Revelation revolution

So, I've neglected this blog a fair bit, haven't I? Well, in making my own site, I've decided it needed a revival. Hardy Heron's now out and various other things have happened, so it's time I started posting again.

The thing is, there's not much scope just talking about open source music software, is there? Really, all I'd be doing is regurgitating blurb from project pages and publishing collections of links. So instead this is going to be a music blog. But rather than just talking about music, I'm going to be talking about the ideas and philosophies behind it. This means that because of my own ideas about how music should be published and distributed, it will of course have a more open source slant.

I learnt to play guitar thanks to the abundance of tablature available on the internet. I'm able to record music thanks to open source applications. I'm able to publish and promote that music thanks to sites like Soundclick and MySpace. Without the internet and the ability to share whatever I want with the world, these things wouldn't be possible.

The campaign for open source music starts here. Let's see where we can go.

Cheap Ubuntu PCs are now available in the UK!

And they're from Tesco!

eSys Intel Celeron PC Base Unit (£139.93)

eSys AMD 3600 PC Base Unit (189.93)


So, they're not the best systems out there and for some reason they're running 6.06, but they'll probably do just fine for surfing the net and writing documents, which is probably what someone buying a computer at this price would want to do (especially someone who'd buy a computer from Tesco).

Whether this is a good or bad thing remains to be seen (Pro: This is a step towards the mainstream for Linux/Ubuntu, Con: These could be terrible computers, which would reflect badly on Ubuntu). Either way, that's a hell of a lot of clubcard points! :D

The next step is to get Dell to release Ubuntu PCs over here. Hopefully they'll do so by the time it becomes time for me to replace my current laptop... (or at least get myself a desktop to go with it)

Interesting links

So, I find interesting stuff on the internet all the time thanks to things like StumbleUpon (If you don't have it already, check it out, it's a great way to kill time on the internet and I've managed to stumble on many useful resources through it) and I thought it was about time I start sharing them with the world. I've got loads stored in my bookmarks, so I'll be going through them and putting them up here. I'll try and group them into categories somewhat. For now, here's just a couple of the latest ones I've come across.

Disposable web pages

So, you want a page for something that's coming up but you won't need the site after the event. You could make an event page on Facebook or a group or something, but why not something everyone can access, rather than just those on Facebook? Why not make a disposable web page? I'm sure there's even more possible uses, so check it out!

Open Design Community

"The Open Design Community (TODC) is a group of Open Source Website Designers providing hundreds of XHTML and CSS based free web design templates available for download.

The main goal of TODC is helping to make the internet a prettier place."

HTML Playground

Or, if you don't find a template you like, you can just use HTML and build it yourself. This is a great resource for learning as it tells you exactly what HTML tags do and gives you editable examples.

That's it for now, more to come soon!

Open source your music!

So, you're using all this open source software to make music and you're intrigued by the philosophy behind it. The idea of sharing it with anyone you can freely and legally. Well, why not do it with things other than software? That's where Creative Commons comes in.

I license all my work under a "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License". This means people are allowed to freely share it with anyone they like and are allowed to create derivative works (remixes, etc) as long as they share everything under the same license. It also restricts commercial use of my work to be only with my permission. For full details, just check the link.

Think about the advantages and disadvantages yourself. In a world of mp3s and P2P sharing, if people want to share your music for free, they will, so why not let them do it legally? If people like it enough, they'll be willing to pay for it in other ways (paying for CD copies, coming to gigs, buying merchandise, etc). And it can never hurt to have as many people as possible know who you are, right?

Things like Creative Commons are what could bring about the downfall of traditional record companies and draconian copyright legislation.

Just a few thoughts. Something to think about. Have fun!

-Andy

Open source + windows

While this project mainly focuses on open source software, and therefore Linux, some people will still be using Windows. So, I thought I'd make a quick post with some links to music tech applications that can be run on windows along with quick descriptions taken from their Sourceforge pages. Stuff in bold are the ones I recommend.

Audacity
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together, change the speed or pitch of a recording, and more!

Psycle
Psycle is a Music tracker (like FastTracker 2 or Impulse Tracker) combined with plugin modularity. It supports its own plugin API, the VST2 plugin standard, and a tracker style sampler playback.

VioLet Composer
A cross-platform modular multispace desktop music composer. Features realtime wavelet processing, flexible arrangement, extensible sample types, runtime plugin development, ASIO support, out-of-order PCM processing, autosaving and much, much more.

modplug
Modplug is a 'Win32' X86 based audio application used to produce music. The application was initially a private project developed by Olivier Lapicque and is a popular 'tracker' used by many musicians.

Frinika
Frinika is a free, complete music workstation software for Linux, Windows, Mac OSX Tiger and other operating systems running Java 1.5 (J2SE5.0). It features sequencer, soft-synths, realtime effects and audio recording.

OpenSebJ
An audio production & mixing tool, featuring a - Sequencer, Beat Box, Wave Recording, Frequency Modulation, DJ Scratch interface, MP3 and sampler playback (the ability to assign any sample to any key) - For Windows, written in C# .Net 2.0 with DirectX.

Mixere
Mixere is a standalone Windows application for mixing audio files. It has a spreadsheet-like interface that's ideal for live performance, and especially live sound collage. Imagine unlimited racks full of CD players, all connected to an automated mixer.

ZynAddSubFX
ZynAddSubFX is a powerful realtime, multi-timbral software synthesizer for Linux and Windows. It is microtonal, and the instruments made by it sounds like those from professional keyboards. The program has effects like Reverb, Echo, Chorus, Phaser...

gAlan
gAlan is an audio-processing tool (both on-line and off-line) for X windows and Win32. It allows you to build synthesisers, effects chains, mixers, sequencers, drum-machines etc. etc. in a modular fashion.

For more, just have a browse through the various projects over at Sourceforge.

-Andy