Not so much a hack as tilting the bottle to look under the cap, but still pretty noteworthy: How to never lose Pepsi's iTunes giveaway. Just saw it demonstrated on The Screen Savers and it seems pretty awesome. Once again wishing iTunes worked in Canada so I could go buy a bunch of Pepsi and buy all my own songs for free, thereby assuring me uh... something.

I'm looking for some help with the organization of samples. I don't know what form this help should come in. My goal isn't to be able to print out a big list (so I'm not sure if software would help), but to more easily browse my samples from inside whatever program I'm using. Maybe what I really want is example categories / directory structures from folk who use samples more than I do. I bought a DVD burner a few weeks ago and since then I've been copying everything off old CD-Rs in the hopes of making a sample library I can intuitively use but so far it's just a big heap of junk and when I'm working on a song I just don't want to go in there because it's hell.

Anyhow, just curious if there's anybody out there who's already come up with solutions for this. Thanks!

I am officially endorsing Dan James as President of the Internet:

Dan and the cool guys at silverorange were in town a few weeks ago and bought me a hamburger and a beer, so basically I will support them in any of their attempts to gain power, no matter how heinous their rule may become.

Here's the article in CiN weekly about Outside the Inbox and me. Pretty sweet.

Understood By Your DadGenre: Rock Time: 2:29 Date: 02/10/04

I've been having a rough time deciding on my next song so I've decided to force myself to release something. Here's a rock song I've been a-fussin and a-feudin with. I think the mix is a bit of a mess, but I'll worry about that later.

I totally forgot to mention I was the featured artist on the Spewgrass website last week. There'll be a brief 5-question interview with me up there maybe tomorrow or something.

Requiem for the Record Store is a Washington Post article talking about the death of the record store and the various reasons behind it. I liked this comment on the major labels' resistance to allowing consumers to only buy the songs they want:

"Can you imagine if there was tremendous consumer demand for an 18-ounce Pepsi and we told Pepsi about this demand?" Singmaster says. "How long do you think it'd be before Pepsi started selling an 18-ounce Pepsi to anyone, anywhere? The record industry has created all these barriers, and those barriers have alienated consumers."

While wandering around trying out free VST plugins I came across ioplong's collection of totally cute VST plugins. First of all the interfaces all look like they were designed at IKEA and they have names like flotser, flitchSplifter and Splonki.

Outside the Inbox is apparently going to be in the February 11th "We Love" feature of CiN Weekly magazine in Cincinnati.

Article describing Magnatune by John Buckman on LinuxJournal.com (via Scott, whose links I so consistently rob.) I think I've suggested it before, but John should really send out mailing lists or keep a blog or something showing all his musicians (and other people) what a great job he's doing of pimping Magnatune. I keep finding out about Magnatune press from other people and I'm all "Hey, I'm on that! What the-"

Wow, thanks to Susie for writing in to tell me I have a real nice write-up on Everything2. I'm touched someone took the time to document my dumb self.

Dropping Out Of School (Hinc Algeber Mix) This remix of my song Dropping Out Of School is by HeuristicsInc. It starts off pretty crazy and turns into a slower rockier noisier version of the original track around 1:44, which I really like a lot.

Scott pointed out this Pepsi iTunes ad and it got an honest to god out-loud laugh out of me. The bouncy music combined with shots of gloomy, innocent looking kids with the words "INCRIMINATED", "ACCUSED", "BUSTED" and "CHARGED" in front of them was just priceless. Like this kid:

That shot there, in my mind, is the emotional equivalent of putting a cute little puppy up on the screen and writing "KICKED" beside it. Also: how great is it that we incriminate our eight year olds over downloading music his parents probably insist isn't real music. I'm just free-associating here now, I'm afraid.

I think Coke should sponsor Kazaa and we could have hilarious commercial wars. Let's settle this whole file sharing dispute as the Lord intended: IN THE COLA ARENA. (Which is the one right before the battery arena.)

Thanks to Reivec for sending in this link to Tune Recycler. It's a project by those Downhill Battle rascals. Pepsi's giving away 100 million iTunes songs under Pepsi bottle caps and this is what Tune Recycler's all about:

With the Tune Recycler, you can send us your unwanted iTunes bottlecap codes and we'll use them to support independent music. Easy for you, and good for musicians.

Very cool. (PS: My 100% indie album is on iTunes.)

Since I seem to be on Friendster and Orkut and junk for no reason these days I was reading about some other social networks and the most interesting one I saw was Songbuddy which tries to connect people based on links to music:

SongBuddy is a new way to find music that's already available on the Internet. By finding songs on bands' and labels' sites and sharing the address of those songs with your friends, you can explore music you'll love that you wouldn't hear anywhere else. So sign up, make some friends and list some music. You won't even need to install any software, SongBuddy works with your current media player.

The site runs incredibly slow for me for some reason so I can't check it out much or represent for myself and my music, but I very much dig the idea. I remember watching something on the Discovery channel a while back that claimed there's no evolutionary use for music except for helping build communities.

I post my songs to Somesongs to get rated and my feelings hurt. Now there's Somesongs radio and it's pretty awesome. Plus I think all my music is on there, so that's even extra awesome. Also cool (but with less me content for obvious reasons) is Songfight! radio, the radio for everybody's favorite macho art-fag site Songfight!.

Lots of great indie home-recorders in there for you to check out in handy radio format.

There's now an Atom feed for this site. It's like RSS only DIFFERENT! If you don't know what any of that junk is, go try out Bloglines or FeedDemon or something. I've been trying out FeedDemon and so far I love it.

I've been getting weird reactions to my DRM post the other day. Some people are angry that I'm anti-DRM and other people are angry that I'm pro-DRM. Robert Scoble seems to have inexplicably classified my entry as some sort of attack on him, which it is not. I basically just said "GUESS WE'LL SEE WHAT HAPPENS, PROBABLY THINGS WILL BE OK EITHER WAY" which I had no idea counted as a radical opinion these days.

To elaborate:

I'm a big fan of technology and tend to be pretty skeptical about how secure DRM is. I know how hard it is (ie. totally damn impossible) for software manufacturers to keep people from copying actual physical discs that they personally design and manufacture so the idea of someone inventing a secure file format that can't be copied just seems like a joke and a half to me.

As I see it, one of the main points of DRM is to get the current record industry to give up its sweet sweet songs without shitting itself in fear and exploding, taking out all music with it as it goes. I assume Apple and Microsoft are both hustling to try and assure the already very nervous record industry that DRM is secure and viable in the long term, which I also assume just plum isn't true.

I believe that even if DRM becomes commonplace, if it's an inconvenience to consumers then I'm pretty sure circumventing it will become almost just as commonplace and there's not much anyone can do to stop it. But maybe it'll all be flawless and smooth and most people will barely notice it and the record industry can be mostly safe and secure.

My personal theory is that it'll crash and burn, but either way life will still be pretty much the same for indie musicians like me. We're like cockroaches with drinking habits.

Here's a good ranty call to arms by Cory Doctorow regarding Digital Rights Management on digital media. The basic gist is that DRM sucks and people shouldn't be complacent and allow it to creep in. As my album is now on iTunes I guess I can weigh in on the subject. I personally can't imagine why anyone would want a restricted copy of my songs and I can't imagine buying stuff with DRM on it and not busting it wide open just for the security. I wouldn't buy a CD that could only play in one or two CD players so I don't know why I'd buy media that behaves the same way.

That being said, if it turns out that consumers are A-OK with DRM and I once again am just an outsider nerd who's fussy about things most normal people don't care about, then I guess that's okay too. Brad the music buyer will probably continue to resist, but Brad the musician probably can do nothing but benefit from this dumb imposed barrier.

Cory wants DRM dead and I don't blame him. Microsoft and Apple want their brands of DRM to succeed and I don't blame them either. I'm just interested to see what happens. If I had to bet, I'd bet on DRM becoming commonplace but with a huge underground that happily violates it.

I have seen it with my own eyes, Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing is now available on Apple's iTunes service. That's pretty exciting and also totally freaking sweet!