Archive for the 'technology' CategoryPage 14 of 26

Sharing Mp3s in Twitter

published
on January 29, 2009
by
ACtual
in culture, DIY, future of music, music, music business, nerd, technology, web 2.0, and website
. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

While Evolving Music and MixMatchMusic have been Twitter devotees for several months now (check out why one of our writers thinks that musicians should jump on the Twitter bandwagon), I’ve only recently picked up the site. And I’ll be honest, if I hadn’t seen the iPhone app Gavroche has been rocking, I probably never would have. I put up an account several months ago, but the idea of just text messages coming in, or needing to look at a browser window seemed ridiculous to me. I’m not sitting at home checking my computer to see what other people are up to. But when Gavroche introduced me to Tweetie where you can post automatically, get a nice streamlined list of responses and other peoples’ status messages, I was intrigued. When he showed me how easy it was to post photos to the site from the phone, I was sold. And now, with even more features, I’m beginning to feel like Twitter culture is slowly infiltrating everything (and now to see if they can come up with a workable business model to actually stay in business.)

But up until now, the shortened URLs, the pictures, the @replies… these are fun things that have kept me busy, but haven’t yet broken into the main area of interest that I have… namely, big shocker here, music. So when I read about Songly, I was of course intrigued. The service allows you to use ANY URL that is hosting an Mp3 and post it as a Tweet. Here’s the kicker though… it doesn’t just shorten the URL and make it tweetable… it wraps it up in a flash player so anyone can listen.

To try out Songly, click here, and to read my first tweet attempt at such a thing, click here. I’ve used the new Souls of Mischief song, “Tour Stories” (click here for Souls of Mischief interview.) And for those of you rocking FireFox, Songly has an integrated tool for it. Talk about musical connectivity. A fantastic way to share music that will surely evolve with Twitter, forming the future of content sharing. Only drawback? Since the player they use is Flash, your iPhone friends won’t be able to listen until they get to a computer.

Which Microphone Is Best for Field Use?

published
on January 22, 2009
by
Duane Nickull
in recording and technology
. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

[Note: Duane is a new contributor to Evolving Music and a new member of the MixMatchMusic family. He co-founded Mix2r.fm and is Adobe’s Senior Technical Evangelist.]

I had a colleague at Adobe write to me today about Duanes World TV and ask the following:

“Hey Duane — Can you tell me the specs of the microphone you use for your videos. The shotgun mic on your camera, that is. Thanks”

This is a complicated question as every interview I have done has had distinctly different conditions. Sometimes wind, rain, background noise ruin the audio. Nevertheless, here is what I have used to date and what I think I will do in the future.

Duane’s World is shot with an HDTV Canon HV20. This is a very compact, yet full featured camera. The shotgun mic I used in Milan to capture my colleague at Adobe is a Rodes model N3594 VideoMic. While it is good, it picks up tons of background noise. For an example of the background noise problem, check out Duane’s World Episode 2 (forward to interviews ), and here for the wind problem.

As a fix, I started using a Beyer dynamics M58, which is a professional quality broadcast mic and really good for interviews. It has a long handle which allows you to control the interview better (when you move the mic back to you, it cuts the person off). The BBC uses these too since they have a long handle you can interview people a meter away. For the difference see this interview in a noisy environment. It is highly directional and picks up no background noise. The problem is it needs phantom XLR adapter (power) so you have to buy a phantom power provider like this to plug the mic into. This uses standard 9 volt batteries (same as the Rodes mic).

For voice overs in my studio, I use the Shure SM7B which is the ultimate studio mic. This uses XLR connectors too so you need a midi device to interface with your computer. I use the Toneport UX2 which has tons of preset vocal tones and plugs into USB. This can allow you to record to Live, Cubase, et al.

HOWEVER:

None of these are the best solution. The better solution for an all around, small portable and perfect mic is a wireless/wired with long cable lavalier mic. I would highly recommend going with the XLR phantom power adapter plus two wired lavalier mics. They work in all situations. So, this is the model I am buying. The problem is that you need one of these for every person so if you are interviewing 4 people, you need 4 mics. Since most of mine are two people interviews, I will use the two mics but record each on a separate channel so I can control the volume in the event the interviewee speaks with a lower voice.

I’ll update this blog post after I experiment with the lavaliers.

Originally Posted By Duane to Technoracle (a.k.a. “Duane’s World”)

Are Mommy Bloggers Into Music Tech?

published
on January 21, 2009
by
Sandra
in culture, DIY, music, and technology
. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

Let’s take a moment to congratulate the two winners of our chicBuds Holiday Giveaway from last month, Jacqueline (read her chicBuds review here) and Michele (whose review is here). Enjoy your prizes ladies! And thanks to everyone else who participated in the contest.

chicbuds

Since Evolving Music typically focuses on topics like the schizophrenic music industry, emerging technology, social media, and artist reviews and interviews, it’s easy to make assumptions about our readership. Sure, anyone might stumble upon our blog and find a post that interests them, but you kind of picture the majority of the readers falling into certain categories like DIY musicians, other geeky music tech bloggers, people from the myspace generation…

As such, at first it was surprising to find that both our winners come from the mommy blogger demographic. Logically though it makes sense. They are everywhere! Mommy bloggers are fast becoming (if they haven’t already) one of the most influential groups online. Avid blog readers will recognize names like Dooce, queen bee of the mommy blogger tribes and one of the lucky few who actually makes a living doing it. With four million page views per month, you can easily picture the advertisers lining up with tongues all a drool. On the flip side, can you imagine the immense pressure of an audience that large? Millions of people hanging on your every written word? She is quite a lady.

With all their genuine commenting, link trading and sharing of emotions, mommy bloggers epitomize the power of social media. Naturally, this slice of society has tremendous influence when it comes to products and thus many mommy bloggers have become trusted sources for product reviews. “Marketers have just started to scratch the surface of this untapped medium,” according to Fahlgren. This phenomenon appears to be very much on the rise.

For those of us tooling about in music industry, the question is this: Are mommy bloggers into music tech? If they are, what kind of influence do they have in the space? And what does that mean for the other players in the field – the artists, the bloggers, the entrepreneurs, the fans, the record labels…? Should artists focus on recruiting and engaging fans in the mommy blogger demographic? Should music related companies target them as an audience for products and services?

Are there statistics out there that’ll tell us what these mommy blogger types are interested in? Because clearly it isn’t all discounts on diapers and parenting tips. Some of them are prolific writers with incredible pull in their circles of influence.

Universal Backs Live Video Streams

published
on January 16, 2009
by
ACtual
in collaboration, culture, DIY, film, future of music, genres, music, music business, startups, technology, video, and website
. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

About a year ago I examined a Wired article looking at the head of the Universal Music Group, Doug Morris, and his attempts to move against the current of technology that was slowly eroding his old-timer’s hold on music distribution. My how times have changed. Not only has UMG joined forces with the other three major labels to eradicate DRM on iTunes purchases, now they’re actively joining the swelling ranks looking for digital solutions to real-life problems.

UMG, home of artists like 50 Cent and Lil’ Wayne, is always looking for new ways to interact with fans and bring their favorite artists to them in ways that are both exciting and relevant. Because of this and the potential they see in the company, UMG has joined forces with Kyte, an emerging web start-up that is aiming to fill a niche not currently serviced by YouTube: live video streams.

UMG is hoping that this will prompt massive coverage and interest in short live broadcasts from the backstage dressing rooms, the road, clips of shows or anywhere else these artists might find themselves wanting to reach out and directly connect to fans visually. It takes away the overhead of big-budget, high quality videos that need to be processed and uploaded and replaces it with a web-based streamlined idea that brings the live video straight to the viewer.

Of course, given that these video streams are live, it could become difficult if not impossible to control the content. I’m wondering how long it’ll take for UMG to take issue with that… This could also be a shot across the bow of YouTube as the four majors actively begin renegotiating licensing agreements with Google’s video baby.

MixMatchMusic Acquires Mix2r

published
on January 13, 2009
by
Alan Khalfin
in collaboration, future of music, music, music business, startups, and technology
. 1 Comment

MMM

MixMatchMusic™ announced today its acquisition of Mix2r. The combination creates one of the premier sites for internet-based music collaboration, discovery and fan engagement, and provides tools to help artists monetize their music.

MixMatchMusic, which launched this past September and already has a library of more than 2500 stems used by thousands of artists and fans, enables musicians to collaborate on, profit from and engage fans with their music. Mix2r, founded in 2005, enables electronica artists to upload completed songs and allows others to create derivative works from those songs. Mix2r’s community of thousands of musicians, DJs and fans features more than 6200 songs and music stems.

Stems of guitar, bass, drums, keys and other instruments are the building blocks of songs. Both sites encourage mash ups and remixes of stems to create new songs, ring tones and music.

“MixMatchMusic’s combination with Mix2r adds a lot of dynamic new music to our library and brings us closer to the critical mass of stems and community needed to fuel our next stage of growth,” said Charles Feinn, MixMatchMusic co-founder and CEO. “This combination also brings us Mix2r founders Duane Nickull and Matt MacKenzie, two exceptional serial entrepreneurs and technologists who join our Board of Directors.”

“Emerging and indie artists win as a result of this combination,” said Nickull. “The breadth and depth of content and the number of people contributing to it adds energy and creativity to the community, and that in turn will attract more people and more great music.”

Nickull, who is a well known senior technical evangelist for Adobe, said the Mix2r site uses Adobe® Flash® Platform technologies including Adobe Flash, Flex and Adobe® AIR™. These technologies, which are critical to Web-based online collaboration, will be used to create future versions of the combined site.

Nickull co-founded Mix2r with Matt Mackenzie, with whom he previously co-founded Yellow Dragon Software Corporation (acquired by Adobe in 2003), and XML Global Technologies (publicly traded, acquired by Xenos Group in 2003).

Mix2r content joins with existing MixMatchMusic content to become one of the largest sources of stems, works in progress and other musical content available for collaboration among artists. The dynamic Mix2r forum will also become a part of MixMatchMusic as the sites and companies are combined in 2009. Mix2r Members will be immediately granted access to MixMatchMusic.com content under the MixMatchMusic license terms.

Participation in the MixMatchMusic community and use of its MixMaker audio sequencer are free to musicians and casual fans alike. Fees are incurred when stems, works in progress or finished songs are downloaded for sale or other use.

About MixMatchMusic
MixMatchMusic was founded to serve the needs of millions of independent and semi-professional musicians. Its services, technologies and community enable musicians to collaborate on, profit from and engage fans with their music.

MixMatchMusic is based in Silicon Valley and is angel-backed. Mix2r.com was completely funded by its founders and has taken no VC investments.