I don't normally listen to podcasts, but on this last bit of travel I tried out a bunch that were suggested to me via Twitter. Here are some reviews: Quirks and Quarks

This is a great science radio show but I'm not sure it was engaging enough to focus on completely. It put me to sleep several times on the airplane which was nice of it.

Real Time with Bill Maher

I like a lot of Bill Maher's stuff even though he's the whitest man in the world. This podcast is just the audio from his HBO TV show, which seemed like itd'd be all right, but the crowd cheers and laughter were so loud compared to the speaking I had to keep dialing the volume up and down to keep it from blowing my ears out. I gave up part way through the first episode. Next time I may run them through a compressor first.

You Look Nice Today

I wasn't sure I'd like this hyper-literate ultra-nerdy sorta hipster comedy talk-show, but it worked for me and I wish I'd brought more.

The Ongoing History of New Music

I was excited to see this show on iTunes as I love it and looked forward to catching up, but it only feeds one minute previews! What the hell!

Gonna go out on a limb here and say the show last night in Denver effing blewww. It was amazing. I don't really want to suggest it was legendary but I had a difficult time through security back to Canada and am thinking word might have gotten around.

I also don't want to characterize a particular Denver sound man as “a douchebag” but I'm not sure how to finish this sentence without doing exactly that.

I will likely blog more about some lessons I learned once my brain unpacks.

It was nice to meet Jeff though even if it was just shouty bar conversation. NICE TO MEET YOU JEFF.

This past Friday was the occasion of my birth. I am now old enough that I wasn't sure what age I'd be turning. Thanks for all the kind wishes.

I am in “crunch mode” for the Denver show on Thursday. I am also “nervous”. This'll be only my third solo show but it'll also be the first one where I'm not doing my own sound.  So maybe that will be good? Maybe I have nothing to worry about?

Very much enjoyed this video for Dropping out of School that Brian Ross just sent me:

Clowns++

Ugh, so busy. I didn't even blog about Halloween. Here are some shots:

We were kind of busy (and lazy) this year so we didn't really get up to a lot of the ideas we had. But I got to play with my jigsaw and made this witch and cat:

 

The resulting shadow was pretty good, though the cat didn't show up very well:

My costume turned out nicely. This flash photo doesn't really do it justice:

I'm really not much for scaring kids so what I would do instead of jumping at them or anything was stand completely still. The kids would see me and know something wasn't quite right and they'd stare and stare. And I'd stare back at them and they'd just be completely unnerved, thinking something was going to happen I guess. And it seems I'm okay with doing that to children as I feel no remorse.

There are some upcoming Brad Sucks shows:

November 7th & 8th: Playing two nights at Kelly's Welcome in Manotick, ON. Full band.

November 20th: The Bluebird Theater in Denver, Colorado. Solo.

There's a pretty good possibility I'll be doing some touring in the new year, so be sure to put yourself down on the map on my live page.

Hey, Out of It is now in the iTunes Music Store! (thanks Jesse)

Why it's $9.90 instead of $9.99 is a mystery to me, but whatever.

Also I noticed this censored auto-complete hilarity when I searched for it:

Oh Apple.

One of the best tech things I saw at Zap Your PRAM was this TinEye Music app for the iPhone. You take a photo of album art with the iPhone and TinEye identifies the album and looks it up in iTunes. I was totally skeptical so we tried it out on my CD, taking this fairly crappy photo:

And bam:

I was impressed. Image search/recognition tech usually works great inside a pre-defined catalog of images but tends to fail in the wild.

Later on I got a demo of the newest version of the iPhone app and it worked just as well but also had Allmusic, Youtube and Wikipedia links for me. Crazy neat. Thanks to Suzanne for showing it to me!

State Shirt has a new album called This is Old and it's available for pre-order now.

I managed to get my store dealy running for him but mercy it was a rough ride. I had hoped to open source all my latest additions (variable pricing, wordpress integration, etc) but I don't think I have the time to put into it. If anyone wants to take the lead on that feel free to get in touch.

Holy cow, Zap Your PRAM was great. It would take some sort of endless series of biographical novels to explain it all. Basically it was roughly 50 super interesting people (and me) in a beautiful historical Prince Edward Island cottage slash hotel. All passionate, all thoughtful, all interesting, no shills. Even (maybe especially) when I didn't think their fields of expertise were things I was interested in, I wound up being fascinated.

Thanks to the adorable silverorange team for all the hospitality and amazing dessert per day ratio. I don't know that there's a nicer group of people to have yell “bum sex” at you on the street.

I was nervous about giving my first ever talk/presentation but it seemed to go well and lots of people said nice things about it. It was both awesome and intimidating to be talking to such a knowledgeable crowd. Seems like it'd be easier to talk to dumbasses, but the feedback wouldn't be as rewarding.

For a general list of what went on, Stephen DesRoches has an excellent write-up and some beautiful photos.

My camera actually died as I sat in the Ottawa airport getting ready to go. So all I have is a crappy cell phone picture of the metal cow in the Charlottetown airport. Which is above.

I'm off to the Zap Your PRAM conference this weekend. It should be some awesome nerdy maritime fun and I'm really looking forward to it. Regular conferences have a little too much desperation going on and this one feels like it'll be more of a bunch of like-minded (but not too like-minded) folks hanging out.

Matt Haughey from Metafilter was supposed to be going but I guess he's not now which makes me sad. At least now I won't have to drunkenly confess about how many ideas I've stolen from him. So I can tell that to Daniel Burka (Digg designer), and Cal Henderson (Flickr architect) instead.

I'm giving a presentation on Friday I'm maybe calling “A Brief History of a Song” where I tell the story of one of my songs -- from the initial idea to its recording and release and to some of the crazy adventures it gets up to when it's out of my hands. It's been something that's been on my mind for a while so I'm looking forward to getting it out. of my system.

Out of It's travelling around out there, which rules! A brief recap:

• I'm a Featured Commoner on the Creative Commons blog.
• There's a Jamendo feature.
• There's a Q&A with me over on ccMixter.
• I did an interview for the Command Line podcast.
• Wil Wheaton likes it!

Remixes and stuff:

• There are a good number of remixes going on over at ccMixter. Still going through them to find the gems – finding listening to my voice difficult.
• This partial-Flash video for Certain Death makes me happy.
• Athene (best paladin in the world) is using the new songs!
• I'm behind in updating the music info page but will get on that soon.

Extra places you can get it:

• Out of It is now on Amazon.com. It's out of stock right now but I shipped off some more a week ago so it should be up soon.
• It's on Magnatune now.
• It's on Jamendo.
• It's been delivered to Napster, Rhapsody, Amie Street, Apple iTunes and eMusic (and a few other I've never heard of) but when they put it online is up to them. Let me know if you spot it.
• Out of stock at CD Baby but should be back in soon.
• A bunch of the new tracks are on iLike, if you're into adding stuff to Facebook and so on.
• The whole album's up on Last.fm as well.
• My MySpace page has been updated with new songs also.

There are a lot of things I'm missing, but this will have to do for now.

One of the nice things about finishing the new album is that I can indulge my useless creative impulses again without feeling quite as guilty. Last couple of days have been a flurry of making a tagging (aka non-hierarchical – delicious/flickr style) audio sample organizer. I mentioned it earlier here and here.

With a lot of obsessive struggling and swears, all the main functionality is there (in “sloppy learning-windows-programming-as-i-go” style):

It indexes a directory and all its subdirectories for .WAV files, saving them to a local database. You can select folders in the tree on the upper left and you can select files on the right side and they'll play. If you right-click on files on the right side, you can enter tags (also known as labels and keywords). The tags are saved and displayed in the lower left panel. You can then click those tags to display the files tagged with them. This way a sample doesn't have to belong to only one directory.

Also drag and drop to most audio apps I've tried works fine, preferences are saved via XML. The buttons at the top are just for easy testing and the search does nothing.

Welp, after my last post on the subject and emails to the author of Sample Tagger, I broke down and whipped out the C#. After a bunch of hours, I have this:

It indexes a directory tree on the left, shows any .WAV files that are in it on the right when selected. Selecting a WAV file plays it (or you can hit the play button). And you can drag and drop the files into any audio application I've tried (Ableton Live & Sound Forge). Next is library saving and tagging I guess.

Can I also say how freaking annoying it is searching for Microsoft development related documentation and tips and examples on the web? Let's see, first there's the difficult-to-search-for terms: C#, .NET, ADO.NET, etc. Then there's all this other crap that gets in the way like ASP.NET, .NET being available in a billion different languages (C++, C#, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual Basic, J#, etc, etc) so even if you do find what you want, it's probably not in the right language or platform. Frustrating.

Seventeen years ago today Nirvana's Nevermind was released. I'm re-watching the Classic Albums Nevermind episode:

It's real interesting and worth a watch if you're a recording nerd or a music fan.

Personally I don't think the production on Nevermind holds up as well over the years as In Utero, but that's me.

Sample Tagger is exactly what I want for sample organization. Only problem? Loading and saving doesn't work (works on some files, not on others). I'm frustratedly staring at C# tutorials now and thinking about all the time I could waste making my own. Ugh.

Album release has gone well, thanks everyone! Decent sales, lots of positive feedback. Still lots of work to do, which I am working on doing.

I rewrote the guts of the music submissions/you section and added all the new album tracks and source in there. Still haven't added all the items I was sent from the new album release, but that'll come soon.

Some stuff I need to blogs:

• There's a Fake It remix contest coming up at Remix Fight.
• The Fake It cliche video thing has sailed past another deadline. Still trying to figure out how to drum up more submissions.
• I nominate this fellow as “happiest to receive my CDs”:

Yes!

Okay I haven't figured out much of a bandwidth solution so let's just party. All the source for Out of It is now on ccMixter here. Also there are acappellas on ccMixter separate from the source if you only want those. Here are the source files direct from me. I pray to the lord my server will survive this:

• Dropping out of School [33mb]
• Certain Death [24mb]
• Fake It [20mb]
• Bad Sign [31mb]
• There's Something Wrong [24mb]
• Gasoline [27mb]
• Total Breakdown [14mb]
• Understood by Your Dad [18mb]
• Out of It [22mb]
• You're not Going Anywhere [22mb]

You should upload anything you make to ccMixter and I'll list it on the song pages and like… you'll be part of song HISTORY!

Okay, I thought I was going to post all the Out of It source today but I'm honestly a little concerned about my server right now and ccMixter only takes 10mb uploads so I can't make it their problem.

So for now here's track 1: Dropping out of School [33mb zip]. I'll see what's what, but the rest is definitely on the way, sorry for the wait.

Update (9/10): The vocals for all the tracks on Out of It are now on ccMixter. Working out getting the full source up shortly.

My new album Out of It is (FINALLY) out! Please listen to it! Please spread it around! Please like it! (And perhaps please purchase it!):

It's got ten songs, you can pay what you want, it's available in CD, MP3 & FLAC. There's no stupid DRM and it's Creative Commons licensed. CD purchases get instant downloads and the full audio multi-track source will be available in the next day.

Some thoughts:

A lot's changed since I started putting music on the Internet way back in 2001. Artist-endorsed free downloads were shocking. Flexible pricing was still an untested novelty. It was rare to find source files from artists and sharing music wasn't encouraged by new artists.

Recently I was asked if I'd do anything different this time around. Would I still give the music away for free? Would I still give away my source files? Would I still be easygoing about copyright? Surely I could pull back now and try to cash in.

And I honestly couldn't imagine why I'd do things different. The only reason I, a dude who made an album by himself in a country basement, has had any sort of success is because people took it upon themselves to share my music with their friends. They remixed it, they used it in their videos, they played it on their podcasts, they included it in software and games and it took on a life of its own.

To sabotage that would be a huge, retarded mistake. Instead I'll be grateful if Out of It worms around the world in even close to the same freaky way I Don't Know What I'm Doing did and continues to.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying I love you Internets. Thanks for all your support and I hope you like Out of It. I'm going to bed, good night!