Category Archives: Rants

welcome back, bandcamp!

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It seems I may have jumped the gun a little with that last post about Bandcamp’s policy change on free downloads; as is often the case with the Bandcamp team, they’ve taken user feedback on board and come up with a compromise that’ll make just about everyone happy. Now, any accounts that have less than 200 free downloads left will be topped up to 200 once a month, so free music guys (like me) can keep using Bandcamp for nothing, as long as they’re not too popular (also like me).

Given Bandcamp’s generous definition of “a download” — streaming playback within the browser is still unlimited and free, and album downloads count as just a single download — 200 a month will cover a fair bit of activity. I’ve yet to reach 200 downloads in total so far, so 200 a month will probably always be enough for me.

Once again, Bandcamp proves that it’s a class act. Rock on!

so long bandcamp, and thanks for all the fish

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I’ve long been a fan, and user, of Bandcamp, the fantastic music hosting site, but Bandcamp is growing up, and as part of that, it looks like we’ll be growing apart as well. It’s still a great service, and I wish it well, but for free artists like myself, the honeymoon is (mostly) over.

The writing was on the wall earlier this year when Bandcamp started taking a 15% cut on sales in order to cover its costs. I think that’s perfectly reasonable, but the question remained: how would Bandcamp cover its costs on free downloads, where there’s no revenue to split? It answered that question today by announcing an end to unlimited free downloads.
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roasting bacon

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I don’t often listen to the TLLTS podcast, but I caught a recent episode (number 361) featuring Jono Bacon, and I was not impressed. I wish Bacon would stop commenting about the state of Linux audio, because it’s clear to me — but probably not clear to the larger community — that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

He explained on the show that he doesn’t use Linux for his music production, and I should say up-front that I don’t have a problem with this. Linux certainly isn’t ideal for everyone, and if Bacon has a solid, working Windows-based setup, there’s nothing wrong with him sticking with that and focusing on making music.

However, it’s very clear to me that he has no idea about the current state of Linux audio production, spreading the usual outdated nonsense about JACK being overly complex to set up, ignoring the existence of quite usable MIDI sequencers like Qtractor and Rosegarden, and giving very short shrift to Hydrogen’s abilities as a drum synth. These tools, with a suitable velocity-layered drumkit, might not give the same results as quickly as Bacon’s proprietary setup can, but they’d certainly do the job, especially once you run each drum in to Ardour for separate processing.

Why do I have such a problem with this? Well, it’s because Bacon is widely known and respected as an open-source evangelist, and also as a musician, so his words carry weight. I and my fellow Linux musicians know he’s mistaken, but a casual listener would assume that he knows what he’s talking about, given his background, and would probably write off Linux as a music production platform because of it.

Again, to be clear, I’m not saying Bacon should use Linux. I’m not even saying that he should spend the time to learn about making music on Linux. I just wish he’d stop talking about it as if he does know what he’s talking about.

ascap vs creative commons? seriously?

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It seems like that last post of mine detailing my selfish reasons for making my music available for free couldn’t have been better timed. ASCAP has launched an attack on Creative Commons, the EFF, and Public Knowledge, asking its members to donate to a fund that will be used to campaign against copyleft licencing in the US Congress. The letter it sent to its members reads like the kind of FUD you’d expect from 90s Microsoft:

“They say they are advocates of consumer rights, but the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free.”

This could not be further from the truth — Creative Commons gives artists tools to control what they wish to allow other people to do with their own work. It’s not aimed at tearing down traditional copyright, and it’s certainly not aimed at providing free access to existing copyrighted works. I’ve talked about the fact that I use CC because it’s in my best interest, but I wouldn’t claim that it’s the best option for all artists.

I can only think that ASCAP is targeting Creative Commons because it’s becoming a credible alternative to the old performance royalty model. If a cafe owner wants some background music for their customers, they can play any appropriately-licenced CC music; that is, any work not using the “Non-Commercial” clause. As more music becomes available under these licences, and awareness of its existence grows, it will be increasingly practical to work with CC music rather than pay ASCAP fees.

congratulations to spacex, but sad pandas for humanity

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Saturday morning marked a significant milestone in spaceflight: the successful maiden launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. For years, spaceflight has been ruled by governments and the military, but SpaceX is shaking things up by developing rockets on a purely commercial basis, and at a fraction of the price of competing offerings. SpaceX has had success in the past with its smaller Falcon 1 rocket, but the Falcon 9 is a much bigger machine: with around 20 times the payload capacity, it’s more than capable of launching crew and cargo to the ISS.

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uncharacteristic productivity

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I don’t know if I’ve been feeling particularly inspired lately, but I’ve definitely been feeling productive. Today I submitted my entry for Tunestorm02, a music challenge that called for creating a track entirely from samples of household items. Last Tunestorm I whipped up something really rough and ready at the last minute, but this time I put the effort in and came up with a proper track that I’m actually pretty happy with.

With that done, that’s four tracks I’ve finished in the last two months. Sure, one was a cover, and one was a bit of cheap ambient art-wank, but that’s still more than I managed last year, and we’re only a few months in. I think it’s just the result of practice more than anything — I’m definitely getting quicker, not just with the tools, but with the writing and arranging as well. Working with some new tools, like Seq24, has helped as well I think.

I don’t have any particular ideas right now, but I’m sure I’ll jump on my PC over the weekend and start playing around with something!

html5 audio problems

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For my last few sketches now I’ve used HTML5′s built in “<audio>” tag to handle embedded streaming of my audio files, rather than using a Flash component. It’s a convoluted solution right now, due to a lack of ubiquitous support — I need to post Ogg Vorbis files for Firefox and Chrome, MP3s for Safari, and then a Flash-based MP3 fallback for other browsers — but it’s worked pretty well for the most part.

Unfortunately, it came a little unstuck today, when I checked my web server logs and saw that there’d been more than 100 downloads of my latest sketch — far more than I expected from seven minutes of abstract wank. I did some testing, and saw that every time I opened the page, it was downloading the entire track, rather than downloading just the headers. As it turns out, it looks like the transparent proxy at the office is to blame; I guess it has problems with partial content downloads.

For now, I’m just gonna fall back to ye olde Flash player for my audio posts — it’s not pretty, or elegant, but it works, and it doesn’t have these kinds of problems. I’ll keep an eye on HTML5 though, and on the office proxy. Here’s hoping for a future where I can post just a single audio file and have it streamed seamlessly everywhere without a need for plugins!

looking back on 2009

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Around this time last year I said (not on my blog, but on my LJ, for those that are reading this there) that I wanted to do a bit more with myself in 2009, rather than just wasting time online. I can’t say that I spent a lot of time reading or writing (probably a lot less time writing, in fact), and I didn’t spend a whole lot of time outside with my telescope, but I did play a good few games, watched some new TV, and spent a lot of time cooking lunches for work.

Most importantly, though, I actually did something productive musically. Until 2009, the best I’d managed since high school was a couple of minutes of generic techno, but in 2009 I produced two complete tracks, both of which I’m still pretty happy with. My dalliances with music in the past have usually ended in frustration, but this year, through a combination of new hardware, much-improved software (mad props to the Ardour guys), and perseverance, I got over the hump. I now feel like I have the tools I need to make whatever I decide to make, and perhaps most importantly, my desire to make music is just as strong as it was a year ago.

I’m usually not one to set hard goals, but if there’s something I’d like to make this year, it’s a proper song — lyrics, singing, and all of that good stuff.

coming up milhouse

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Feels like time for another bullet-point update!

  • We got a house! Well, provisionally anyway — we sign the lease on Saturday. It’s a cute little renovated two-bedroom place in Footscray, so it’s got a bit of that same old house charm that our Surrey Hills place had. Living west-side is going to be quite a change, but it’s a quiet spot, and it’s not far from Kensington or Yarraville, which both seem like awesome places to hang out. The timing is great too — we get the keys on January 5th, so we have plenty of time to give notice here and start packing and cleaning.
  • Royal Crown Revue tonight! Last week, Kat spotted that they were touring, so we grabbed some tickets. It was going to be a pain heading off to two house inspections this afternoon, then heading home and having to head back in to the city for the gig, but now that we’ve been approved we don’t have to worry about those inspections now.
  • I have a new coffee machine! I had been using a plunger at home since my old machine died a couple of months back, so I’m very glad to have a new one. It’s a Rancilio Silvia, and I got a new grinder (the matching Rancilio Rocky) as well. Perhaps now wasn’t the best time to buy new toys, but I got a great deal on it, and I sure as hell need my coffee right now!
  • I ended up on the Open Source Musicians podcast again on the weekend; one of the usual hosts couldn’t make it, so the other host, and a few of us that were online at the time, jumped in to a Skype conference call and talked crap for a bit instead. That episode isn’t online yet, but I’ll link to it when it is.

random updates

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Just a few more random updates:

  • It’s good to see myself in print again — there’s a feature in the PC Authority that hit the stands today that lists 99 great free apps, and I contributed the Linux portion of it. I checked it out today and I think it came up pretty well!
  • Microsoft finally received my 360 today, after nearly a good few days in the post. I sent it on Friday, and i didn’t think it’d take so long to get a console to Sydney, but either way, they have it now, so I should have it back within a couple of weeks of today. In the meantime, I scored a loaner 360 from a friend, which is awesome.
  • I signed up with iiNet for our home ADSL yesterday, so of course Internode launched new plans today. Luckily, there’s nothing there that would entice me back — iiNet will still be a better deal, even before the DSLAM comes online here. I decided to jump to iiNet now rather than waiting for the DSLAM just to avoid any downtime; doing it now means a churn and just an hour or two of downtime, rather than a disconnection and reconnection and the days of downtime that’d cause.