Archive for the "Digital Audio" Category
May4

Primal Scream Get The Mash-up Treatment

Posted at 1:54 PM • No Comments

Primal Scream are the latest in a long line of artists to be ‘honoured’ by getting some of their best known music hacked and rehashed by a group of Mash-up bootleg remixers.
The Beatles, the Beastie Boys, the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers, Blur and the Clash have all recently been given the unofficial remix treatment by DJ ‘Mashers’.

Primal Screams classic 1991 UK indie-dance crossover album ‘Screamadelica’ was hailed by NME writers as one of the top albums of all time in 2003. The original album boasted production credits from UK club legend Andy Weatherall, the Orb and veteran Rolling Stones producer, Jimmy Miller.

Screamadelica, Primal Screams classic 1991 album gets mashed up.

The remade opus, ‘Screamadelica-Primal Scream Remixed’ was reworked by some of the main players in the UK bootleg / remix community including Mark Vidler (who produced the albums bonus track, ‘Screamadelica’), Soundhog, Tone 396, FakeID, Dunproofin and Cry On My Console, amongst others.

Like all the best made projects in this vein, the album is available for download as a BitTorrent file. The makers are eager to confess, “ We don’t pretend to think this comes close to the Scream’s masterpiece, but then nothing else does. So what primalscreamremixed.com offers is a different spin, moving from chill through dub via glitch to drum & bass. Not a million miles away from the eclecticism of the source.”

Thanks to Beatmixed.com

Related Links

Get Your Bootleg On [GYBO]
Culture Deluxe [CultureDeluxe.com]
Bootie San Francisco [BootieSF.com]
Twenty Questions [TwentyQ.Blogspot]
BitTorrent FAQ and Guide [Dessent.net]
Bastard Pop [Wikipedia.org]
Boom Selection [Boomselection.info]

May1

Nokia Join The iPod Killer Club

Posted at 3:19 PM • No Comments

That much over hyped headline, ‘iPod Killer’ made its now regular appearance in the news again last week (and has been appearing since 2003) when Nokia announced the N91 4GB hard-drive multi-media cell phone in Amsterdam last Wednesday. The N91 looks great and is impressive sounding enough, coming standard with MP3, M4A, AAC and WMA music compatibility.

Business Week, April 25 Cover 'iPod Killers?' and the new 4GB Nokia N19 phone & digitalaudio player

There’s connectivity with your PC via USB 2.0 for simple drag and drop file transfer. Also included is an audio industry standard 3.5mm stereo headset jack, a two megapixel camera and multiple wireless connectivity options, including WCDMA, WLAN and Bluetooth technology.

Expected to be commercially available worldwide by the end of 2005, Nokia estimates the retail price of the N91 to fall between 650 and 750 EUR ($835-$963). For all its looks and killer features, without a substantial manufacturers subsiduary its hardly going to threaten or even tempt the average iPod demographic. In comparison the 30GB iPod Photo retails at $349, less than half the proposed price of the new Nokia.

Korea’s Samsung Electronics introduced the SGH-i300 last month with a 3-gigabyte hard drive, enough to store 1,000 songs. A 10-gig phone could hit the market within two years. Research firm Strategy Analytics estimates that in 2008 50% of the 860 million cell phones sold will be able to store and play songs, up from 8% today.

Related Reading

Nokia N91 Preview [InfoSyncWorld.com]
The iPod Killers? [BusinessWeek.com]
Of iPod Killers and Mobile Dreams [Billboard Postplay]
Attack of the Anti-iPods [Time.com]
Samsung Unveils SGH-i300 3Gb Hard Drive Mobile Phone [Pocket-Lint.co.uk]
The Father of the iPod [Cult of Mac Blog]
Inside the Apple iPod Design Triumph [DesignChain.com]
Microsoft’s iPod Killer? [CNet News]
iPod Killers Coming Soon [CNet MP3 Insider]

Apr26

N.W.A. As Remixed Illegal Art

Posted at 4:15 PM • No Comments

NWA’s 1989 album ‘Straight Outta Compton’ is hailed by many as one of the most seminal albums in the history of rap and greatly influenced countless gangsta rappers. Ice-T and Schooly D were the first gangsta rappers, NWA took it mainstream with this controversial and massive selling piece of profanity. The parental advisory sticker could have been invented just for this album and backlash from the ‘moral majority’ at the time lead to the album being issued with an alternative version, sans-profanity.

NWA get remixed and stitched

Over fifteen years later, Ice Cube is a film star and Dr.Dre is producing Eminem. Technology has also taken a great leap forward and in a humorous about turn Brooklyn design and technology student Evan Roth has cut up the NWA classic and spliced it back together in an edit of the entire ‘Straight Outta Compton’ album with all the adjacent non-curse words edited out. A nod to Steinski but with swearing. Like one of the college radio station WFMU’s blog poster’s comments say, “I haven’t laughed this hard at cursing since I was nine”.

According to the creator, “‘F**k tha Police’ edits down to 42.6 seconds after all the non-explicit material is edited out. This gives it a 12.3% explicit content index (much higher than ‘Straight Outta Compton’ at 7.4%)”.
Now you know. get it here, whilst its still up.

Thanks to WMFU’s Beware of the Blog

Related Links

Napster Dealt Copyright Rap by Dr. Dre [CNet News]
Chilling Effects [ChillingEffects.org]
Illegal Art Audio [Illegal-Art.org]
History of the Cut-Up [Beatmixed.com]
Bastard Pop [Wikipedia.org]

Apr22

20GB MP3 Player For Less Than $100

Posted at 10:08 PM • No Comments

If you’re slow getting started on the MP3 portable player bandwagon, can’t afford an iPod and have a sizeable CD collection just waiting to get squashed into MP3 files and put into your pocket and on the move DAP Review put us on to a deal right now at J&R.com. Actually Amazon are doing the same too.

The 20GB Entempo Spirit is quite possibly the ugliest hard-drive player on the market. You can get one for less than the half gig iPod Shuffle

They are both shipping the 20GB Entempo Spirit for $99.98 and OK, the Spirit is never going to win prizes for the design, in fact they would if there was an award for ugliest hard-drive player ever, but besides that, even as a cheap hard drive back up its pretty impossible to beat at that price. All for less than the cost of the half gig Shuffle.

The blue and white unit comes with integrated FM radio and built in voice recorder, something even the mighty iPod doesn’t offer. There’s the usual USB 2.0 transfer, built in shock protection and WMA and MP3 compatability. The California based Entempo also have the much nicer looking 20GB Rubato which retails for double the price of the Spirit.

Thanks to DAP Review for the lead

MP3 Player Shopping

MP3 Player Love [MP3PlayerLove.com]
Digital Audio Player Review [DAPReview]
Top 10 Portable MP3 Players Guide [About.com]
MP3 Player Buyers Guide [CNet Reviews]

Apr19

Freenet Creator Launches the Google Of Indie Music

Posted at 10:50 PM • No Comments

P2P software pioneer Ian Clarke, creator of the Open Source P2P platforms Freenet and more recently Dijjer has this week quietly unveiled his latest project, Indy.

Ian Clarke, the P2P software pioneer behind Freenet and Dijjer this week unveiled his latest project, Indy

Speaking to P2PNet Clarke promised that Indy, “does for freely available independent music what Google does for the world wide web.” Indy uses collaborative filtering, a system similar to that used by Amazon to recommend books, etc, to prospective buyers, to learn about your musical preferences in relation to other Indy users.

“Everything it plays is from online indie music freely available on the web and you can rate each piece at between one and five stars. Using that as feedback, Indy will find and download music that’s keyed to what you like as opposed to what you don’t like.”

“We were concerned that even with all of the advancements with online media in the past few years, it was still pretty difficult just to find new independent music that you liked.”

According to Clarke, Indy is inspired by iRate, another collaborative music filtering set-up. As users rate music in iRate it automatically finds more free music that you’ll like by finding people with similar music tastes. Indy is said to have a much cleaner and simpler user interface and it is freely available for Windows OS initially with other platforms in development.

Submit Music to Indy

Related Links

iRate Radio [iRateRadio.com]
Freenet Creator Unveils Dijjer P2P [Buzzsonic News]
Dijjer [Dijjer.org]
The Free Network Project [Sourceforge]
Mobster [Sourceforge]
Collaborative Filtering Research Papers [JamesThornton.com]
Collaborative Filtering Comes To Independent Music Makers [MasterNewMedia.org]
The Music Business and the Big Flip [Shirky.com]
InDiscover [InDiscover.net]

Apr18

Open Source Sounds Get New Creative Commons Resource

Posted at 11:15 PM • No Comments

A free new Open Source music samples database has been launched by the Barcelona, Spain based Music Technology Group (MTG), part of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings and bleeps all released under the Creative Commons sampling plus license.

A new open source music samples resource, the Freesound Project

The project is also part of the forthcoming International Computer Music Conference hosted in Barcelona this coming September where sounds taken from the database will be part of live performances at the event.

There’s an increasing amount of audio projects adopting the Creative Commons licence idea including ‘Wired’ magazine who issued the ‘Rip.Sample.Mash.Share’ compilation CD with the November issue of the tech geek bible in association with Creative Commons. Readers were invited to remix and mash-up artists including David Byrne, the Beastie Boys, DJ Dangermouse and the Thievery Corporation.

Creative Commons also have a collaborative community music sharing /remixing site CC Mixter featuring songs licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want. There is an ODB remix contest coming up soon and a Magnatune remix contest, with a recording contract for the winners.

Related Links

Creative Commons [CreativeCommons.org]
The Wired CD [Creative Commons]
CC Mixter-The Remix Family Tree [CCMixter.org]

Apr14

Numark Unveil iPod DJ Mixer

Posted at 1:17 AM • No Comments

As a dance music producer myself and someone who has humped around boxes of 12 inch vinyl records all in the name of DJing in the past I’ve seen the ‘death’, or more accurately, the steep decline of vinyl for years. Instead of backbreakingly heavy piles of vinyl, a handful of CDs can take their place. With MP3 music compression it hasn’t stopped there however, why bother with CDs when you can carry all your music on a device the size of a box of cigarettes. The end of vinyl getting lost in transit for the DJ jetsetter, everything fits in your pocket. The only minus point about DJing with an iPod in the past has been the lack of pitch control. Not anymore.

Numark had a prototype iPod DJ mixing console on show at the Musikmesse exhibition in Frankfurt

DJ gear specialists Numark unveiled a prototype iPod DJ mixing console a few days ago at Frankfurts Musikmesse exhibition. Though camera shots of the unit were apparently shielded at the show, German HipHop website WebBeatz managed to grab some shots, one of which we have here the other is being shown at Engadget.

Details are sketchy right now but Engadget are reporting that Numark aims to put out a consumer model in the next couple of months, retailing in the $250-350 range, to be followed with a pro DJ version with pitch control and other goodies required by the pro mobile DJ. Both versions will feature the dual iPod dock with crossfaders and transport controls.

Another turntablist website, Skratchworx were showing the same leaked pictures.

Thanks to Engadget

Related Links

Prototype Numark iPod DJ Mixer [CreateDigitalMusic.com]
iPod For DJs [DJZone.net]
Playlist iPod DJ [iPod-Dj.com]
With iPod, Who Needs a Turntable ? [Wired.com]
Downloaded and Ready To Rock [Washington Post]
iPod Lounge [iPodLounge.com]
Everything iPod [Everythingipod.com]
NoWax [NoWax.co.uk]
Playlist Mag [Playlistmag.com]
The iPod DJ Revolution [Methodshop.com]

Apr14

Podcasts Get Their Own Search Engine

Posted at 1:12 AM • No Comments

Fairfield, Connecticut based TV Eyes, the real-time broadcast search provider which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts since 1999, will debut a Podcast search engine called Podscope later this month. Every word within an Internet podcast will be made searchable which is equally applicable to video blogs and personal videos. Podscope will crawl the web to look for podcasts, when it finds one, it will create an index against every word within the content. Podcasters are also able to submit url(s) for crawling.

Podscope will be indexing the content of Podcasts enabling searchers to make text searches of content

“With a looming explosion in such user generated rich content as Podcasts and video blogs, there is a growing need to empower consumers to find and subscribe to programs that meet their diverse interests, commented Allen Weiner, Vice President and Research Director at Gartner. “Searching and indexing these varied audio and video programs will not only benefit content-hungry consumers, it also adds legitimacy and velocity to this burgeoning space.

Podscope isn’t the first speech recognition search technology. HP’s Speechbot has been online for years in demo form using speech-recognition technology to create a searchable transcript. BlinkxTV which we featured here last December also uses speech-recognition technology to create searchable text transcripts.

Related Links

Podscope: New Search Engine Will Allow You to Keyword Search Every Word Spoken in a Podcast [SearchEngineWatch Blog]
Pod Catch [PodCatch.com]
BBC To Massively Expand Podcast Trials [iLoveRadio.org]
Podcast Lab [PodcastLab.com]
Podcast Alley [PodcastAlley.com]
Busy Podcasters Guide [iPodder Sourceforge]
Podcasting (aka How To Get Podcasts and Also Make Your Own) [Engadget.com]
Podcasting Power [MercuryNews.com]
A Look At Other Video Search Tools [SearchEngineWatch.com]

Jan23

Yet More Beatles Mash Up Mayhem

Posted at 12:27 PM • No Comments

We’ve already mentioned the Beastles and the ‘Revolved’ Beatles remix mash-ups on these pages in recent weeks and now there’s another one worthy (or not) of your attention. Beatallica.

Beatallica, an unholy mashup of the Beatles done over in Metallica style
Although they’re not in the truest sense of the meaning, mash-up or ‘bastard pop’ as celebrated vigorously on the bootleggers ‘bible’, ‘Get Your Bootleg On’ (or GYBO to those in the know), Beatallica have the spirit of the art down to a tee. A sense of humour and an unlikely clashing of musical genres. Online rockzine Blabbermouth probably summed them up the best by saying that musically they were, “arrangements of Fab Four standards with wonderfully unsubtle references
to Metallica’s songs and a spot-on imitation of James Hetfield’s distinctive vocals…”

So probably more in common with parody like the Rutles and Dread Zeppelin than the genius of Loo and Placido but worthy of a mention here also for their usage of BitTorrent to distribute both their albums, ‘A Garage Dayz Night’ and ‘Beatallica’, not only in the ubiquitous MP3 format but in the lossless audio format Flac. Props all round and great fun to boot (no pun etc….).

Related Reading

Another Beatles Mash Up [MusicbizNews24.com]
Meet the Beastles [MusicbizNews24.com]
Music For the Bootleg Generation [MusicbizNews24.com]
Culture Deluxe [CultureDeluxe.com]

Jan12

Its Here, the iPod Shuffle Emerges

Posted at 12:49 PM • No Comments

As predicted for a while now just about everywhere, Apple CEO Steve Jobs yesterday announced Apple Computer’s Flash memory based MP3 player, dubbed the iPod Shuffle.
Apple finally unveiled their entry into the Flash memory based MP3 player market with the iPod Shuffle, shown at the Mac World Expo in San Francisco
Unveiled for the first time at the Mac World Expo in San Francisco CEO Jobs said, “It is smaller than most packs of gum,” and, “It weighs about four quarters.”
The iPod Shuffle will sell for $99 and $149. Unlike other iPods, the Shuffle uses flash memory, rather than a miniature hard drive, to store songs and it is priced lower than many competing flash players with less memory than the 512 megabytes and 1 gigabyte Apple will include.

As predicted at MacMind over a month ago the unit comes without an LCD screen.
“Get this: NO SCREEN. Got a cellphone with one of those flat joysticks? This is apparently how you’ll get around on the screenless iPod.”
Like its big brother the hard disc drive iPod, the iPod Shuffle includes a navigation wheel. There’s also a slider on the back of the player that determines how tunes will be played. The first switch position tells the iPod shuffle to play songs from the beginning of the playlist to the end in orderm, one more notch and it will shuffle the songs on the device. The third position turns the device off.

Jobs told Conference goers, “With most flash-memory music players users must use tiny displays and complicated controls to find their music; with iPod shuffle you just relax and it serves up new combinations of your music every time you listen.”

Users can charge and transfer music from their Mac or PC by plugging iPod shuffle directly into a USB port. The Shuffle also doubles as a portable USB flash drive and comes with its own lanyard so you can wear the tiny player. Apple already have a number of accessories for the new iPod including an arm band, dock connector and sports case.

The players go on sale from today on the Apple website.

Related Reading

iPod Shuffle:First Impressions [PlaylistMag.com]
iPod Shuffle Sparks Stampede [Wired.com]
Apple Introduces iPod Shuffle [Yahoo Finance]
Apple Makes Tiny Steps for the Masses [Washington Post]
Apple: Jobs Unleashes Mini Mini Pod [Silicon.com]
Apple iPod Shuffle (512MB) [CNet Reviews]
Turn Any iPod into an iPod Shuffle in 3 Easy Steps! [Flickr.com]