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SXSW 2013 on BitTorrent: 7.39 GB of Free Music

SXSW 2013 on BitTorrent: 7.39 GB of Free Music:
Since 2005 the SXSW music festival has published thousands of free tracks from participating artists.
For some of the first releases the festival organizers created the torrents for the artist showcases themselves, but since 2008 this task has been handed over to the public.
Luckily all of the SXSW showcase MP3s are still freely available on the festival’s site for sampling purposes, so it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running.
For the past four years Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to put all the MP3s on BitTorrent, and this year two torrents containing 1,210 tracks have been released.
That’s 7.39 gigabytes of free music in total.
All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their iPod without having to invest thousands of dollars. The 2005 – 2013 archives are now over 45 gigabytes.
Every year the SXSW torrents are a great success, with many thousands of music aficionados downloading the gigabytes of free music from both established acts and upcoming bands in virtually every music genre.
This year’s SXSW music festival takes place from March 12-17 in Austin Texas.
For those interested in even more free music to fill up their MP3-players, there’s always Jamendo with nearly 370,000 free-to-download tracks. That’s a few terabytes of free music, good for years of continuous play.
Source: SXSW 2013 on BitTorrent: 7.39 GB of Free Music

Alek’s Tiny House Project

Alek’s Tiny House Project:
My name is Alek Lisefski. I’ll be starting to build my tiny house within the next month and hope to complete it by this summer. I designed it myself and will do as much of the construction as I can to save money and because I believe it’s an invaluable skill that everyone should have. I’ve set up a blog for my project here: http://tiny-project.com/
While I haven’t started to build yet, I’ve done a lot of designing and planning. Attached are some of the models I’ve created. A few things have changed, but they are fairly accurate to what I will be building. What looks like glass walls around the bathroom is just so I can see through them in my model. They will not actually be glass.

I plan to build on an 8×20 foot trailer. My house will feature many windows (including several large, south-facing windows, for passive solar gain). The house will have fold-down overhangs to shade windows from mid-day summer sun, and will also include a fold-down deck.
I’m currently looking to form connections, get advice, and hopefully convince a few companies to sponsor me to help make this dream a possibility for me.

The main aspect of the Tiny Project is to build a tiny house. Inhabiting such a small space will force me to live in a simpler, more organized, and efficient way. Without room to hoard things and hide away from the world, I’ll be forced to spend more time outdoors, in nature and engaging with my community. This will foster better health and healthy relationships. With no more rent to pay, I’ll save money, allowing for a less hectic work life and more time and funds for health, leisure and travel. I won’t be able to keep closets full of clothes or store 5 year old trinkets in a house so small. But I also couldn’t possibly spend $100/month to heat the place, like I do with my apartment now. It has it’s trade-offs, but one thing is certain: While living in a such a small house, my space, and in turn each area of my life, will be simpler, less chaotic, and free from all but what is essential. That sounds really great to me!

Music Making, Shared: Communal Ambient Tracks Explore Instagram Photos, Lisbon, and More

Music Making, Shared: Communal Ambient Tracks Explore Instagram Photos, Lisbon, and More:

This collection of Instagram photos inspired an ambient compilation at the end of last year – one well worth adding to your listening queue now. Since then, challenges opened to a community on SoundCloud have produced hundreds of terrific tracks – and the latest weekly challenge is on now, with a deadline midnight Monday.

Where do you get your ideas? Sometimes, it can be a challenge just to start a track, or can simply feel a bit, well, lonely. Finding fellow music makers can solve that. Artists gathering around SoundCloud and online ambient music chronicle Disquiet work together, with inspiration from recording ice to ancient found samples of music and spoken word. Disquiet itself has challenged artists with Instagram photos and the city of Lisbon. The results are imaginative, varied, superb music. And they’ve been surprisingly popular, earning lots of ears and inspiring still more music.
Now, given the Instagram sale for US$1 billion, I would value the free compilation inspired by its photo sharing at least a couple of million dollars. Finding a welcoming community both to spur on new musical ideas and share the results? Priceless.
And, okay, while perhaps they haven’t netted any massive Facebook buyouts, the past months have proven that ideas like this can motivate music makers and listeners alike.
The Disquiet Junto, started by Disquiet and its editor, Marc Weidenbaum, describes itself as “a collaborative music-making space in which restraints are used as a springboard for creativity.” New projects are announced on Thursday, and then you have until the following Monday just before midnight to upload tracks. In just fifteen weeks, that’s inspired some 700 tracks – not bad, especially considering ambient music, lovely as it is, is hardly considered a hot commodity as genres go. (Non-ambient submissions are welcome, too, so long as they fit the brief.)
This week’s challenge, for instance, due Monday the 23rd of April, starts with samples of a piece of sandpaper and a pair of dice. The challenge: make one the foreground, and one the background. (The samples came from free sharing site freesound.org.) Previous challenges including Shostakovich and old rural music, bird song, a spoken word Benjamin Franklin autobiography, and old Edison cylinders as source material, and challenges like working from recordings of ice in a glass.

The city of Lisbon becomes musical muse, too – in sound source and inspiration. Photo, in Polaroid, (CC-BY-SA) Yasmina Haryono.

Weidenbaum has also been assembling some lovely compilations. The most recent “remixes” the city of Lisbon, entitled LX(RMX). Marc explains:

It’s 16 tracks, two each by eight musicians — each musician recording one under a pseudonym, and one under their own name, all exploring the sounds of urban Lisbon:
http://disquiet.com/2012/02/14/lxrmx-lisbon-remixed/
The 17th track is the source material.

Here’s what the resulting tracks sound like:


A separate compilation from the end of last year explored the notion of using photos on Instagram as source material. In two separate conversations, artists told me recently they felt that we lived in a “visual” culture, one in which the image was more important than sound. I’m still not convinced that’s true, or even how this oft-repeated statement is evaluated. But on the other hand, finding visual inspiration for music is a compelling exercise, a change to feed one part of the mind with stimulus from another.
Marc reflected on the project when I spoke with him in January – long before Instagram became part of business history, and when the Junto group was just starting:

The first week of release of Instagr/am/bient was much more intense than I had expected — intense in terms of how quickly it garnered an audience. The first week it averaged over 2,000 listens per day, not counting downloads (which I posted over on Archive.org). I had hopes that the mix of visuals and sound would be of broader interest than some of this music (drones, abstractions, extended phonography) might be on its lonesome. Apparently that proved to be the case. Clearly, tying it to a familiar software (Instagram) helped ground people’s imaginations, as of course did the visuals. I think there’s a lesson in that. The correlation also functioned thematically: not just how the music was inspired by the photos, but how Instagram images and ambient music both involve, in their own ways, filters/processes that alter existing documents (photographs in one case, often field recordings in another).
It was interesting as well how the musicians acted on their assignments. Each of the 25 sent to me an Instagram photo they had taken. I then gave thought as to how to disperse them, sometimes assigning one to a musician whose work I thought it shared an aesthetic with, sometimes to a musician for whom I thought the image would provide a creative

challenge. For example, I gave the image to Evan Cordes that showed the wheel of an office chair against floorboards. To my eye, the lines of the floorboards resembled sheet music, and indeed when I later discussed the project with Cordes he confirmed that he had interpreted it as a graphic score.
This project differed from past Disquiet.com projects in that it was looser. The assignments were fully conscious, but in the end one has less overall control over something when 25 geographically dispersed musicians working from 25 different source subjects are involved, versus when a dozen musicians are involved. The next major Disquiet.com project is very controlled, just eight musicians, all with a very specific assignment. It should be out in a few weeks.
The relative openness of the Instagr/am/bient project inspired me to push the idea a step further. So, I created a Soundcloud group for communal sound experiments, which launched today. It is called Disquiet-Junto. It already has 40 members, which is great. The idea is that I come up with a sound/music assignment and post the idea on a Friday, and then Monday by midnight the groups’ members post their recordings in response to the assignment. Already there are a half dozen tracks based on the first assignment, which is to make music from the sound of ice in a glass.

The aftermath of the Instagram compilation is itself a fascinating story. The compilation captured the imagination of writers well outside the world of music. But most tellingly, you can read how the group of 25 musicians worked to translate what they saw into sounds of their own creation – whether in the microcosm of technical details (gear used and such) or bigger ideas of how to work between the visual and aural media. Their reactions are sometimes formal, sometimes emotional, intuitive, or fanciful.
Evan Cordes even posted video of his Pd patch, ticking away:
Hilobrow has this revelatory review:

Imagine receiving a postcard in the mail. Ok, back up: remember the mail? Remember postcards?
Right, now imagine them. On one side, an image: a faraway place, an iconic sign, people smiling, a sunset. Perhaps someone has even scribbled on it, adding their own moustaches, thought bubbles, or other postal graffiti. “Having a wonderful time,” it inevitably says, “wish you were here.”
Or, does it? Turning it over, ostensibly to read, you find instead that it — sings.

But, Instagram hype aside, consider what this could mean for finding inspiration anywhere, for reinvigorating your musical process. Actually, don’t think about it too long – just go do it.
You can check out the Juno group:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto
And read up on the two curated compilations – each released under a Creative Commons license:
LX(RMX) / LISBON REMIXED
INSTAGR/AM/BIENT: 25 SONIC POSTCARDS
http://disquiet.com
Note, too, that the SoundCloud Meetup Day is on the 17th of May. I expect to be keeping tuned into what’s happening in Berlin and involved in something in London, but wherever you are in the world, I’d love to hear what ideas you have for exchanging sound, and if you’ll be doing something to celebrate if you’re a SoundCloud user.
SoundCloud Global Meetup Day May 17th: Get Involved!

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Vertazoid, New web cartoon strip

Hello !?:



Vertazoid is a web graphic novel, in black and white so far. You can find it at Vertazoid.com

Bitwig Studio: A Professional Music Creation Software (DAW) Comes to Linux

Bitwig Studio: A Professional Music Creation Software (DAW) Comes to Linux:

Bitwig is an international music software company based in Berlin. The company was founded in 2009 by a team of music enthusiasts with extensive experience in the music technology industry and a strong vision about new cutting-edge methods of music production, live performance and collaboration.

The team includes many veterans who worked on Ableton Live, a popular software for professional music creation.

Bitwig has now released Bitwig Studio, a multi-platform professional music-creation system and Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for production, performance and DJing and unlike Ableton Live, it will have a Linux version.



This is definitely good news as more companies are showing interest in Linux. Just couple of days back, Corel announced availability of AfterShot Pro for Linux.



Check out the Bitwig studio video below and sign up for the beta access from here.

Hi-Quality EQ and Chaining Return Tracks - New Tutorials from Thavius Beck

Hi-Quality EQ and Chaining Return Tracks - New Tutorials from Thavius Beck:

You might have seen the "Hi-Quality" mode option in Live's EQ8 device, but do you know what it does, and how you can hear it? In the latest video in his series, "Did You Know", Ableton Certified Trainer and Dubspot Instructor Thavius Beck looks at oversampling in EQ8 and its advantages:

Learn more about oversampling, the Nyquist Point, and Hi-Quality mode in EQ8 at the Dubspot Blog.

In another recent video, Thavius looks at chaining return tracks by having them send to each other - resulting in some new effect combinations: