I recently fixed a bug that now allows for streaming/downloading feeds of CC Mixter contest entries to be delivered properly.

The feed urls are

http://ccmixter.org/rss/freestylemix

and

http://ccmixter.org/rss/militiamix

It’s easy as 1-2-3 to see the mixes as they get posted right in Thunderbird:

results in:

Sorry, I just thought it was cool.

In a follow up the my review of ACID 5.0 the good folks at Sony Pictures showed inestimable patience with me while trying to demonstrate how useful the Media Manager could be despite the overhead. They didn’t win me over to the feature although it’s worth repeating one more time that there might well be a great need for this feature if you have a few dozen of the official Sony Pictures loop libraries and want a quick way to traverse them.

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I’ve been negligent about passing along Beatmixed Matt’s “Bootmixed” which he released earlier this month. It’s been looping on my system pretty full time for two weeks.

Matt’s done an incredible job of making a high energy hour of some of the best straight-up mashing on the web today including his own excellent ‘Fuck My Bitch Up.” Also recommended: make sure to get to Go Home’s incredible “Artist A. vs Artist B.”

Do I encourage this kind of bootleg sampling? Er, do I encourage painters to use colors? Lawyers to site cases? Doctors to read and learn before they operate on me?

When it comes to fucking with the music industry’s criminalizing of fans and artists alike I firmly believe in the ALL PRONGS APPROACH.

Go get ‘em Matt.

When you have a compressor every problem looks like a nail. Or something like that.

True story: two days ago I was driving to the office of a label to drop off the final masters of an album I’ve been working on for most of this year. At the start of the drive I popped the CD into the car’s stereo for one last listen. Halfway through the drive I pulled the car over. I replayed a track that sounded just plain wrong. Well it didn’t sound any better just because I stopped the car. Damn. I got out of the car, took a walk around the block, got back in the car for a third listen. Then I turned the car around and went home.

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Downhill Battle is running a sycophantic but hilarious interview with Thievery Corporation. Lots of quotable stuff including the title of this entry which is their prediction for what they would be doing right now had they signed with a major label.

Have I mentioned that TC has released a song with commercial sampling rights at CC Mixter? Well now I have. Again.

I just changed email client to Thunderbird (holy smokes how brilliant is that!) at the same time my server decided to go off line for no reason with no warning so if you sent mail to me in the last 16 hours or so there’s every chance it was gobbled by the great bit bucket. victor — fourstones.net (replace — with ‘@’) should be fine now. While I’m on the subject I’m experimenting with turning off my Knowspam filter because (ironically enough) having them on my inbox for a year seems to have greatly reduced my spam intake and I’m going to try TB’s system for a while.

Oliver Wang is a fellow East-Bay’er whose biography reads like a vinyl geek’s dream (we’re all “culture critics” but few of us get paid for it).

Amongst his many enterprises Wang runs a site I keep close tabs on called Soul Sides (he calls it an audioblog, but I’m not crazy about that term so I’ll skip it — see! right there! I was criticizing culture!!). Anyway, today’s entry is an absolute doozy pointing out Stax classics focusing on the Mar-Keys, the purveyors of music that can be called no less than, well, “perfect.”

Remix Chuck D. w/ Fine Arts Militia’s “No Meaning No” and get a chance to be their next CD at CC Mixter.

Phew! After a long sprint CC Mixter if officially open for business and the launch includes a two part contest, one featuring the Fine Arts Militia cut and other allowing people to remix anything else from the WIRED CD (Thievery Corp., Beastie Boys, David Byrne, etc.) and the 11 top mixes end up a Creative Commons CD that they’ll be distributing.

Of course the ’cause’ behind this is the important thing: that sampling is an art form that doesn’t need to be a federal crime. All of the music on the site (including Chuck D., The Beasties, etc.) is all licensed under a Creative Commons license and all of it is free to sample for non-commercial purposes and most of it is licensed for commercial use (except advertising — screw marketing hehe).

And these licenses are not just for the contest. They are real CC licenses so you can freely post your remixes anywhere on the web.

Let’s be clear: these artists are going out on a limb because they believe in this stuff. Trust me, this is a big deal for them: “giving away” their music runs counter to everything everybody on the sleazy business side have been telling them their whole lives. I hope the same community that (rightfully) complains about the illegality and criminality they face by pursuing their art will come out and support the “big names” that didn’t have to take this step.

So download the tracks, remix ‘em like crazy (the contests are specifically not looking for straight club-remix type entries, they will judge based on how much you transformed the originals) and post ‘em away at CC Mixter. Pass it along.

Over at the new Remix Fight you can hear a collab between me and my kid (a.k.a dj peregrine) who seems to be putting some old vinyl to much better use that I ever did.