We’re big fans of Fink, one of Ninja Tune’s artists – if you are too, then you’ll be interested to see that he’s got a free, previously unreleased download of a B-side track that didn’t make it onto ‘Sort Of Revolution’ up on his site at the moment. You will need to swap him your email for it though…
Feel like helping develop a new piece of sampling software? Maize are currently developing the Beta version of Maize Sampler 2, to go alongside their ‘Modular Studio Environment’ a VST and effect chaining/mixing shell. They’re inviting producers to download the latest version of the sampler beta, and use it for a couple of weeks before reporting back with feedback and information on any bugs you might find. Be quick though, the software’s license will run out in a fortnight’s time.
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:
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.
iTunes is heading for it’s 10 billionth track sold, and has launched a promotion to encourage people to get their credit cards out. If you’re the purchaser of the 10,000,000,000th track, then that nice Mr. Jobs will post you a gift card worth $10,000 to spend in the iTunes store. Interestingly, you don’t actually need to buy any music to be eligible to win the ten thousand dollar prize; you can get a free sweepstake entry by filling out a form here, which should count the same as a song purchase if your entry gets processed immediately after the 99,999,999,999th track is sold. You can keep an eye on the track sales ticker on the iTunes homepage, and put in up to 25 free entries a day, or just log in and buy a huge pile of songs near the time. I’ll be entering, but unfortunately they don’t sell hardware on the iTunes store, so my iPad will have to wait until Christmas. Oh, and if you happened to buy from one of the artists that RouteNote has distributed music to iTunes for, then we’d be really pleased.
We posted a while back about Gil Scott-Heron’s forthcoming album, and it’s proven to be a very interesting piece of work. Utterly heartfelt and honest, you can hear the age and frailty in his voice as he recounts deeply personal experiences. His sense of meter and rhythm are unfaded, and the quality of his writing has lost some of its agression, but none of its fire. Strongly reccomend pouring a long drink and sitting down to listen to this one.
You can listen to the album it right here thanks to the wonders of the internet:
It’s been literally decades since the progenitor of hip-hop released anything, so we’re interested to see how this new work is received.
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 are forever releaseing neat little bits of software, and for those of you bold enough to be running Linux [I'm considering it, after my XP system got a virus for the second time in 3 months], they’ve released the Linux MultiMedia Studio:
LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio, which allow you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples. You can have fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more; all in a user-friendly and modern interface.
Features:
- Song-Editor for composing songs.
- A Beat+Bassline-Editor for creating beats and basslines.
- An easy-to-use Piano-Roll for editing patterns and melodies.
- An FX mixer with 64 FX channels and arbitrary number of effects allow unlimited mixing possibilities.
- Many powerful instrument and effect-plugins out of the box.
- Full user-defined track-based automation and computer-controlled automation sources.
- Compatible with many standards such as SoundFont2, VST(i), LADSPA, GUS Patches and full MIDI support.
Import of MIDI and FLP (Fruityloops Project) files.
In order to encourage people to get their music online with us, and introduce new potential customers to our service, we thought we’d run a little competition. If you’re a solo musician or you’re in a band that has new music that needs to get out there and selling, all you need to do is add a comment to this blog post with the name of the band or artist and a link to the track that you think is their (or your) best. We’ll keep entries open until the 14th of December, and then we’ll judge all the tracks that have been entered. The top 3 according to our judges will be given completely free distribution to all of our partners stores during 2010 on any new releases they upload to RouteNote. No fees, no subscriptions, no back end cut, no strings – just access to our service completely free until 2011. The top 5 will get a feature and review on our blog, and we’re promoting this competition in collaboration with www.music-news.com, so you can expect to get their attention too. This competition is open only to artists and bands and music not already signed up to RouteNote.
Thanks, and good luck!
Billboard has always been a leader in breaking news and inside sources, however they seem to have lost their way a bit online. Thus, Billboard is now looking to grow its service even further and expand into other areas. Today, Billboard is launching a new service called Billboard Live. Having the chance to stream festivals across the ocean is nice, but Billboard offers us a customized version of streaming by letting us choose what we want their cameras to focus on.
According to Associated Press, not only does this new website offer music lovers FREE streaming of selected concerts, but there are options galore! Users get to choose from five different camera angles in which they would like to view the show.
Two more factors that could possibly make this the #1 concert-streaming site? First off, the ADD generation of social platforms have the option to also use Twitter or Facebook without having to leave the website. Secondly, (and of course) it’ll be available on for iPhone.
If you happen to be lucky enough (!) to live in Birmingham or it’s environs, then you should get to the Music Live show at the NEC, 6th-8th November (this weekend) where Source Distribution will be giving away a cool MOOG synthesiser. This is a keyboard as versatile in the studio as it is on stage, and worth more than £1k: “Moog Music is proud to introduce the Little Phatty Stage II; the newest member of the Little Phatty family. Like the Stage and Tribute Edition before it, the Little Phatty Stage II puts the performer in control of a 100% analog signal path, two ultra stable Voltage Controlled Oscillators, a Voltage Controlled Filter and other versatile features like an external audio input, CV and KB gate inputs and a full MIDI controller.” Then you can make lots of lovely tunes on it to upload to our music distribution service!
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