So you unwrapped ACID or GarageBand or Live, loaded your loops disks, created your first ready-for-prime-time mix, upload it to your ISP’s share area and finally hold your breath and post a link to your favorite mixing forum that you’ve been lurking at for four months.

At which point you proceed to get hammered about the head with a 2×4 because everyone recognizes three of the loops you used from the ACID loop set. You’re a heel. A lowlife. Go back to your bedroom in your parent’s cul-de-sac split level row-house and do your homework. (Your actual homework, not the allegorical kind.) You stare at the screen is horror as review after review come pinging in, all saying the same thing:

“you suck.”

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Very cool: Matt Hite over at beatmixed.com scored an exclusive interview with one of the premeir mashers IDC. No shocks or surprises, just a good read.

Say night-night to the Grey Album.

Getting a singer or rapper to agree to fork over a solo vocal track for a remix is one the easiest things in the world. Most of the time, all you have to do is ask. They love to hear themselves sing and they love to hear their own voice in different settings. This sounds a lot more judgmental than it is meant to, after all, liking the sound of their own voice should be the worst trait in a singer.

There are however, several other problems you are likely to run into when you try to do this over the Internet:

• The recording equipment they use is likely to be sub-par. I don’t just mean the microphones, I mean their method of recording is usually based on some slapped-together system, typically involving, for example, several rounds of analog-digital conversions through a mini-headphone-jack. Being remote, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about this except point out some obvious flaws, suggest the next sound card upgrade, etc.
• Most singers don’t know how to record vocals. Drifting away from the mic, spitting sibilants, pounding popping ‘p’s and whole host of other rookie mistakes are to be expected. It’s not a big deal and the best suggestion is to send the singer to a real recording for a session or two with the house engineer.
• Rappers love to double their vocals. They love it so much that when you get their ’solo’ vocal tracks they are in fact, two voices on the track. Make sure to ask up front to take one off a bling.
• While they like the idea of their own voice, many vocalists are actually quite shy about what they sound like without any effects. You may have to beg but let them know to trust you and keep the reverb and delay off the track. This one is the toughest one. If you get over this you’re home free.
• If you’re transferring files over the Internet, be prepared for a lot of hand-holding when it comes to ftp, FLAC, and other subterranean technologies. This is cool. I actually encourage singers not to get too involved with technology because we all know what they sense instinctively: it’s a big rat hole and distraction from their art.
  Meanwhile, a surprising number of singer/songwriter/rapper types don’t know how to make uncompressed wavs or aifs, leave alone apply a lossless compression afterwards. (I recently had someone send me a Windows shortcut to a CD audio track thinking they had “uploaded the track.”) Many have never been asked to render a solo track from their composition and have no idea if it’s even possible using their equipment. (Ironically, ProTools doesn’t make this a snap but that should be the problems you have.) If you are having issues, be prepared to suggest a snail mail of a burned CD.
• If you are transferring over the Internet (and if they have any degree of tech-saavy) try your damndest to get mono tracks. There is no reason to double the upload/download cycle when all you’re getting is dry vocals. The biggest problem here is that most software and digital recorders default to stereo recording and rendering. If you do manage to wrangle their software to get a mono track before upload, be a mensch and make sure to remind them to set it back to stereo so they don’t spend the next six months trying to figure out why their new tracks all sound like a telephone answering machine.

In summary:

Permission: Easy.
Everything Else: Ugh.

Happy Mixing.

I have well over 100 MP3s of my own mixes and tunes and I’ve been hand editing an XML file to catalog them for my tunes site. This is what the software industry called a “non-scalable solution.”

Not having the burning urge to write a script that reads and writes ID3 tags I found Collectorz.com’s Music Collector Pro Edition for $40.

Yes, I understand there many great tagging utilities and free players (like foobar 2000) that do a lot of databasing features. The only reason I got this particular one is because it exports your list not only as HTML, but XML along with some nifty (although useless to me) XSLT transforms. This is deeply soaked geekdom, I know, but it was a revelation to me and will save me days of writing and endless compatibility testing.

Ever want to build your own virtual studio in software? Plogue software is giving away the first version of Bidule in hopes of generating interest. And it should work.

If you love building circuit boards then stick to Reaktor. Meanwhile Bidule follows the same connect-em-up yourself user interface model but in a somewhat more accessable way. (Still, it is possible to go pretty crazy.)

Bidule can be used stand alone or as a ReWire host or slave. (The slave part makes the most sense to me.) It can host VST/VSTi.

Sorry about everybody getting “Error 500″ screens on this site. It should be fixed now, but I had to do a fair amount of hand spelunking so I might have missed a thing or two. If that’s the case, please let me know. If you tried to leave a comment in the last day or two and got that error then go ahead and try again.

This was my pilot error, but if you use Moveable Type to generate PHP files, read on…

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I got my copy of Live a few days ago and have been doing my first mix with it. Here are a few random thoughts that I have come up with in the last day or so while working with Live and FL Studio (Fruity Loops) as ReWire slave/master.

First off, let me say it seems Live greatly enhances the power of my machine. While sync’ing to FL with a heavy effects load, the CPU meter went to 304% (sic). I don’t know how they did that but that is cool.

• I know I’m just getting used to this environment, but I’m still performing a lot of the mix with the mouse. It’s very easy to assign keyboard notes to trigger samples, heck I’ve got plenty of masking tape and Sharpees just for the occasion, but again, I haven’t quite gotten into the Live flow yet.
• After really digging into Live I now see that FL’s “Live” mode sucks. They don’t have a concept of “scenes” encapsulated into one view. It’s possible but obviously just a “catch-up” feature they tacked on.
• Yes, you can ReWire both apps together, but the user model is do different in the applications I haven’t found a comfortable way to really work both at the same time. (I keep doing something in one or the other, switching back and forth, but I never really sync the two together for the final playback.)
• It seems theoretically possible using MIDI-OX/Yoke to assign the same MIDI keyboard keys to Live’s scenes and FL’s “Live” patterns, so that with one key hit you trigger matching scenes in both. This would mitigate the previous two problems, but I’m feeling adventurous enough to just get the music done. That level of dorking is even too high for me.
• Am I missing something, or is there no way to get FX onto the Live master channel? Do I have to use Send Channels? If true, I don’t like that.
• Live really is about playing, well, live. That’s great but I wish they would put a few more pennies into rendering to disk functions. Unless I’m missing something (again, it could happen) it looks like I have to actually select the entire arrangement just to make a WAV file. Each and every time. I know it’s just a few clicks and there are real problems in the world but it’s kind of pain. I don’t mind re-training my mouse hand when I think it’s worth it, but extra steps like this seems unnecessary.
• Once or twice I’ve had FL disappear from memory before I saved my work. If I forget to close it first then Live ASSERTs in a flurry of five message boxes with references to line numbers in their code. That could be useful if I had access to the code.
• It looks like every single time FL comes up in Rewire save mode several (but not all) of the settings are in factory default mode. Another pain. The “recent file list” is blank, Remote MIDI is turned off, etc. etc. I hope the bug this “feature” saves me from was worth the work-around.
• I read in the manual that when sync’ing to another app you can add a tiny delay to play/record but I can’t find it right now. But I need to because when sync’ed to FL I always miss whatever notes are on the downbeat of the first bar. (Like the bass drum.)
• You have to be insane to try to work with a ReWire host and client without dual monitors. The user interface model is pretty haphazard and non-standard. Sigh. I’ve been called a lot worse than insane, but I really don’t want to do this. If I end up using this set up a lot, however, I don’t see how I can avoid it.

That’s all for now, I’ve got more organized thoughts but none of these seemed to fit a larger category.

Over at the Internet Archive you can hear recent uploads, like Nicolas Slonimsky talk about Frank Zappa and a great audio documentary on Zappa’s hero, Edgar Varese. But the recently uploaded 17 minute raw audio of a Robin Baxter interview with a typically ornery Frank himself (from 1971) in which he compares Stravinsky to Lawrence Welk and turns down a room service beer, alas, has been yanked.

However the William Burroughs 1974 press conference is still there. And while we’re on the subject, don’t miss the new Cowboy Junkies and one of several Little Feat concerts circa 1976.

Is Magnatune’s model of “Try it, if you like it, buy it” catching on? It seems EMI subsidiary Blue Note records is floating the entire new Nora Jones album for listening online at VH1. I’m currently listening to it on Windows Media Player (hey, I wasn’t given a choice) at 64k which, to be honest, doesn’t sound too shabby — in fact she sounds exactly like Dolly Parton.

Now all I gotta do is hook up the old Virutal Audio Cable, hit record in Sound Forge and I’m in business! What’s that you say? Oh, that could land me in a Pepsi commercial.

OK, maybe not quite the same licensing arrangement as Magnatune. They don’t mention any soft-drink at all.

[via VT buddy Citizen Keith]