With the recent purchase of M-Audio, AVID, a well known presence in the TV production and best known in the audio world for the Digidesign line of Pro Tools turnkey systems, has released a line of ProTools software called M-Powered aimed directly as some of the most popular M-Audio interfaces. A master compatibility chart is here and the M-Powered specific compatibility chart for OSX/XP is here. The street price for the software seems to be hovering around $300.

Why do we care?

I don’t have the facts and figures but it is safe to assume that not a lot of professional recording studios have Fruity Loops. Almost every one has a ProTools system.

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If you have a wav editor that creates named regions (is there one that doesn’t?) and FL Studio with the Beat Slicer plug-in then you may not realize just what a powerful, customizable beat-slicer you have at your disposal.

If you start with a beat (or voice track) or anything that has easily isolated snippets of sounds, you can mark them off in your wav editor, name them something meaningful to you and load them in FL Studio’s Beat Slicer to assign those names to MIDI keys.

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here scroll down, click on ’start search’ . These are supposed to be Bonham out-takes from 1978. I’m not 100% convinced but it makes a great story, if somewhat echo-y loops.

There’s been a bit a dought of truly brilliant tracks uploaded to Mixter but that all changed this morning when CC Mixter’s two best producers, Pat Chilla and teru, posted a collaborative production using folk singer Colin Mutchler’s a cappella.

Castles of Serenades is a beautiful, emotional, technically perfect rendition.

(A special note to singer-songwriters out there: Looking for a good producer? Upload your a cappellas to Mixter. Wait a week.)

Mixter itself is closing in on 1000 registered users (I know, nothing compared to the hoards that flocked to the opening on ourmedia.org but then Mixter is a much more specialized site and it *cough* works) and over 700 samples, songs and remixes half of which is allowed for commercial sampling. The ODB contest this month (judged by RZA and promising a spot on a release later this year) and the Magnatune contest that starts next month (where winners get signed to the label) are sure to take that number well over 1000.

But the numbers don’t mean a thing if the music is just a bunch more of the guy-in-a-dorm-on-his-imac “experimental” crap stuff that jams the archive every night.

Pat, teru and “Castles” is what the whole thing is about.

Just in case you’ve been out of the loop for, say 15 years, Jim explains it all here.

Who’s Mike Jones? Who gives a shit?

Someone named Vitaly Zolotarev uploaded several decent to great percussion loops to the archive a while back under NonCommerical-Sampling+ CC License — I definitely have a favorite.

Slowly but surely modern musicians are starting to leverage technology and community. NIN’s Reznor has released a 70MB sit file for a Garageband project for anybody to remix and contribute to. more info at MacWorld.

…says Downhill Battle

A P2P-based cross platform high quality video player that enables “anyone with access to broadband and a videocamera [to] have their own channel with a real audience.”

Although I’m guessing the audience part is speculative.

One to watch.

Maria Schneider, the first artist to ever win a Grammy with a web-only release (which was paid for directly with fan “participation” of $80,000) is releasing (for $25 a pop) a version of her classical album with the soloists stripped off.

details here

This whole Schneider thing is a little weird to me. For the life of me I can’t figure out what the lessons are from this thing. Jazz orchestral fans have lots of expendable cash lying around? The web can be used to milk your fans old skool style? And I’ve looked: what did you the ‘participants’ actually get for their 80 grand? When she sold out her run of CDs did she give any of the money back? Can she really get away with taking $80k from fans AND selling the CDs for $17 (and then these remixes for $25)?

CC Host integrates with phpBB2 without any modifications to phpBB2.

If you want phpBB2 to pick up the current CC Host skin dynamically then you’ll need this phpBB2 skin (ZIP) to be your default skin. (There is example online of the two working together.).

To install:

• put that zip into your phpBB2/templates directory
• unzip (this should create a ‘cchost’ directory under ‘templates’)
• Go to the phpBB2 Administration panel
• Under ‘Styles Admin’ select ‘Add’, then click ‘ install’ next to ‘cchost’
• Under ‘General Admin’ select ‘Configuation’
• Select ‘cchost’ for the ‘Default Style’ and click ‘Submit’
• Log out of phpBB2

That should do it.