Huge, huge congratulations to Matt Haughey on the impending baby girl. Way to procreate!
Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make is very good, though a bit nerd-centric. I obviously agree with just about everything written there and have been doing it for years. But I also know that most of the music buying public doesn't care about deep linking, RSS, or ID3 tags and they still think a cool looking Flash site is pretty cool looking.
That being said, I think the tips are essential for any indie record label and great for any musician who's thinking about relying on the Internet as a major source of promotion.
Update: Great Metafilter discussion here.
Mashing for Beginners - an intro to making mashups in Tracktion.
Magnatune selling USB Flash Drives of 10 Rock Albums in retail stores:
In partnership with Hana Micron http://www.hanamicron.com, in March you'll start seeing Magnatune-brand USB Flash drives, with 10 complete rock albums loaded on the drive. The drives will be sold in retail outlets, both in music stores and in computer stores, and will come in a variety of megabyte sizes. You can plug them into the USB port of any computer and play the MP3s right from the drive.
...
The initial manufacturing run is for 50,000 units, so this should get some visibility for us in the retail world. We'll have more information when the USB drives become available in stores. The 10 rock artists on the product are: Artemis, Arthur Yoria, Brad Sucks, Burnshee Thornside, Emmas Mini, Fluid, Jade Leary, Myles Cochran, The Kokoon, and Tom Paul. If this sells as we hope, we'll be releasing additional USB Flash drives for different music genres.
50,000, holy crap. Cool stuff.
After basically two years of mulling it over, I'm buying a new electric guitar. It's a Cort G250. I played it in the store and boy do I like it. It has pretty good reviews on Harmony Central. I've been unhappy with my current guitar for a while and this was compounded by reading its reviews the other week. Here's my favorite summary:
Overall Rating: 1 Overall, I would like to reiterate that this guitar isn't fit for firewood. If it was stolen I would shrug and forget about it, perhaps even smile.
I don't think I'd go that far, it's done me well over the years. But the Cort G250 is definitely an affordable step up and I'm looking forward to getting it tomorrow.
Exotic Guitars - May I direct your attention to the Skeletar.
In the server chaos of last week, I misplaced all the remixes people had sent me. If yours hasn't been posted yet, feel free to send it again and I'll try not to have some sort of disaster befall me until I get them online.
Additional ways to consume and a Japanese feature!
- MSN Music now has my album here. For some reason it only allows full album purchases rather than individual songs, which sucks.
- Apple iTunes is available in Canada now (article), so my fellow Canadians can buy my songs, I assume.
- Brad Sucks is featured featured on Oricon Style, a popular Japanese site.
My email was down over the weekend, so if you sent me something, feel free to resend it.
The Band Aid Dilemma - people who hate the new recording of Do They Know It's Christmas buying as many copies as they can and destroying them on camera. (via J-Walk)
Snes APU on a PC - Crafty fella extracts the sound module from a Super Nintendo, hooks it up to a PC.
A Singular Christmas - Computer generated Christmas music. (via boingboing)
My Journey into the World of Replacement Pickups - Giving some thought to replacing the pickups on my crappy electric and these articles are helping tackle my pickup ignorance.
Music technology dictionary - a good glossary of music technology terms.
Encyclopaedia Metallum - "Possibly the most complete reference site for metal." (via In4mador!)
WP iTunes - a plugin that allows you to display your currently playing iTunes song on your WordPress blog.
Today I took down all this mattress foam I stuck to the walls around me a few months ago. It worked okay for sound dampening but I can't stand the smell of polyurethane anymore. I think it's clouding my mind and draining me of my powers, much like Superman in that movie there... with the thing. Now I'm emailing acoustic foam retailers asking if their products stink. And feeling pretty cool about it.
AOL CD Throne - more than 4000 AOL CDs built into a throne.
CD Sculpture - sculptures made out of CDs, by George Radebaugh.
I tried out the 0.8 preview release of BlogTorrent today. Pretty interesting, but I couldn't get it to work. Maybe it works better on the uninitiated, but I found myself confused and fighting with their upload tool and trying to figure out if it wanted torrent files from me or if it was going to make them itself and then how to get that over into seeding the files. I assume there'll be better documentation eventually or I'm just a dummy. I had a lot more success with Ryan's WPBT Bittorrent tracker for WordPress. Easy to install and it integrates into the Wordpress user system. It worked first try for me, though you have to use other utilities to make your .torrents and seed them. It doesn't make Bittorrent seeding a point and click experience, but it made it a hell of a lot easier, which is good enough for me.
Free Tracktion Promotion - get a free copy of Mackie's Tracktion multi-tracking software. Looking to get into recording on your computer? Good place to start. Read more about it here.