How to set up a SoundCloud remix contest

Why pay some smug superstar DJ 5k to remix your track when you can crowd source something better for free? SoundCloud posted a super detailed explaination on how to do it using their pretty service. Sometimes I post things on Wire to the Ear solely so I can remember, find and use the info later… this is one of those posts.

“Your remix group will be where people submit their finished remixes. It’s quick, free and easy to create a group: add a logo, background info and let people know if you want the submissions to be downloadable or not.” – SoundCloud.com

To check out the full instructions click here: 5+1 Easy Steps To Set Up Your Remix Competition With SoundCloud

I’m on SoundCloud: soundcloud.com/thingstocome

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This entry was written by Oliver Chesler, posted on February 23, 2010 at 6:48 am, filed under business and tagged , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



Wire to the Ear’s Winter Namm 2010 picks

The NAMM Show acronym stands for “National Association of Music Merchants”. The event takes place twice a year. There is a summer event in Austin, Texas but the bigger of the two happening this week in Anaheim, California. There are many websites covering NAMM down to the very last detail. I’d like to only list here what I personally think are the most interesting new products. So without further ado here is Wire to the Ear’s Winter NAMM 2010 hot picks:

Soundcloud Integration With Audio Software. I’m a full on web junkie and I like my stuff in the cloud. I think redundant servers spread out around the world are far better places to store my precious files than my own home and Lacie hard discs. I also love to share. That’s the point of being a musician no? Soon you will be able to render and send a file from Ableton direct to SoundCloud. My music from me to you faster than ever. I like it! link

Mungo Enterprises State Zero. A giant hardware interface full of knobs. 8 voice polyphony. Anything to anything patching. Patches store in memory. If this is real analog and less than a price of a car I’m sold. If it’s digital or crazy expensive I’ll play with the one you buy. link

Jomox M.Brane 1_1. Wicked snappy sharp analog snares and percussion. I have the Jomox Mbase 01 kick module and it’s wonderful so as soon as the M.Brain is available it’s mine. I’ll trade gigabytes of snare samples for one real analog snap. link


Dave Smith Instruments Mopho Keyboard.
(photo credit: Synthesizers) The spiritual descendant of the Sequential Circuits Pro-One has arrived. The Pro-One was the main keyboard used by Vince Clarke on the amazing Yaz albums so you know the Mopho’s got mojo! Why waste desktop space with a empty Oxygen 8 or like controller when you can slap one of these new Mopho’s in its place? Thanks to internet nagging the price will be right on this new guy too. link

Akai iPK25. A real hardware piano keyboard for the iPhone. If other Apps can access the keys then this is nice. If not it’s a full on dud. link

Teenage Engineering OP-1. Here’s a product that looks like special care has been baked into it’s DNA. A small super stylish hardware TAPE sampler with a FM receiver, G-Force Sensor (Wii), OLED display, speaker and USB connectivity. TAPE mode is awesome. The graphics on the display are awesome. If you’re a musician with a sole you have to want one. If you want to show up your hipster friends with microKorgs this is the guy to do it with. The bad? It’s still away off and who know’s what the price will be. link

So how are you going to spend your money in 2010? Do any of these or other NAMM new releases tempt you?

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This entry was written by Oliver Chesler, posted on January 17, 2010 at 8:33 am, filed under hardware and tagged , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



Frosty the Synthman

Frosty_the_Synthman

We set up our pink X-mas tree today. For some photos: click here When I was a little kid there was a store in Rockland County called CostCutters my mother used to take me to to buy me school supplies. Before the store closed down last year I bought the Frosty Ornament you see above. If you want a way to get into the spirit why not try the SoundCloud Christmas song contest? You can win a Premium account. They have a thing against the band Wham too. Read all about it: click here

“The SoundCloud staff will then listen to every submitted track and select one winner who will receive a yearly Premium account and see the track featured with an own blog post, tweet, Facebook, Tumblr… just in time for Christmas. The winning track will be the one that knocks our red socks off.” – blog.soundcloud.com

Frotsy the Synthman was a jolly happy soul, with a glass body and a Yamaha CS5… lalala…

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This entry was written by Oliver Chesler, posted on December 11, 2009 at 10:27 am, filed under Uncategorized and tagged , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



SoundCloud gets a killer update

SoundCloud iPhone App from Oliver Chesler on Vimeo.

SoundCloud has become the best place for musicians to store and share music online. The Berliners have continutally upgraded their site’s services listening to it’s customers. Beyond the new features the site is managing to scale well and it looks very pretty. Here are some of the new tools in the latest release “Taylor”.

SoundCloud already had the best embeddable audio player with a great waveform display and comments along it’s timeline. Now there are two new player widgets called “Artwork” and “Mini player”. Here they are:

Artwork Player (Roll/click your mouse over for effect):

Mini Player (Click Play to expose mini waveform):

Sharing is much better now too as they follow Flickr a bit here allowing users to grab a Secret Link to send out. Stats is greatly improved (where there even Stats before?). Just take a look at these Stats from the past seven days:

SoundCloud_Stats

Here we go with a big one: an official SoundCloud iPhone app! Take a look Ma no flash (Video above).

Finally there is a new pricing structure that could make more sense for the unemployed and skeptical. For more info: click here

Follow me on SoundCloud: soundcloud.com/thingstocome

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This entry was written by Oliver Chesler, posted on November 11, 2009 at 6:26 am, filed under iPhone, music, promotion, video and tagged . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



6 Train Uptown New York City

6 Train - New York City

6 Train NYC by thingstocome

A recording I made on the 6 Train going uptown in New York City. As you can hear the train sits there more than a minute before it heads from 23rd Street onward. I used an iPhone 3G and the FiRe application which uploads directly to SoundCloud.

Check out my growing set of Field Recordings: click here

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This entry was written by Oliver Chesler, posted on August 20, 2009 at 4:53 am, filed under sounds and tagged , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



CitySounds.fm is the Music of Cities

CitySounds.fm

CitySounds.fm uses the SoundCloud and Flickr APIs to bring you music and images sorted by different world cities. The site was created by Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud during Music Hack Day in London. I’ve been listening during my morning coffee/web troll routine to Nashville.

“The tracks and city information is fetched from the SoundCloud API–in fact the list of cities and tracks is even updated in real time as new tracks roll into SoundCloud. Additionally, pictures for each city are fetched from Flickr.” – blog.soundcloud.com

Check it out for yourself and let me know which city your think is producing the best tunes: http://citysounds.fm/

For more info: musichackday.org

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This entry was written by Oliver Chesler, posted on August 10, 2009 at 5:06 am, filed under music and tagged , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



SoundCloud adds a new feature: Groups

SoundCloud Groups

SoundCloud keeps adding on nice features to it’s pretty music sharing site. I was reading they now have a large paying user base and have received a few rounds of funding. I’m about ready to buy myself a Pro account. This weeks new feature that caught my eye is Groups. Anyone can create a Group around a subject. Here’s a few I joined:

Ableton Live Users – A group for users of Ableton Live.
Dj Mixes – Be sure to check out/comment on other mixes and upload your own. Keep it to 2-3 max please.
Field Recordings – Add your favorite field recordings.
Vocoder love – Group for artists who use vocoders.
Belgian New Beat – For anyone making music in this style or influenced by it.
Samplecloud – Put on the needles, plug in the cables, switch on the microphones and give us some food!
monome – small is beautiful
Samples – For sharing samples under the creative commons license. Samples and fragments only please!

I’d like to see an iPhone App for SoundCloud. You can already record audio on your iPhone and send it directly to SoundCloud using FiRe. I’d like to see how your using SoundCloud outside of the site itself. If you are posting your tracks into your own website or other social network send me a link to check it out.

“Groups are an entirely new feature on SoundCloud. They can be started by anybody and are a great way to bring people together around a specific theme or project. Want to start a remix contest? Make a group for it and let people send their remixes to that group. You’ll get a DropBox badge for the group that you can put on any page. And you’ll get a great player widget that will show all tracks that have been posted to the group. Groups can also be moderated to give you full control over its contents if required.” – soundcloud.com

Find me at SoundCloud: soundcloud.com/thingstocome

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This entry was written by Oliver Chesler, posted on June 20, 2009 at 7:10 am, filed under promotion and tagged . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



Soundcloud’s New Player Widget is very nice.

SoundCloud Player Widget

SoundCloud has added volume control, a new info panel showing track stats, a download and buy panel, a share panel with support for direct sharing to your favorite social network, a handy switch to toggle comments on/off for faster navigation and threaded comments to it’s already sleek Player Widget.

To be honest I wish I didn’t love SoundCloud so much because I hate the idea of paying more than $50 a year on a web service. I also fear that if I upload 1000s of songs over the next five years and then SoundCloud goes out of business I’d feel majorly screwed. Imagine I use the above Player Widget in all my blog posts and then SoundCloud disappears. I know this is an issue with all cloud computing but I feel a bit more confident Google (and even Yahoo/Flickr) will be here in the long term or if they do cancel a service there will be good migration options. Now all that said, SoundCloud as a site is fantastic. In fact, it’s pretty much everything I want in a music storage and share online service. The guys in Berlin should really be congratulated for doing such a beautiful job.

I’m on SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/thingstocome

Related post: SoundCloud is a nice looking way to share music.

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This entry was written by Oliver Chesler, posted on May 16, 2009 at 7:51 am, filed under business, music, promotion and tagged . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



Make an anthem for an event you play.


The Horrorist Live – Halle, Germany 2008 from thingstocome on Vimeo.

Often a promoter from an event I am booked to play will ask me to do an anthem. Sometimes they want to post the song on their website before of after the gig. Other times they are doing a CD for the event and want a song with the event’s name in it to kick it off.

A few weeks ago I played in East Germany at the Alte Lampenfabrik for an event called Ton Aus Strom. It was there 10 Year anniversary party. As part of the plan they recorded my set direct from the mixing console. I started my show with an anthem for them. I did some screaming, pitchshifting and beat shuffling. Some of the vocals… “Ton Aus Strom” “Take Over!” “East Germany!” “Deutschland!”

Ton Aus Strom “Anthem” Live – The Horrorist by thingstocome

Ton Aus Strom Anthem by The Horrorist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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This entry was written by Oliver Chesler, posted on November 17, 2008 at 2:07 am, filed under music, promotion and tagged , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



Bandcamp and SoundCloud screencasts.


Bandcamp Screencast from Ethan Diamond on Vimeo.

Last week I mentioned to a friend that 1pixelout must have released a new audio player because I’ve been seeing huge versions of it around different sites. The 1pixelout audio player is the one you sometimes see on this site. Well it turns out these new players are coming from a new service called Bandcamp. Just watch the video above as it tells the story better than me typing it out. It’s clean, free, pretty and let’s you sell your music. I love it.


SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

SoundCloud the Berlin based startup has enjoyed a great beta ramp up and launch. They have attracted a nice group of industry insiders and electronic musician to their site. The SoundCloud audio player which allows your to make comments along the waveform of your song is just plain awesome. However trouble may be brewing in die Hauptstadt (capital city) because they just released their pricing plan and it’s a doozy. They continue to offer a free service but the forums, tweets and blogs seem to think they are gouging.

You know what? I want a combination of these two services. Give me a way to sell my music in many formats. Give me a great audio player with comments along the timeline and a waveform view. I want a dropbox. I want widgets. It should be free with ads or $25 a year advert free. They can have a few percent of my music sales too. I’d like to be able embed all my music on my own site as a mini store and have complete control over the CSS.

Bandcamp: http://bandcamp.mu
SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com

Bandcamp or Soundcloud?

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This entry was written by Oliver Chesler, posted on October 12, 2008 at 11:42 pm, filed under business, promotion and tagged , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.



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