PR10PN Powered Loudspeakers. Despite forgetting my mixer at home they did a nice job at rehearsal last night. Very clear and full sound, plus I have them up on stands now which I think helps them stand out from the murky low frequencies.

I knew nothing about monitors or live sound before. I did a lot of reading and here uh are some... knowledge:

• People on live sound forums are kind of annoying, possibly worse than recording forums. God forbid you not want to outfit your garage with multiple $1500 JBL's.
• Powered speakers are now a viable alternative to a powered mixer + passive speakers and offer more flexibility. But they're newer so they're hard to find used.
• The Peaveys have optional brackets to position them as floor-wedge monitors.
• The Peaveys actually have three inputs on each speaker. Two quarter inch and one 1/4"/XLR combo. All have level control, which is impressive.
• With powered monitors you can use a regular passive/unpowered mixer, which are cheap and plentiful.

The other point of this was to make it easier to integrate the laptop into the full band, which so far has been a huge struggle technology-wise.

I want a Twitter-style service for freeform, taggable, time-stamped data. My intended purpose would be to log real-world items. Like I'd IM/text/email the Data Twitter service with:

bike ride tags: bike, ride, exercise

writing a blog post tags: status, writing

phone call from annoying dude tags: annoying dude, phone

basketball tags: basketball, sports, exercise

These would all be time-stamped as I add them. A duration may also be useful.

The data could then be queried, searched, accessed via API from other web sites & apps, read via RSS and imported into spreadsheets.

Potential applications:

• import specific tags (like 'exercise') for a certain time period into a spreadsheet for analysis
• power cross-site social widgets from the data feed (most recently listened to songs, task completion, current status)
• use as a remote control for triggering events in software monitoring the feeds (bittorrent clients, server administration)

It's super nerdy, by nature deals with private instead of social data and likely wouldn't scale, but I still want it.

Here's some in-the-wild proof of what you get when you send in a tip, bad penmanship and all:

Thanks Scott!