There’s no shortage of music and media players available to help manage and organise your masses of mp3s and other media files, but very few that actually stand out. Songbird is an open source piece of software that enables you to listen to, organise and discover new music. Features include Smart Playlists, Last.fm scrobbling (handy for stats geeks like myself) and the ability to search for concert tickets in your area. Another great feature is the fact that it’s multi-platform, so even Mac fanboys (controversial) can enjoy it. Read the rest of this entry »
Glasgow has been named a United Nations City of Music. The award has prompted the creation of a new group called Glasgow City of Music to help the city’s music community reach greater heights. Glasgow becomes only the 11th city to become part of the Creative Cities Network which was launched by the UN in 2004.
Seville and Bologna are the only two other European cities to share the title. Scotland now has two world cities, with Edinburgh being the other after being named as the first UNESCO City of Literature, in 2004.
Wired magazine have done a feature on one Cliff Bolling, who has been digitising thousands of tracks from vinyl records. He’s begun a quest to bring back the delights of 78rpm music to the masses through the internet. Currently he has just under 4000 mp3 files available on his site (which is currently offline).
I smell lawsuits.
If you like music of the algorithmic kind then Nodal is probably right up your street. A software application for OS X that lets you create music based on graphs.
Nodal is a generative software application for composing music. It uses a novel method for the notation and playing of MIDI based music. This method is based around the concept of a user-defined graph. The graph consists of nodes (musical events) and edges (connections between events). You interactively define the graph, which is then traversed by any number of players who play the musical events as they encounter them on the graph. The time taken to travel from one node to another is based on the length of the edges that connect the nodes.
At the moment it’s only available for OS X but is free for non commercial use. Commercial use requires a license. I’ll be playing with this for a while.
Part 1: You’ve never had it so good.
Think about why you want to release a record. Really think about it. I’m talking to you, local bands, young bands, bands just starting out with stars in your eyes and dreams of fame in your hearts. Maybe you’ve got a bit of a ‘following’ in your home town, a couple of thousand ‘friends’ on Myspace or Facebook. Perhaps the local press are calling you the ‘next big thing’. Perhaps you’ve pooled your resources and have decided that it’s time to head to the nearest studio, lay down your 10 best songs, then get 1000 CDs pressed up. Yeah! DIY! That’ll show ‘The Man’. Read the rest of this entry »