Category: Other Places

New year, new look, new content

Now that 2006 is well underway I thought it was time for a new look to the ole blog and some new content. The theme is based on ‘Gentle Calm’ by Phu Ly, but I modified it a bit to give more space for the content and other little bits and pieces. Hopefully it will make things easier to read.

Also there is now the first of my tutorials on using Plogue Bidule. Its a beginners guide to using [tag]Bidule[/tag] and takes you through the process of creating a complete polyphonic synthesizer using the vast array of modules they provide. You can read it here.

If you have been interested in [tag]modular audio[/tag] software before but either never got around to trying it or just felt daunted by the whole experience then hopefully this should gently ease you in to the wonders of creating your own instruments and sound mangling tools. At the moment you can try bidule for free, or buy it for a cheap price before the full release hits the virtual shelves (and its cheap at only 70 dollars). So there has never been a better time to get started.

Any comments or ideas for this tutorial and future tutorials are warmly welcomed.

Christmas Hits

The soundtrack to your christmas is here.

Everyone wants to know, what will be the christmas number one? Cliff Richard, Westlife, Some other manufactured rubbish that will make you regurgitate your turkey?

Do your ears a favour and check out the hot hits from some of the people who make no-future the worlds premier electronic music forum. Featuring Cristian Vogel, Pleated Lemon, Rob Acid, Bavin and many more family favourites.

To save you the time and trouble of searching through this thread to find all the seasonal gems therein ive compiled a list right here, just for you.

1. Pleated Lemon – Yuletide Logs
2. Black “E” – Ho Ho Ho
3. Kams – When Im 64
4. Phillie-T – Little Donkey
5. Hektor Ruiez – Console For Christmas
6. ActionJetzon – Get The Rod Again
7. Ultrafoetus – When were you i
8. Komakid – Stikla Vocal
9. Bavin – Jinglebavs
10. Knusbert – Wenn mal der schuh drueckt
11. Crud – Mistletoe and Wine
12. Tec-Ho – Happy Maggie
13. Chelmsford Industries – Bad Tidings
14. MDK – Merry Christmas
15. Oliver Rosemann – Underwearwolve
16. Rob Acid – 4

Download them all, burn em on a cd, give it to your gran. Thats christmas sorted.

last.fm recent tracks in flash

If you’ve been wondering when the code was going to return, well, here it is. Its a little app to show you your [tag]recently played tracks[/tag] from Last.fm. [tag]Last.fm[/tag] is a great site if you like music, and who doesnt like music? So whats it all about?

As they say ‘You get your own online music profile that you can fill up with the music you like. This information is used to create a personal [tag]radio[/tag] station and to find users who are similar to you’

One really nice feature is that a lot of the data is freely available from the audioscrobbler.net site in a variety of formats. This has prompted some people to create handy little scripts that generate sigs which show what you have just been listening to. Most of them have been made using php and GD to generate a graphic, or just plain ol html. So i thought this would be a perfect opportunity to do the same in [tag]Flash[/tag], but using only open source tools and libraries (You dont need the flash IDE installed to build it..)

You can download a zip of the code from here.

To build it you will need swfmill and MTASC, and to make your life easier i’ve included an ant build file.
The build file requires the as2 [tag]ant[/tag] tasks created by Simon Wacker which you can grab from here.

Also included in the zip is a lovely font created by the nice people at orgdot and a little php script that will cache the response from last.fm so you dont hammer their servers (they ask that you dont make more than 1 request a second..)

For now the implementation is very basic, im sure theres plenty of improvements and extras that can (and should) be added. Drop me a comment if you do something interesting with it.

and if you want to see it in action you can go here

Free Music

Everyone likes free stuff and these days theres a lot of music you can get *legally* for free. Irdial put out a lot of decent records and in an act of benevolence embraced the Free Music Philosophy

This is a good thing.

So go and grab yourself some classics like Neuropolitique and Aqua Regis.

While youre at it heres some other net labels putting out good music, get your ears round some of these

pathmusick
hippocamp
monotonik

sorted.

Music Wants Out

Rather than letting this song fester on my hard drive for another 2 years i’ve decided that its best to release it into the wild. Who knows when i’ll get around to putting together another record, so without further ado, just go ahead, download it, share it, enjoy it, delete it, whatever you like. Just dont try and make money from it. thanks.

MDK – Inside

and, yeah, it needs a bit of mastering because the volume is a bit low, but, you gets what you pays for 🙂