Since there are still 9 days to go till SXSW 2010 it’s a pleasure to give out a link to the completely unofficial torrents which old all mp3 files of almost all songs which are to be presented at this years SXSW:
“The SXSW® Music and Media Conference showcases hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on over eighty stages in downtown Austin. By day, conference registrants do business in the SXSW® Trade Show in the Austin Convention Center and partake of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature.”
“12 months, a core team of dozens (with a network of thousands) spanning 3 continents, 4 languages, 5 specialist teams, countless sleepless nights…
It’s finally here.
Filmed in Sacramento, Portland, and Victoria by the Nine Inch Nails team, edited and produced by their fans, The Gift is a stunning work in 1080p High Definition video with 5.1 Surround Sound, multi-language subtitles, and artistically-driven ethics.”
You’re reading it right: the final production is ready to be downloaded. I am downloading it right now.
It’s a complete Nine Inch Nails live concert in full-hd. Free for all / Not for sale. Get it while it’s hot!
Great find this weekend. I haven’t heard of Ladyhawke until Saturday. Now it’s the soundtrack of this weekend and the upcoming week!
Great pop music with a touch of rock. Powerful and fast. One of my favourites in the album is “My Delirium” – a song that has a subtle feeling of the Cardigans song “My Favourite Game”.
Ladyhawke writes in her blog about it:
“I wrote the song a year and a half ago after days of no sleep due to terrible jetlag. I felt like I was going out of my mind. I was missing my friends and family back home, and I was basically living to hear my phone ring in hope that it would be one of them calling. So my delirium came out of me thinking I was going crazy from lack of sleep!
I always knew this song had the potential for a really imaginative video, considering the general theme of the song is me going crazy. So when I read the treatment sent in by the Frater guys, a duo of London based directors who specialise inanimation, I knew it was the one!”
Imogen Heap is obviously an artist I have missed in the past years. More precisely Imogen Heap is a singer-songwriter whose newest album just became available. I found it due to one very special song called “Bad Body Double” which was played in an episode of the tv show “Heroes”.
Imogen Heap - Ellipse
Great thing is that it’s available right now. And it’s available in two flavours. You can have the single-cd version which holds all the great songs. And you can have the deluxe version which holds all great songs + the instrumental version of each song.
Great stuff! It seems I have to catch up some great tunes from this artist in the near future!
UPDATE: Before you need to buy that album, just listen to it first:
Es ist schon extrem erstaunlich was in einem vorgeht und welch erstauntes Gesicht man macht wenn man durch Zufall einmal ein Video von den Sprechern der “Drei Fragezeichen” findet.
Hand aufs Herz: Klingen die Stimmen so wie die Personen aussehen? Also ich komm immer wieder aus dem Staunen nicht heraus wenn ich die Stimmen höre und die Gesicher dazu sprechen sehe. Da muss doch ein Trick dabei sein!
Ach übrigends sind heute auch noch zwei neue Folgen der “drei Fragezeichen” erschienen…
“Und ein weiterer Schritt im Free! Music! Contest wurde getan: Der Sampler steht nun zum Download zur Verfügung! Da die Rückfrage kam: Natürlich sind alle Stücke unter Creative Commons lizenziert.
Fast vier Stunden Musik waren eingereicht worden und am Ende stand eines fest: Mit einer einzelnen CD wären wir nicht in der Lage gewesen, die Qualität der Einsendungen entsprechend zu würdigen. Also verzichten wir auf ungefähr 70% des Gewinns und haben dafür 100% mehr feinste freie Musik. ”
I just found out that Jason Mraz – this singer songwriter guy with the nice smooth melodies – is doing some things different.
For example Jason and his management encourage bootleg recordings by even offering several spots near the mixing desk. Yes you’re reading it right: You can go to his concert and record it! You can even download several concerts in excellent quality (flac’n'stuff) on archive.org. How cool is this!
I just have to go to a record shop and buy something made by this guy!
By the way: his current album isn’t bad at all… it’s great!
“Welcome to your life There’s no turning back Even while sleep We will find you Acting on your best behaviour Turn your back on mother nature Everybody wants to rule the world”
If you want to completely destroy your productivity for today, just go ahead and visit this great Mash-Up Charts website.
“A mashup, bootleg or blend (also mash up and mash-up) is a song or composition created by blending two or more songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the music track of another.
In full swing at the end of the 20th century, mashups have been described positively as “ultimate post-modern pop song[s]” or “‘culture jamming in its purest form’” They have also been described negatively as “the logical extension of the sampling fever of the ’80s taken to its dumbest extreme”. Due to the questionable legal status of mash ups and little chance of profits “there’s a real punk rock attitude attached to the movement”.” (Source)
Oh… by the way: This is not the first time I am writing about Mash-Ups… be sure to have a look here and here.
Since my last Songbird experiences were not that great I thought it would be a great idea to take the newly released 1.2 version of Songbird for a spin.
It’s said that the new version is faster and more stable. I installed 3 hours ago and I still cannot use it since it’s syncing with iTunes ever since.
Let’s say you’re like me: You got several audiobooks on CD over the years and you even ripped several of these to listen to them in your MP3 player/car.
So what I have is a number of audiobooks ripped as mp3s on my harddisk looking something like this:
If you only have the CD what you would like to do is rip the whole CD as ONE large m4a AAC encoded audiofile. We need it to be an m4a because we later want to inject chapter marks. If you have this big AAC file just skip the next few steps. But if you got those several small mp3 files – one for each chapter you want to merge them together and reencode them as m4a AAC.
There is a great free tool to merge these mp3 files together. It’s called (who would have thought) Merge MP3 and is available completely for free. It’ll create one big mp3 file out of your several small ones.
After you got that huge mp3 file you want to convert it into a m4a file with AAC encoding. I recommend using iTunes.
When you got that one huge m4a file you want to load it into a tool called Chapter Master. It’s not free and will set you back $15 but it’s worth as I did not find anything else that was a) that cheap b) that comfortable c) working.
Load the m4a file into Chapter Master, add the chapters in the right order and at the right time. Eventually you want to add an album art picture. Click save and you’re done.
The resulting file is a m4b file recognized by iTunes as an audiobook with chapters.
After the last update and the fact that I am locked into iTunes (using it for more than 5 years…having rated almost 70% of my huge library…) I decided to buy an iPod at the beginning of this year. Sadly there was only the big and heavy iPod classic that looked promising since the touch was way to expensive.
I thought about things like: Would I need my whole library or would it suffice to have 8/16/32 GB of it? Do I want to have additional applications or just a music player?
After the last update several things came together to a conclusion:
There’s not a 160 GB iPod anymore. Since my library is almost that I wouldn’t be able to put my library on a 120 GB classic.
The touch is cheaper now
mostly I am listening to podcasts, which I do need to by in sync all the time, that means: remaining playtime sync and syncing without manual work
Since my wife doesn’t like the look of the new nano we decided to get the 16 GB Touch.
It was delivered today and I am hugely impressed with it so far. It’s what I wanted and the way I wanted it. The feature of having my podcasts and audiobooks start/stop positions synced is just fantastic (listening to the first 20 minutes on the go and the rest at home is now possible because the position where I stopped listening on the iPod is synced to the iTunes).
As you may or may not know I am working on a gateway tool for citizen band radio. For this tool I was asked if it would be possible to build a tone detection, maybe more, into my software. And on the way of finding out how to accomplish this I stumbles across several very interesting things.
Like this peakmeter control which uses a software digital signal processing or a software dsp library – everything written entirely in managed code (C#) and both open source. Both examples show that you can use digital signal processing for audio and image content… and for more.
“DSP processing is very interesting subject to learn and work with. This block receives digital samples from the source. It approximates the original waveform and finds its peak magnitudes. Since I would not be able to go in details about how FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) works in this article, I recommend the interested reader to visit some of the links in the reference section to increase his/her knowledge about this process.”
“A C# open source library that provides fully featured (1) single and double precision complex number data types, (2) complex number math library, (3) 1D, 2D and 3D complex and real symmetric fast Fourier transforms, and (4) highly accurate statistical routines. The library is optimized for both speed and numerical accuracy. The reason that this library is called a “Digital Signal Processing” library is because complex numbers, FFTs and statistical functions form the basis of any DSP library — although it is the hope that this library will continue to evolve to a more full fledged DSP library.”
“As usual I’ve got a very strange wish what nobody else seems to have on this planet. I have several computers of different platforms. And on one of this machines there are speakers attached…I want to have the possibility to output from any of the machines to the speakers. And please loss-less and low latency!”
It took more than 3 years to fulfill this particular wish. But now it’s done. In 2005 I mentioned the Airfoil software that could run on MacOS X and forward sound from almost every application to an AirTunes compatible device. As it turns out Rogue Amoeba did their homework and created a free “Airfoil Speakers” application which can be used on Windows and MacOS X.
So the things are simple: Start the speaker application on a machine that is in the same network/subnet as the Airfoil master. The virtual speaker is then displayed on the master machine and you can assign a sound source from that machine to the speaker. Hmm… Simple Setup sample: One machine is in my kitchen (Windows XP machine) and one machine is on my desk – an iMac. In the kitchen only the speaker application is started and the iMac instantly “sees” the speaker. One click and the sound output of my desk machine is forwarded through the network to the kitchen… Easy and cool. One can think of any other combination of Speaker/Master application – even multiple speakers can be powered by one master…oh joy!
So here is what the master looks like:
and this is what it looks like on a client (speaker):
“A mashup or bootleg[1] is a song or composition created from the combination of the music from one song with the a cappella from another (also mash up and mash-up). These songs may be considered part of the European bastard popmusical genre. “A mash-up is a song created out of pieces of two or more songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the music track of another… Mash-ups are incredible fun and a fascinating way to reexperience some of your favorite tunes.”"
And there is this website – offering over 200 tracks and extras around the mashup theme – even best-of-samplers are available:
If you got a Mac (and that’s the platform it’s only running on) and if you’re using iTunes to listen to your music you probably want to give this Dashboard Widget a try – it automatically searches the music video which supposedly belongs to the music you’re currently listening to and plays it in a small window on the dashboard:
“YouTube has stacks and stacks of music videos on their website. I have written a little dashboard widget called iTube. iTube gets the artist and title of the song you are playing in iTunes. It then performs a search on youtube and plays the first hit in the widget window. Once installed iTube works by itself in the background, so start a song up iTunes then look at your dashboard and with a little luck you’ll be watching what you are listening to.”
I seriously don’t know why they are doing that – it’s not as if any material released previously came to any notice so far – but what the heck – Radiohead decided to put their current music video (which isn’t bad) and the raw data that was used to create it to the public using the Creative Commons license:
“The animation data used to make the video are licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license at Google Code. This means you are free to use the data to make your own video projects, as long as you abide by the CC license’s conditions. (To be clear, the song and its accompanying video are not under CC license; the data used to make the video are.)”
“Following on from her critically acclaimed sets ‘Love In The Time Of Science’ and her first for Rough Trade ‘Fisherman’s Woman’, the forthcoming ‘Me And Armini’ (released 8th September) sees her working once again with her long time producer/collaborator Dan Carey resulting in what we feel is destined to be one of the albums of 2008.
‘Me And Armini’ is a hugely ambitious and aspirational pop record with Emiliana’s soaring voice centre stage, bolstered by a rich gamut of musical styles. From the summery skank of the title track to the surging, breathless, first single ‘Jungle Drum’ (released 29th September) and yearning, spine-tingling ‘Big Jumps’ and much more in between ‘Me And Armini’ is a truly fantastic album.
‘Me And Armini’ will be released as a digital single in the US exclusively via iTunes on 19th August, with the album of the same name to follow on 9th September. “
The video was created by flight404 using Processing…
“Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.”
There’s a new version of Dot.Tunes out which is now available for free. That’s good news and if you ever wanted to access your iTunes Library and you were not in Bonjour range…try this great tool!
“DOT.TUNES is not some lightweight iTunes utility. It’s a fully developed web server application that supports MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV, MPEG, MP4, and MOV files, allowing you to share your iTunes library contents with your friends in other cities, your classmates across the dorm or the coworkers scattered throughout the building. DOT.TUNES contains a custom web server designed specifically to serve the audio tracks from your iTunes at lightning fast speeds. Through seamless integration with your iTunes base, DOT.TUNES easily handles large libraries without missing a beat.”
I tried it and it’s working quite well – especially if you consider that there’s a bunch of plugins available.(which you have to pay for)
Hurray! The wait is over and the brand new Morcheeba album is spinning in my players…thank you cd dealer for breaking the street date … hrhr!
It’s called “Dive Deep” and is the first album presenting different vocal artists each song. I am missing Skye Edwards voice but with all the variation on this album it’s back to the roots as if Skye was there.
It seems that tomorrow “Lascif Corpse” going to do a gig in Ilmenau and I want to encourage you to see them live on stage in the BI-Club(admission is 2€ reduced /4€ full).
If you cannot drop by you also can tune into the live stream the FeM Streaming Team is going to send out over the intertubes. Yes that’s right: the complete concert is available through a live stream.
Tune into the live stream around 2200 CEST and watch a great concert…
This post is more of a reminder for myself. I need to remember that obviously great multi-track audio application that just became available.
“Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. You can produce your own CDs, mix video soundtracks, or just experiment with new ideas about music and sound.
Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you’ve been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.
Above all, Ardour strives to meet the needs of professional users. This means implementing all the “hard stuff” that other DAWs ( even some leading commercial apps ) handle incorrectly or not at all. Ardour has a completely flexible “anything to anywhere” routing system, and will allow as many physical I/O ports as your system allows. Ardour supports a wide range of audio-for-video features such as video-synced playback and pullup/pulldown sample rates. You will also find powerful features such as “persistent undo”, multi-language support, and destructive track punching modes that aren’t available on other platforms.”
I am in the middle of a jolly exiting jazz-swing-neo-whatever phase when it comes to the music I am listening these days. There’s “Big Bad Voodoo Daddy” – a band which I will talk more about in the next days and there’s one (for me) very very new
“Silje Nergaard (born June 19, 1966 in Steinkjer, Norway), is a very successful Norwegian pop and jazz musician. While some very old titles of her (e. g. Si det, si det from 1985) rather have a distinct pop feel, she has now almost completely given up making pop music, which is the reason why virtually the entirety of her later releases consists of jazzy tunes.”
Want to get an impression of one of my favourite songs of her (it’s “You Send Me Flowers”) ? Go ahead:
Several months after I was told about last.fm I finally ended up using it. I installed it yesterday on my main-music-playing-machine and so far the experience is great.
“Last.fm is a service that records what you listen to, and then presents you with an array of interesting things based upon your tastes — artists you might like, users with similar taste, personalised radio streams, charts, and much more.”
Since last.fm is monitoring what music I am listening to it can also be used to create some kind of “personal chart list” which you can put on your website… it may look like this:
(this actually is a realtime chart of my account)
In the meantime I was redirected to another quite similar service called “Pandora”. You also get a free high-quality radio from them. But Pandora is working very differently in the inside. Instead of taking the social approach like last.fm, Pandora wants to investigate the “genome of music”:
“Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.”
Since last.fm has a really nice tool for my mac and is working really well for my music taste I am going to stick with it… for everyone else: go and try both.
Weihnachten, das ist die Zeit der sentimentalen Rückblicke und selbstkritischen Fragen (“Was zum Teufel hab ich eigentlich das Jahr über gemacht?”) und noch kritischeren Bernd-das-Brot-like-Jahresausblicke (“Macht euch keine Hoffnung: Das nächste Jahr wird noch viel schlimmer.” und “Die Hölle, das sind die Anderen.”).
Und man kramt auch Sachen wieder raus. Da liegt bei mir nun eine alte Ärzte-DVD auf dem Schreibtisch.
Der Datenträger deckt die ersten Schaffensjahre der Gruppe ab.
Neben hinglänglich bekannten Videos…
“Gehn wie ein Ägypter”
“Westerland”
“Bitte, Bitte”
…auch diverse Live-Auftritte im TV…
“Teenagerliebe”
“Zu spät”
“Du willst mich küssen”
“Radio brennt”
…sowie Interviewmaterial…
Farin
Bela
Sahnie
… und nicht zu vergessen die Moskito-Sachen:
“Das ist Rock ‘n’ Roll”
Mein persönlicher Favorit ist “Du willst mich küssen”. Allein schon mit dem Gedanken, ein Nerd würde den Song laut und ungeniert im Schulflur trällern:
“Du willst mich küssen, doch das geht mir zu schnell. Du solltest wissen: Ich bin intellektuell.”
“Ben Westbeech, Briony, Cris Tanzi, Divas Harmony feat. Kayla & Trip, Golden Era of Sound feat. Dionne Charles, Granufunk & Sonny Plankton, Kristin Hild, Lady Destiny, Layonne & Krako, My Toys Like Me, Reebosound, S. Maily, Stee Downes, Super Star Planet, Switch”… oh wait… GRANUFUNK?
“Have you ever wanted to take the audio output of one piece of software and send it to another? How about taking the output of that same program and send it to two others, then record the result in the first program? If so, JACK may be what you’ve been looking for.
JACK is a low-latency audio server, written for POSIX conformant operating systems such as GNU/Linux and Apple’s OS X. It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves. Its clients can run in their own processes (ie. as normal applications), or can they can run within the JACK server (ie. as a “plugin”).”
This alone isn’t what I was searching for…but there is NetJack – the network extension for JACK.
“Netjack is a Realtime Audio Transport over a generic IP Network. It is fully integrated into JACK.”
Last year I told you about Bobby Baby – a girl from sweden which makes great music since she is 12. Known since 2005 as Bobby Baby (before: Ella Glockenspiel) she is going to be in germany for some gigs next month:
RT @lamelama22: Omfg hell just froze over. #DukeNukem Forever is announced by the end of this year & PLAYABLE at #PAX! 13 yrs in the mak ... 30 mins ago
Warum zeigt Twitter for iPad eigentlich Bilder als Webseite statt nur das Bild an? #twitter#iPad5 hours ago
RT @yeebase_t3n: Toshiba recalls 41,000 laptops (Satellite T130) for overheating http://bit.ly/aXYSdw - if only dell would do that !! 5 hours ago
Zomg! 13 hours ago
RT @haekelschwein: Man soll nicht mit seinem elaborierten Wortschatz bramarbasieren! 22 hours ago
”
I need to remember that obviously great multi-track audio application that just became available.
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