Traxsource introduces WAV files

This is something I’m really excited about. My favorite online music retailer, Traxsource, has just implemented a new format for downloading music – WAV files.

I realize that they are slightly behind their competition, but to reward their loyal customers for the wait, the team from Florida managed (once again) to offer something unique. They give their customers the ability to upgrade any of their tracks purchased earlier, to the this new CD-quality format. The cost of this operation depends on the original format of the files. Traxsource charges $0.75 for a mp3@320kbps -> WAV upgrade, and $1.25 if you own a 192 kbps mp3 file.

WAV files are part of the new release of the store front which is called Level 4 and although it’s a big step, this is the only new functionality. Other changes (comparing to Level 3) are concentrated around improvements of searching features. I haven’t really noticed those changes (apart of cosmetics), but let’s hope they will turn out. I’m a bit dissappointed that they didn’t implement sorting of search results, which is something I missed the most, but let’s hope they will someday.

The launch of Traxsource Level 4 is an important milestone not only for the company and it’s current customers but to all house music lovers, because Traxsource is the exclusive digital retailer for many great and hard to find labels.

Production Tips and Tricks from Prime Loops

I also knew that knowledge sharing is great way of promoting products/services (from the same/similar industry of course). Now I am a living proof of this concept.

While searching the internet for some tips on how to layer kick drums, I stumbled upon this set of tips and tricks tutorials prepared by the people of Prime Loops. It seems they’re in the business of making loops and sample collections, but I haven’t had a chance to use any of their products.

Nevertheless, there are a few PDFs worth reading. The knowledge may not be groundbreaking, but the documents I read (Getting your Kick Drum to sit with your Bassline and Drum Mixing) and seem thorough, informative and are accompanied by helpful screenshots from Logic.

Side-chain compression left turned on

The technique of using the kick drum as a side-chain to trigger the compression on the bass-line or other tracks is as common in today’s dance music as McDonald’s in the US. But to leave the compression on while turning the kick drum off for the whole track is a bold and innovative move.

If you are wondering what I am babbling about, listen for yourself to the new No Beats Mix version of Stimming’s excellent Kleine Nachtmusik. I’ve been playing the original for some time now (and probably still will be), so I was eager to find out how does the No Beats Mix sound? Surprising for sure! The kick is not there but still it’s triggering the compression and making the listeners dizzy… I didn’t have a chance to listen to the mix, maybe it make sense while player over some beats, but as standalone track it sounds really strange.

The track has been released on Sunday (Oct 26th) as part Buzzin’ Fly’s Chaos Restored Mixed and Messed by Justin Martin compilation/mix cd.

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Want decent music production videos? Forget YouTube

This is not a proper article, but a kind of a link to another article. Oliver Chesler, the man behind the Wire To The Ear blog has gathered some very interesting links to sites offering proper videos about music production, audio engineering, acoustics… etc.

Check out Oliver’s post on Wire To The Ear.

Frequency Range presentation

Dave Moulton, a Grammy-nominated audio engineer, founder of Moulton Labs and Sausalito Audio, has put together a nice demonstration about frequency range.

With the use of a series of audio clips, this presentation helps to determine the frequency limits of one’s system and range of hearing. It also demonstrates the non-linear nature of our hearing.

Check this out, it’s a nice exercise. Remebber to keep your volume down to protect your ears!

You also may want to browse through a collection of Dave’s thorough articles about acoustics, studio design, hardware, software, etc…

Pro Music Creation Tour in Poland

Digipark, Digidesign’s main distributor in Poland launches a tour around Poland to showcase two product lines developed in California.

It was announced that they hold 5 hours long workshops in Poznań, Wrocław and Kraków. The attendees will have to choose whether they’re more interested in music production in ProTools or working on the Icon digital console, because both product lines will be presented in the same time.

To talk about the products, Digipark hired experienced professionals, like composers, producers, sound engineers, mastering engineers, DJs and of course product specialists.

Below is the list of dates and venues:

• Poznań – Oct 20th, 2008 – SQ,
• Wrocław,  Oct 22nd, 2008 – Lemoniada,
• Kraków, Oct 24th, 2008 – Cień.

In all the cities the scheduled time is 3-9 pm. Since the event in Kraków occurs on Friday, there’s an after party planned for the adult attendees.

One more important thing, the spaces is limited, so you may want to register to make sure you won’t be turned down at the door. For registration and more details about the tour, visit Digipark’s website.

SoundCloud opening to public tomorrow

“The greatest music sharing site in the history of the Internet”. Sounds ambitious, doesn’t it? Well, we’ll have to wait to find out if this becomes true, but let’s see how it all started. In June 2007, Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, two young Swedish web-entrepreneurs/musicians fed up with existing ways in which musicians share music (senspace, yousendit, etc.), decided to leave everything behind, move to Berlin and start working on a new project.

Although the founders burst with enthusiasm and passion typical for open-source developers, the whole venture was run as a proper IT project from the very beginning. The early stages included hiring staff, renting an office space and apartments for out-of-town crew members, organizing kick-off parties, seeking for inverstors and starting a blog to document the development process.

Despite the professional approach of the team, they still managed to communicate with their target audience (musicians and labels) in a understandable and pleasant way. For instance, changes to the service were streamlined into milestones and introduced periodically as versions. But to keep things nice, they were named after artists (like Evangelos after Vangelis, Fabio after Fabio Genito, Will after Will Oldham) instead of boring numbers like version 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc…

Speaking of audience, SounCloud was undergoing some heavy testing by real users, but this was done in a private-beta manner. In order to register for the service, one had to be invited from someone already on the inside and each new user had a opportunity to invite 3 people. The limitations were necessary to avoid problems caused by unforeseen, rapid growth of traffic cause by new users and also were a good way to make sure that the feedback comes from professionals from the music industry rather than kids looking for the new MySpace. This exclusiveness is about to vanish tomorrow as SoundCloud is opening to public tomorrow (Oct 10th), but more on that later.

Understanding how it’s been brought to life, let’s look at what it actually is. The “music sharing site” expression quoted at the beginning, although coming from the founders, doesn’t really give the right idea. Associations with p2p and piracy that spring to mind are completely irrelevant.

It’s all about the artists/labels being able to upload their music and receive comments, including timed comments, which are “attached” to a specific time mark in the track indicating that the comment concerns a specific event occurring around the mark rather than the whole piece. This feature can be very useful for distant collaboration on music allowing to avoid the necessity to write down time codes or other remarks when referring to a specific place in the track. To make listening and commenting even more comfortable, there’s an embedded player capable of displaying the track’s waveform along with the avatars of users that have placed comments. The player can handle music uploaded in virtually all common formats so there’s no need for an artist to perform any conversions prior to uploading his music.

Another innovative feature allows to decide weather the uploaded music will be shared with everyone (as a public track) or just with selected users (as a private track). That’s a great way for artist and labels to distribute promos having to upload the track only once and giving selected users the ability to listen and/or download the file.

DropBox is another nice feature useful especially to labels allowing other users to leave their file for the DropBox owner similar to dropping a letter into ones mailbox. The advantage of the DropBox over sharing tracks is that the person uploading doesn’t need to be a SoundCloud user of have any storage space available on the internet. They just “mail” their work, which then awaits to be heard by the box owner only.

Soundcloud offers a lot more, but giving the innovatory nature of the features their functionality may be hard to understand after reading about it. The developers were obviously aware of that, because they have made a video, which is a sort of a virtual tour showcasing some of the things you can do. Watch the video below.

To see detailed videos about specific features, see SoundClound’s profile on Vimeo.

Remember how I wrote that the project was managed professionally including seeking for investors? Now it’s time to answer the question what’s in it for them? It must have cost a lot of money to develop the site and the features work really well, so how can it pay off? At first, I was almost sure (as well as many other beta testers) that the site will become ad supported and this will be the funding source as it usually happens with all web-community based portals. Well, we were wrong. Along with the announcement stating that service is opening to public (no invitations necessary to register), SoundCloud introduced paid accounts called PRO. That decision remains very controversial among the beta users community, but let me avoid any judgemental statements and provide some details instead.

Starting tomorrow, the site remains ad-free, but there are going to be 4 types of accounts:

• Free,
• PRO Light (9€ per month),
• PRO Standard (29€ per month),
• PRO Max (59€ per month).

The level of service associated with the above options will differ in terms of:

• the number of tracks user is able to upload,
• DropBox functionality,
• statistics features (basic vs. advanced),
• level of support (basic/normal/premium).

So what can you get for free? Here’s what Eric wrote on the forum yesterday. An owner of a free account will be able to:

• send 5 tracks/month,
• see the 10 latest sent tracks (they will also show on user’s profile),
• have a DropBox, but only with the ability to see the last 5 tracks dropped,
• make contact lists with up to 20 people.

I’m not sure if the internet users used to free sites will be willing to pay for their accounts, but I guess the owners rely on the fact that their target audience are music professionals and will be using the site for business. The question is, will the benefits of having a pro account be valuable enough to pay the amount being asked for? I wouldn’t want to judge now whether the prices are too high or not. Purely because in order do it properly, I’d have to conduct some sort of research to find out what are the alternatives and how they are priced, which I don’t have time for. One of the alternatives mentioned on the forums was having a dedicated web space provided by some ISP and running some services on them like FTP for instance for the same kind of money. But the ease of use is second to none comparing to SoundCloud. Together with the financial aspect, also the decision about opening the site to public recived some criticism as artists were enjoying that SoudCloud was nice and quiet compered to other sites like MySpace or Fecebook.

I’m very curious to see how this develops. The time will tell, I guess…

Lovebirds non-stop

Wow, there is absolutely no stopping this man right now. If you don’t recognize the picture, I’m talking about Sebastian ‘Basti’ Döring AKA Lovebirds. Although this name has been becoming increasingly popular just recently, the Hamburg based producer has been in the game for well over 10 years now, releasing musing either solo (under Lovebirds and Superbird pseudonyms) or together with Thorsten “Toddie” Freese as the superstar Knee Deep duo.

This year alone, we could see two fine releases from Lovebirds featuring the vocals of Holly Backler In The Shadows and Love On My Hands on Winding Road. The former has been collecting excelent reviews from all over the world, which is no surprise to me. From personal experience I can tell that In The Shadows seems to be working on all kinds of audience. Also, The Beat Goes Boom was part of Buzzin Fly’s 5th anniversary compilation, and we’re about to see many more.

So what’s more to come in 2008 and 2009 for him? An amazing EP on Freerange, another one on Winding Road and a couple of releases on co-owned Teardrop Music. Additionally, a remix of Ian Pooley’s track made together with Vincenzo. To get into a little bit more details, here’s what I’ve been able to find out so far:

Ian Pooley – In Other Words Pt. 2 – [Pooled Music] – PLD 0186 – Release date: Oct 15th, 2008

1. My Kicks (Long Version)
2. Closer (Remix)
3. My Kicks (Vincenzo & Lovebirds Remix)
4. My Kicks (Bonus Beats)

Lovebirds – The Rat EP – [Freerange] – FR 113 – Release date: Oct 20th, 2008

1. The Rat
2. This Sound
3. The Rat (Kreon Remix)

The Rat hasn’t even come out yet and it’s already huge. I think it has been featured on every deep house podcast in the past few weeks. The Rat’s bassline sounds astonishing on a big system, trust me.

Lovebirds – Gentle EP – [Teardrop Music] – TD 001 – Release date: Nov 11th, 2008

1. Gentle
2. Tuesday
3. Juicy

You can find out more about this release from my article about Teardrop Music.

Lovebirds – Louder! EP – [Winding Road] – ROAD025

1. The Night
2. Louder!
3. It’s All Yours

I can’t wait for this to come out since the moment I first heard The Night on the Freerange Records Radio Show back in August. It says on the distributors’ site that it’s suppose to be available on Oct 24th.

Vincenzo & Lovebirds – M.U.S.I.C. EP – [Teardrop Music] – TD 003

1. M.U.S.I.C.
2. National

Lovebirds – Snary – [Teardrop Music] – TD 005

You can listen to a lot of these tracks on Lovebirds’ Unreleased Sessions on Beta Lounge.