#1 Songs - 1930-1989 - just the lyrics, no audio, but still interesting.
The Official BitTorrent Home Page has a torrent search engine on it now. Interesting move. If it's a big hit, it'll allow people to more easily find public torrents they want but at the same time it'll make it easier for the MPAA/RIAA to track what's going on.
The FBI needs to spring for a web designer to do their shutdown notices instead of just saving from Microsoft Word. Look at that ugly HTML markup. Sick. Also I really like the quote from this article:
"Today's actions are bad news for Internet movie thieves and good news for preserving the magic of the movies," said Motion Picture Association of America Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman in a statement.
You win this round, people for the preservation of the magic of the movies!
craptracker II - a web-based old-school music tracker. I spent many hours staring at Scream Tracker when I was a teenager.
The Winamp iPod plugin - lets you use Winamp instead of iTunes with your iPod.
Music Thing is doing a week-long special on The Tiny Music Makers, a series of articles on the artists responsible for small sounds in operating systems and ads and so on. After doing the Gaim 2.0 sounds I have a pretty good appreciation of how challenging it can be to make tiny evocative sounds, so this'll be an interesting read.
This Reuters article describes how mobile phones are getting integrated into live shows. Artists can make exclusive offers available through phones and also fans can send SMS messages that then appear on the big concert screen for everyone to see.
The companies first worked together on a promotion for Anastacia in Europe. Renshaw said the initiative generated thousands of messages at each concert at a cost to users of 1 euro ($1.26) each. He estimated that 10 percent of the audience participated.
Very neat and takes advantage of people increasingly having these little buying devices on them all the time.
O'Reilly Radar >Podcast support in next version of iTunes. Jobs also takes an SNL-swing at podcasting describing it as "Wayne's World for radio".
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.