The Guns N' Roses Self-Similar Midi Synth is Guns n' Roses songs made up of sped-up samples of entire Guns n' Roses songs. How it works:

First, We took the recordings of several Guns N' Roses songs, from the albums "Appetite for Destruction" (1987), "GN'R Lies" (1988), and "Use Your Illusion I and II" (1991). We sped up these recordings exponentially until the tempo of the song became a pitched frequency. This is generally in the area of 480 times faster than normal playback speed (at this speed a song that lasts 4 minutes would be over in 0.5 seconds). Then we take these short sounds use them as samples to play back midi files of various Guns N' Roses songs. For instance, the GNR Self-Similar version of Sweet Child O' Mine may use the entirety of November Rain as its snare drum sound and the entirety of Patience for a note in Axl's voice. In this way, we can make Guns and Roses songs that are made up of very small Guns N' Roses songs, which could reveal themselves under a sonic microscope, yet are too fast to hear in the actual final product.

Paradise City and Sweet Child O' Mine are available.

The Beta of BitTorrent 4.1.0 has been released, the big addition being trackerless support. If it works as advertised, this is huge news as it'll simplify bittorrent immensely and make bittorrent activity extremely difficult to find and shut down. More info on the trackerless mode is here.

'Yoda' - I'm kind of in love with this video of a Yoda puppet dancing to "Just a Gigolo".

While I wait around for my CDs, I thought I'd give podcasting a try. Sellout Central is a simple show featuring five independent songs that I really like. The first episode is online now. I've also included links to all the MP3s for those of you who still like your audio in song-sized chunks.

The "Creative Commons Magnatune Lisa Debenedictis Remix Contest" has just started. 10 remixes will be chosen, and those winners will get signed to Magnatune. Source for my track Sick as a Dog is on the loops page.

Big Bends Nut Sauce - "Big Bends Nut Sauce stops problems with string breakage and eliminates problems with pitch drift. Big Bends Nut Sauce is a "state of the art" lubricant that will not run or drip."

Here's the source for my song Overreacting (50mb).

Saw this 3.2 million dollar art spider in town today and snapped a picture. Gotta go back once they attach the egg sac!

Derek Sivers from CD Baby has some sorta depressingly obvious news: cover songs sell the best on the digital download services. Derek claims the top selling independent artists are ones that do covers of well-known songs that people search for, therefore stumbling onto the new artists who have covered them.

So now, I'm advising musicians to do a creative cover song on their next album. Find something that hasn't been done TOO much. (Example: CD Baby has 762 versions of "Amazing Grace". Really!) Find something that you can add your unique twist to. Then make sure to include it on a full-length album, so that people who discover you by that song can get turned on to your own music, and buy the whole collection.

Derek's probably 100% right that that's what an aspiring artist should do, but now the idea of doing covers kinda creeps me out.

Matt Mullenweg writes about getting screwed by the copy protection on the new Dave Matthews CD. Non-nerds (such as my mom) have even been complaining to me about this sort of thing. Makes me wonder how well the record companies think it's working.

Justin's put together a Direct-X plugin (scroll down to his post) of the Jesusonic CrusFX. He's also been working on the Jesusonic SKULR 500 (pronounced 'secular 500'), which aims to be a more affordable version of the hardware.

I went to a lot of record label websites tonight looking at shopping carts. When I was on the Warner site I noticed that ringtones are given almost equal prominence to the actual band stores. A Flaming Lips ringtone is $2.50, which of course is 150% the price of a song on iTunes. That is nuts to me.

Soundtrack Composer - an educational Flash game about being a soundtrack composer.

Yahoo! Music launched today. It's a five dollar a month music subscription service, WMA format only, so you can't use it on your iPods. It also uses your existing Yahoo! ID, so if you've got one of those, you're already logged in. Lately I've been tempted by these subscription services (such as Rhapsody). Buying tracks with DRM on them still seems a bit backwards to me, but the ability to stream any music I'm interested in sounds great. Unfortunately none of them appear to be available in Canada, so that's one less decision I have to make.

Oh yeah and my album is here.

Bands Whose Fans Make You Want To Kill Them - a wiki on how to avoid pissing off certain music fanbases.

Remixes, a mashup and a cover, oh my:

• Borderline (16-1lab mix)
• I Think I Started a Trend (Zipper mix)
• I Think I Started a Trend (cotxetxe reverse mix)
• Look and Feel Years Younger (Cyberpest mix)
• Koalas with Guns (Bad Apples) - mashup of A Tribe Call Quest's Bonita Applebum and my Bad Attraction.
• Work Out Fine (Tom Nash cover)

Latest source is still I Think I Started a Trend (61mb). Other source is available here. Send me your mixes.

The History of Sampling - a Flash interface for navigating the history of sampling in music.

Guitar Freaks 2nd Mix - awesome looking coin-op guitar game. Apparently Guitar Hero is going to have a guitar controller also. [via]

Team Toxic Bass - watch some girl get uh pounded by bass.

I shipped off the master and artwork for I Don't Know What I'm Doing to the CD duplication place yesterday. After a year and a half of home-burning that sucker, there'll be a shrink-wrapped, professionally pressed version with a cover and a lyric sheet and everything soon. I'll announce a release date when I figure one out.