Network of charties here and one of my favorites Mercy Corp.

Beastles this Beastles that.

Let me tell ya, DJ Earworm has a mash-up of Beatles, Scissor Sisters, George Michael, Aretha Franklin called No One Takes Your Freedom that will completely blow your mind.

My wife (the artist“) recently Netflixed “How To Draw A Bunny” and I highly recommend this film for two reasons:

1) Ray Johnson (the film’s subject) was a shining example of brilliant ‘remix’ art. Every scrap in this man’s life was fodder for art.

2) The “score” is by the phenomenal drummer, composer, activist Max Roach but hardly in the conventional sense: the film is interspersed with clips of close-ups of Max playing a snare with brushes.

Brilliant artist, great music, remix culture. Good stuff.

Some places to click to be of help:

http://www.careaustralia.org.au/show_mediarelease.asp?id=86

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/

http://www.redcross.org/article/0,1072,0_312_3870,00.html

FL Studio v5.01 bug fix release. This includes an important MIDI/VSTi bug fix.

VSampler 3.5 sounds like a major upgrade. Important here is that they now read ACIDized files as well as everything under the sun. This used to be my soundfont editor of choice (back in the day when I actually thought it was worth my time to edit soundfonts) so I may just give this one a whirl.

Both of these via the invaluable KVR-VST feed.

Is there a lesson for the music community to be learned from the release of the official One-Point-Oh of Firefox and Thunderbird and its stunning success story — nearly 10% browser market share overnight.

Sure. The first of which was that it wasn’t overnight. The Mozilla guys have been at it since debris from a series of explosions at the top of Highway 17 landed at Netscape in 1994. Look it up, that was 10 years ago. For 10 years a community of developers believed that people would prefer a software product that was stable and focused primarily on people that use it, treating them like humans and not consumers, customers, marketing data, etc.

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Remix Fight seems to have been attacked by the phpBBS worm and is struggling to get back on it’s feet. See here for latest info and if perhaps you can be of assistance.

[UPDATE] BACK with a vengence at http://remixfight.org/drupal. Dr. Kong Balong has been cranking on a revised site using drupal portal. Damn.

Is Amazon evil yet? I ask because I just realized you can get digital recording gear there:

Amazon.com : Musical Instruments / Products / Sound & Recording Equipment / Computer Audio / Hardware

The prices don’t seem too spectacular but they do make it easy.

Staccato: A Creative Commons music show. And guess what — the music is actually good.

It’s official: The word “remix” no longer means anything.