The recording studio downstairs here at RouteNote Towers is only a modest affair, certainly no Abbey Road, but making sure everyone involved in the running of the studio or the scheduling of a project can still get complicated. This web app from Gain Studio aims to arrange your business neatly, and make it remotley accessible, so that multiple members of staff can use it even when they’re not offsite. You can also:
Book sessions and assign rooms, staff, resources etc to each one, then easily edit them.
Easily track tasks by assigning jobs, tickets, and to-do lists to staff, setting due dates and priorities.
Track your equipment and reserve it for sessions.
View calendars for every room, staff member and piece of equipment, or get an overview of the whole studio in one place.
Of course you can also manage staff calendars etc on Google Calendar or even Outlook, and having all your studio’s co-ordination happen online can be a problem if your internet connection goes down, but this does seem a neat way of collating all the necessary information and making sure everyone’s on the same page. The basic version, for smaller studios (like ours) is free, but if you’re managing a massive organisation with tens of projects and multiple simultaneous recording sessions you’ll need to pay for a premium version (up to $399 a month!). That said, they’re running a month’s free trial at the moment, so you don’t lose anything by taking a look.
Band Metrics is a newly launched (on the back of this year’s Midem) service that allows bands to keep track of their radio exposure in different cities, and who’s talking about them on Twitter along with their location, plotted on a Google map. While the radio tracking service is only really useful to larger, more famous acts, the Twitter locator is quite useful, as long as you take care to make sure your band name is distinctive, as the word filter can’t differentiate between subjects or pick up phrasings. The platform is bound to develop, and add functions to it’s reporting, but even now it’s a relatively handy little tool for planning a tour and guaging the level of interest in your act in a given location.
As Apple are set to announce their iSlate, or whatever their tablet computer is going to be called, and we all contemplate the future of the ‘cloud’ of online applications and file storage that we’ll doubtless be accessing from our Dick Tracy watches and optical implants in a few short years, here is a neat little online music editing package that lets you save your projects online, and share them with other users. It’s by no means as sophisticated as desktop based programs like Cubase or Pro Tools, but as a means of roughing out a track with remote collaborators, Aviary’s ‘Myna’ is an excellent free web app.
As well as being able to upload your own tracks and samples to their server, you can import material from Soundcloud, pick and choose from their online libraries of loops and samples, and browse other people’s uploads for stuff to use in your project. You can then insert these clips into tracks just by dragging, and then use all the standard tools you’d expect from an audio editor; gain, fade, stereo balance, clip trim and loop, as well as a bank of simple effects like delay, reverb, filters and phasers. Once you’ve sketched out your track you can mix it down and export it as a .wav, or you can leave it up there to be edited by other users. It might not give you access to your favourite plugins, but this is a hell of a lot of music processing power for free.
KVR.com ran a developer competition to build audio plug-ins/applications, the prize fund being donated by users and split among the winners: The Metatron synth didn’t even make it into the top ten, but the name alone has surely got to earn it a place in your VST folder [no Metatron is not a transformer].
Here’s what it does:
Metatron is a 2 oscillator phase synth with an arpeggiator that works alongside a gated modulation sequencer for creating unique rythmic patterns and sounds. The oscillator section uses waveforms that double up to create a phasing effect similar to pulse width for each waveform. This along with a powefull unison detune section and ring modulator give Metatron a rich, fat sound. With the addition of versatile graphical envelopes, LFO’s and other modulation options, Metatron becomes an instrument that can create complex sounds, but at the same time keeps things simple without trying to do everything, making it a perfect ‘go to’ synth for one-finger basslines, rhythmic techno leads, spacey gated pads and other creative arpeggiated sequences.
Go check it out, and drop something in their prize-fund donation box!
Can’t afford a Tenori-On? You haven’t got anything to do for the next 10 minutes have you? Good – then you can play with the iNudge. This is a tiny, 8 voice, 4 bar synthesiser that you can control with your mouse to make loops like this horribly bodged attempt.
If you’re proud of your creation – link to it in the comments
After we published the post on the comparison between our digital music distribution service and those of our competitors, we got some comments talking about tools that you can use to promote your music online. A good one to get started with is TubeMogul. If you’ve produced a video for your latest track (like this one for The People’s String Foundation’s new album) then you can use TubeMogul to get it up with multiple video sites, YouTube, Break, Viddler, Dailymotion, Revver etc. You can also track the stats for each video across all the different sites, and promote your video through their targeted content network.
KVR Audio have a blog listing new software and plugin releases, and they’ve kindly organised their offerings into categories, including a directory of free plugins of various types across all platforms. Searching through them is a bit of a chore, as they’re arranged in the order that they were written about, 30 per page, but it’s a good rummage bin of tools if you’ve got some time to spend looking.
We’ve just launched our new upload tool, designed to make adding your music to our service quick and straightforward. You’ll need to sign in to your RouteNote account, and then you’ll find a link to download the new tool on the ‘Upload’ page. The program is available for all operating systems, and will install onto your desktop. From there you can add in all the music and image files, as well as the metadata (track, artist and album information) necessary to put an upload together. The program will then let you know about any errors in file format or album info before you send it to us, so you won’t need to wait for our admin dept. to get back to you with any issues, you can save the data entry process at any point before you send it, so that you can come back to a session later, without the risk of losing your progress, and uploads can be queued and sent while you’re not using the computer for other stuff online. Using the upload tool means that won’t lose your progress if the computer crashes during the upload, you can just restart the process once you’re up again. We’ve also streamlined the data entry process so that you don’t need to put the same information in multiple times for multiple tracks, releases are grouped by album, so the program knows which track is attached to which release.
We’ve put the tool together to make things easier and quicker for you while uploading, and to try and eliminate common errors from the upload process, and we hope that you think we’ve succeeded. Any feedback or comments on the tool once you’ve had a go at using it would be very welcome. You can comment on this post, or send email to support@routenote.com.
You might not be able to get a slot on From The Basement without greasing some major label palms, but BalconyTV is a channel that does daily sessions with unsigned and indie artists. So far they’ve had more than 8 million views across their bands, with The Script netting almost half a million plays as their most popular band. You can apply to play a session here, and then wend your way to either Dublin, London or Hamburg for a one day, live, unplugged recording session that they’ll chop up into a little video for you. Obviously if any of our distribution clients get on there we’d love to know about it so we can promote you on this blog!
Rounding out the little series of free VST plugins we’ve been posting, here’s a Vocoder for you. This should pretty much complete out your collection, but if there’s anything else you want, you could go here and take a gander: http://www.audiomastermind.com/ – they’ve got a pretty comprehensive search function, so if you find anything good, post it in the comments!
Want to make awesome robotic sounds like Daft-Punk, Kraftwerk, Vangellis, or Sparky the Magic Piano? Then Sonicism’s Vintage Vocoder is the audio effects tool that you’ve been crying out for. Designed from the ground up to capture that classic analogue vocoder sound using today’s DSP technology, Sonicism’s Vintage Vocoder is the most powerful, versatile and cost effective [it's free!] Vocoding solution available.
The recording studio downstairs here at RouteNote Towers is only a modest affair, certainly no Abbey Road, but making sure everyone involved in the running of the studio or the scheduling of a project can still get complicated. This web app from Gain Studio aims to arrange your business neatly, and make it remotley accessible, so that multiple members of staff can use it even when they’re not offsite. You can also:
Band Metrics
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