This is probably a nightmare a lot of electronic musicians have had. (via GetLoFi)
Way back I posted my hesitation about using a Firewire audio interface. While I love technology, years of abuse at the hands of SCSI, USB and many other acronyms has made me scared and wary. After dual booting my laptop and stripping XP down to its most efficient, I wrote to M-Audio asking why my Firewire 410 inputs kept hanging whenever I, like, used them. This was the reply:
Hi,
You've seen a lot of problem with the newest Dell laptop. The new dual processor have made computer to go faster than ever, but when there is IRQ sharing (or if the IEEE 1394 adapter is on a virtual IRQ), the chipset seems to be less robust with resource sharing.
I would recommend you to try a PCI firewire card (or PCMCIA or ExpressPort Firewire cards) to get rid of any IRQ conflict.
If I give a hundred dollars to everyone on the planet will all my problems go away?
Set this up in the living room last night:
The neighbors can clearly see it from the living room window, so I'll be expecting the police any day now.
PS: You're all invited over to get wasted on some 100% organic salad in a few months, dudes.
That is my hip-hop name. Some stuff:
- I've been hearing that Making Me Nervous is playing on Sirius Satellite channel 24. I declared that to be sweet.
- I bought a wireless monitor and transmitter (PSM-200) for live shows.
- Brad Sucks Magnatune ccMixter compilations are in the can, just waiting to get all the remixers' tax forms into Magnatune.
Things I'm trying to avoid working on because I have a lot of stuff to do:
- New songs.
- A WordPress page-to-wiki plugin so awesome people could update my guitar tabs page for me.
- Turning temple of ego thing into something usable for other humans.
- A to-do manager that looks and works almost exactly like Gmail.
- A better Google Desktop email (or Gmail) gadget that updates faster and doesn't show me all my sent mail and MySpace invites and other crap I don't care about.
Today I re-partitioned my laptop and stripped Windows XP down to its bare essentials. That took a frigging fortnight and a half but it's dual-booting now so I can have my nasty regular laptop Windows XP and then my stripped down Ableton Live only XP.
I would like to see many Beatbots dancing in unison. Possibly I would set them to my music, film them and call it a music video. Everyone would love it because Beatbots are so awesome.
So bands on MySpace are limited to posting 4 songs. Lame in this age of massive affordable bandwidth but OK. I can't change my songs around because lots of people have them added to their pages and I'll break those. But OK. Then there's this Myspace announcement today:
You know how you can list four songs on your band's MySpace page? Well, thanks to the fine peeps over at Bodog Entertainment you can now add a 5th song. More music means more ears, more ears mean more plays, and more plays mean way more exposure. Add Bodog Entertainment as a friend and up your band's song list to five on your MySpace Standalone Player. Get your 5th song heard.
Wow, that's ballsy. I mean it's one thing for everyone else to treat the MySpace friend system as the dumping ground of the internet, but for MySpace itself to just whore it out like that takes some nuts. They must really not care.
Update: Ryan points out that when you Google your new "friend" Bodog you find out he's really into online gambling. Check their Wikipedia page. I'm still surprised MySpace did this and now even more surprised News Corporation (MySpace's owners) are cool with potentially being accused of marketing gambling to the kids.
Maybe we can all add Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man as MySpace friends for a sixth and seventh songs on our musician pages! Hooray!
Jason from Insomnia Radio sent me word of an interesting service they're partnering with called Magnet Media. Something I've been wondering about for a while now is how an independent artist (or band) is supposed to keep up with all the online services that allegedly promote a band.
For $50 a month Magnet Media hooks you up with a "Personal Promoter" who according to the promotional services list does the following:
They'll manage your email lists, post to blogs and music sites, send out MySpace â„¢ bulletins, and communicate with you directly to find out where you're playing next. In addition they will:
Add to Garageband.com
Add to Zuzula.com
Add to Podsafe Music Network
Add to Purevolume
Add to music.download.com
Add to Podsafe Audio Network
Add to Sonicbids EPK (pending artist approval)
Add to Last.FM (under artist name AND Magnet Media group)
Add to SonicGarden
Add to YouTube (music videos)
Add to Google Video (music videos)
Add to iSound.com
Add to Muze
Add to SnoCap-sell music directly from Myspace
Submission to select Live 365 DJ's
Registration for ''Global Battle of the Bands'' (artist approval)
NACA (National Assoc. of Campus Activities) Entry for Conventions/Showcases (artist approval)
Add discography to www.discogs.com
Add band wikipedia entry
Add information to www.musicbrainz.org which Last.FM pulls data from.
Submission to Association of Music Podcasting (over 85 music podcasters)
And more…
It's an interesting service idea, though many of the services listed I've never heard of or consider to be fairly worthless from a promotion aspect. I'm also not sure why you would pay $50 a month for this as about 98% of the items on that list are one-time submission services.
They also offer an artist website (domain name included) and fan email lists. Who owns the domain? Is hosting included? If you quit Magnet Media do you keep all your accounts and email lists?
They also list press releases. Are those free? They list "distribution opportunities" but don't say if they're included or you have to pay extra. "Opportunities" sure sound extra to me.
I think there's a fair amount of money out there for this kind of service, much like what's going with the smaller advertising services like FM Publishing and The Deck.
Lately I'm into the idea that record labels should be services that musicians subscribe to. But I'd have to feel they actually know what they're doing for me to invest in them and put myself and my email lists into their potentially inept and/or evil hands. Uploading my bio and video places is convenient but not really worth paying for (disclosure: I'm cheap.)
There is nothing rock and roll about charting your live show setup:
Nothing.
Create Digital Music has some great videos and information (1, 2) on the Dr. Who Theme. Here's one with the composer:
And here's one with Delia Derbyshire who was responsible essentially for "producing" the theme and giving it so much of its sonic character:
Whenever I feel frustrated with my audio setup here I'm going to re-watch that video.
I got some great feedback for my Bad Sign mix (that I'm working on implementing) so I've posted a mix of Certain Death as well.
It can be a little confusing for me deciding what's a technical decision and what's an artistic decision, but it's great to get some feedback from fresh ears.
Mugshot (thanks JB!) almost does what I want as a central identity feed aggregator (see my Temple of Ego post). But it's missing a few things to make me happy:
- You can only import feeds from services they've specifically programmed. Being able to use any RSS feed would be better.
- Because it's missing Google Reader starred/shared items & Picasa Web Albums, etc.
- Let readers customize Mugshot feeds. Say a reader wants to subscribe to my Mugshot feed but isn't interested in my Flickr photos. They should be able to toggle that.
Are there any other services like this out there?
Did you know that Vampires Are Alive?
(via onetonnemusic)
Because I'm lonely I'm going to try posting mixes of my new album tracks in my forums for feedback, commentary, crushing of my spirit & motivation, etc. You can check out a new mix of Bad Sign if you're so inclined.
I may make the forum private in the future, I haven't decided.
This is a great and very effective hip-hop anti-piracy PSA from 1992:
Also you may be wondering what MC Double Def DP is up to now.
Apparently Edward Furlong (the boy from Terminator 2) makes music.
My genius integration of bbPress and WordPress accidentally shut off anonymous comments on the blog here. Anyway you're all free to comment about OfficeMax and black metal again without signing up for an account.
I think everyone should thank me for upgrading my Picasa Web Albums account two days ago to get a little bit more than 250mb storage. Today they gave all default accounts 1gb storage just to make me regret my purchase.
Also what is it with services not offering refunds? World of Warcraft and Picasa have both told me that they're "unable to provide refunds" lately:
We're unable to provide refunds, so we encourage you to try the free service before purchasing additional storage.
Well I uh... did that. And then you quadrupled the amount of storage on free accounts a day and a half later.
These FCC complaints against Prince at the Super Bowl are fantastic:
It was obscene to show Prince, a HOMOSEXUAL person through a sheet, as to show his siluette while his guitar showed a very phalic symbol coming from his below-midriff section. I am very offended and I would preffer not to have showed it to my 4 children who love football. One of them has hoped to be a quarterback and now he will turn out gay. I am actually considering to check him for HIV. Thanks CBC for turning my son GAY.
Yes!