Tomorrow is going to be the day that I begin to try and switch bradsucks.net over to Movable Type. Hopefully it will work and everything won't break and so on.

So I think I've decided to abandon Acid and switch to Cubase SX. Acid's been kind to me, but after being frustrated with mixing the other day for the kabillionth time, I tried to mix some of my old tracks in Cubase and sweet Jesus was it ever nicer. I had gotten used to having a one second delay every time I change an EQ setting in Acid and in Cubase it's instant. INSTANT! But the interface is batty. I just have no clue what's going on. I managed to import some old audio files and horse around with them, but the idea of actually writing a track in there is a little daunting. The simplicity of Acid was mostly what I liked about it and Cubase seems like Acid's more complicated older brother that's been translated into German and back a couple of times.

RIAA: Stickering Program Weakened By Downloading. This is the most hilarious thing in the world.

I've been kind of busy, but have about four tracks I've been working on and struggling with recording. There's something about mixing electric guitars that makes me want to write techno.

I bet you are all still in deep suspense about my Acid 4 cliffhanger the other week. What happened? Is it the greatest thing ever? What's going on? Well, I've been kind of let down, but I'm not sure by who. I installed Acid 4 and it seems to work. But there's a big stupid delay whenever I start or stop playback, which makes it a little cumbersome to zip around at the speed I'm accustomed to.

After having no luck playing with any of the settings in Acid or my sound card, I looked around the Acid forums and some people seem to be anticipating a patch for Acid 4 quite a lot. Sometimes in poem form:

Trust in SOFO to bring us the light, a new child is born out of the ashes of version 4.0, 4.0a brought to life by the spirit of SOFO brings us relief from all the pain and darkness, when will this tidal wave hit and drown us in fulfillment and joy ? when will it finally see the day ?

Joyfully awaiting 4.0a, i gratefully thank the SOFO team for this achievement.

I also checked with my awful, awful sound card manufacturer's web page and they have nothing to say about driver revisions or anything awesome like that.

This sort of thing happens a lot in computer music stuff. It usually means you need to buy something.

Life's been a little hectic lately. Between little contract web jobs and trying to learn Flash so I could do some projects I've been thinking about for a while, I haven't had a chance to finish any of the songs I have lying around. If you don't believe me, click here for shocking, undeniable proof.

Also slowing me down are my almost exactly year-old braces, which have recently been tightened and modified so that I have elastic bands keeping me from opening my mouth more than a centimeter or so. Also they hurt. Pretty damn bad. With luck I'll be getting the braces off in six months. So here's to that and all the chewing and biting that will follow.

So I've been anticipating the release of Acid 4.0 for oh, about as long as I've been using Acid 3. And it's finally out! Hooray for everything! You should download the 27 meg demo and play with it! It promises various sexy things that I've wanted for a long, painful time such as plug-in effects automation, ASIO driver support, MIDI piano roll, and VSTi plug-in support. Not to mention there are a whole bunch of other things on the new feature list that I'm sure will impress the pants off me as well.

The main thing I worry about is stability. One of the great things about Acid is that it rarely crashes, which is fantastic because nothing makes you want to hurt adorable little animals more than losing your work. Even if it's just the last ten minutes, it's still awful. As I've learned from previous crashes throughout my computer-using career, I can do a surprising amount in ten minutes.

I'm installing it now. More as it happens.

Difficult Situation Remix This remix of Difficult Situation was done by Philip Jones, author of the BeatBlog. It is noisy and experimental and neat.

Neat! Philip Jones of the BeatBlog I mentioned the other day did a nifty remix of my song Difficult Situation. I've put it online here. There's also a link to it on the sidebar and I plan to eventually do a page specifically for remixes so I can offer a bit more information about the people that send them in. If you've got a remix or something based off of my stuff, please e-mail me a URL where I can check them out. Large e-mail attachments get eaten.

In between work and hiding from work I should be doing, I've gotten the chance to talk to some people who are doing some very interesting musical things on the net lately. One is Philip Jones, who sent me a link to his BeatBlog, a very neat project where he creates and gives away beats he makes. Philip is also holding a contest you can read about over here. He's also made this neat program called Gbloink! which generates neat music in handy pinball format which is worth checking out if you're into that sort of thing like I am.

Everything is GreatGenre: Stringy acoustic ballad Time: 3:42 Date: 8/14/2002

This one was written on the piano and turned into an acoustic guitar track and then I got all crazy with the strings and synths. It was written and recorded over the course of about five days, complicated by my sound card half dying. I have no other fun information about this song.

So the site was down over the weekend because apparently I'm a huge idiot. Despite being a l33t net veteran web programmer cool dude, I managed to assume that my registrar would remind me that my domain was about to expire (other registrars for my other domains always have), but instead they only sent me an e-mail a week and a half after it had expired for some reason. My bad for assuming they'd compensate for my laziness. I have received my nerd demerit points and set my Palm Pilot to remind me next year. I have a couple of songs almost ready to go online -- I'm just waiting for the planets to align in such a way that gives me some time and relative quiet for recording. There is sawing and hammering and nail gunning going on one floor above me. If it goes on much longer, I may wind up going in a more experimental direction. I could record ten minutes of the noise, title it Construction/Deconstruction in the Key of Hate (Crickets, Faint Talking and Footsteps in the Background Remix), MP3 it, slap it online and call it a day.

I seem to be able to get my Darla to work for limited amounts of time before the it craps out on me. I recorded most of a song yesterday, having to occasionally re-record stuff because the left channel just didn't show up sometimes. Today I've started looking around to see how much a replacement card might set me back. So far it's looking kind of expensive and complicated. I found this sound card benchmark comparison, but a lot of the top of the line cards are a bit fancy for my needs. I don't need a ton of outputs or inputs, I just need two ins, two outs, excellent sound and hopefully really good Windows XP drivers.

The search continues...

I'm not sure if it's related to the lightning storm the other night or what, but the right input channel on my Echo Darla24 sound card has taken to cutting out all the time, making it really rough to record anything. If I play around with the breakout box enough I can temporarily get it working, but it cuts out shortly afterwards and then I cry and cry and cry. I've been having this problem on and off for a couple of months, but I always assumed cables were dying and I replaced them and that seemed to make things a little bit better for a while. But I've now tried three different sets of cables and the right input continues to cut out. A loose connection inside the breakout box? A message from god? If it dies completely I'll have to start researching what the hell I'm supposed to replace it with and who I have to kill to get the money and how I can really make it look like an accident and maybe what sort of Canadian arts grants might be available to assist me in all this.

If that all fails, I plan to escape into the woods with my four track, acoustic guitar and enough canned goods to keep me alive and I'll record some sort of all acoustic guitar anti-technology concept album that will be so full of pain and sadness that I'll be inundated with cards and letters and money from apologetic engineers for the rest of my life. I'll accept the money, but not the apologies.

My 56k modem (Which only ever worked at 28.8k due to my rotten phone lines) was fright Wednesday night in some sort of freak Canadian lightning storm. I was forced to go out and spend $150 on a new retardedly slow modem Thursday morning because I'm a slave to the Internet and I had given away all my backup modems to friends and family over the years. I will never be nice to anyone ever again, especially my friends and family. I also tried to install Movable Type because while I like to think of myself as a slick web programmer who doesn't need no prefab scripts, this weblog package I wrote for Brad Sucks could use an overhaul and various sexy features (such as commenting, a posting form that works, RSS feeds, and decent category archiving), but I don't have the time to spend on writing them lately. Installing cgi-bin managed to screw up just about everything that was good and pure about this server and I've given up for now because I don't have the time to waste on that either. All in all, time to waste has hit an all time low in the Bradiverse, which is unfortunate because it's one of my strongest skills.

Here's an interesting rant. In it, a woman named Shannon Campbell takes swearing issue with me and my stupid idea. There are a lot of things I'd like to say about this, but I'll try to keep it brief so I don't bore the tar out of you. Some replies to specific things she wrote:

I offer a great deal of my music for free - but all of my songs are copyrighted. The difference between Brad and myself, that I can see, is that if both of us were to get heard by some huge recording industry mogul on the same day, and said mogul wanted to record one of our tracks, said mogul would have to buy my track and pay me a royalty every time that bastard saw the light of day - but he could take Brad's track, completely fuck up the arrangement, change the lyrics around to better suit Brittaney or NSYNC or Pink, and then sell a billion copies of the single without ever giving a dime (or a writing/arrangement/etc credit) to Brad.

That seems like kind of a silly thing to worry about, the odds of that happening being as poor as they are. In the absolute worst case -- and least likely -- scenario, I may miss out on a staggeringly huge paycheck and credit for songs I've written. That would be a drag, but I'm not playing the lottery here. I'm pretty sure that if I'm doing work good enough for moguls to steal and good enough to sell a billion copies, I'll be okay in the long run.

To quote Eminem: What the fuck, is you stupid?

I think I'm about average.

The RIAA is never going to be able to stop an artist from distributing their own material, because the artist is the copyright holder. Brad's distributing music that doesn't belong to anyone (which I guess makes it public domain) and relying upon the kindness of strangers to give him a leg up somewhere down the road.

I always hope for kindness, but I don't rely on it. It's not like I'm mortgaging the house on this principle. What can anyone honestly expect from people? "Wow, a musician is giving his music away for free on the Internet! Honey, get me the checkbook!" It just doesn't happen like that.

If there's a living to be made in this crazy new frontier of Internet music, I think it'll come from building an audience. Maybe touring, maybe merchandising, maybe a lot of other interesting ideas people have had. In the dark cyber-y future of the Internet, I don't think copyright is going to matter much. It's been mattering less and less every day since Napster hit the scene and it doesn't take a genius to realize that that will probably continue.

Brad Sucks was linked on Metafilter today, which means that this site is getting about a billion times the traffic it usually does. Hi to all the new people, I hope you enjoy the site, please come back often, etc. I've gotten a lot of interesting e-mail and comments, which I'll reply to as soon as things calm down and I'm not staple-gunning floor boards down.

In case you're checking this page looking for some stupid new songs, there are a few on the way. I've been busy and briefly sick with some sort of flu I had imported from Norway for me. In the meantime you should play with Viragelic and generate some random songs while looking forward to a time when tempermental (and not to mention lazy) artists are replaced by Flash applications.

Alan Lomax died on Friday. I had heard the name before, but didn't know much about him. Turns out he was one of the pioneers of recording, which makes me like him an awful lot. From the article:

What Alan Lomax did was, in a way, inherently contradictory. He was terrified that recorded sound would eradicate the folk-singing tradition. Who needed to sing when you could play a record?

I'm sure a less hammered individual could probably draw similarities between his dilemma and the current situation with MP3s and the RIAA. So good luck to them.

Reason 2.0 is the bees knees. I picked up my copy the other day and the Malstrom synth is a truly impressive piece of work. So much so that I've cleared off my newly-made Linux box for it and am now thinking about selling my Emu ESI-2000 sampler that I spent a lot of money on and almost never ever use. It's been a year and change since I bought it and I don't think I've ever fully recovered from the expensive and draining multi-month process of hooking it up to my computer. SCSI was very mean to me and I've been unable to put it behind us.