Art Gillespie

So I’m hunting around for local venues for my new live experimental lounge electronica act today, and I stumble upon The Red Room at Grill’s ‘Booking Manifesto’

There are so many full-of-win things about this manifesto that you should read the whole thing, but seeing as it’s on MySpace and my readers don’t like having their eyes gouged out by tiny sans-serif and the silhouettes of a thousand dancing mortgage brokers, here’s my favorite bit:

There are many fine venues that book great indie rock in town. This means that we don’t have to, and we generally don’t. I would define indie rock as saying that you probably have a very jacked-up MySpace with a huge splash screen with professionally rendered CSS frippery and a million slick-looking pics and videos all over it, and that your albums “drop” instead of get released, and you have a “street team in my market area” and that you are “rising” or “upcoming” and that you have a “strong buzz.” We already have a strong buzz, which comes from beer. We love you, but it’s not what we do here.

I want to play this venue. I do.

Last month, my band was going through the mixing process for their new album and we were all weighing in on different mix versions. I imagined there must be some application on OS X that would make this easy. I Googled. I called audio engineers. I even posted to twitter. When nothing turned up, I gave up and went back to my crappy Pro Tools/track solo methodology.

For a while, anyway. Then I decided to write the utility I would have been delighted to find.

The result is Audio Compare, a simple utility that lets you instantly switch between up to four different audio files while keeping them in sync. Once I’d built it and used it in the final stages of the new Redlands album, I found all sorts of uses for it: testing to see if I could hear the difference between 192- and 128-kbps mp3s and their AIFF original, comparing the iTunes mp3 encoder with LAME, etc.

I’m interested what others have to say about it and what features people would find useful in this kind of tool, so I’m posting this early version here for anyone to download. If this is the sort of thing that you’d find useful, give it a shot. If there’s a feature that would make it perfect for you, don’t hesitate to let me know. If you find a bug, PLEASE let me know. Hit me in the comments, on twitter or directly at agillesp at gmail dot com.

Download here: Audio Compare 0.1.0

There’s no manual (yet). Just drag audio files onto the pads, hit play (spacebar) to start and stop playback, and hit ‘A/B’ (a key) to toggle between loaded pads. You can hit ‘Hide’ (b key) to hide the filenames and the currently selected pad. This also randomly selects the currently playing pad. Finally the ‘<<’ button (left arrow key) will force all playing files back to zero.

UPDATE 06/10/09: Changed download link to latest version.

Just a brief post to pimp the folks at Sweetwater Sound for their absolutely stunning customer service.  My new Kurzweil PC3X went wonky only 8 days after I received it:  The middle C key stopped sending note-on/note-off unless you forte-forte-forte’d that bastard.  I foresaw much frustration, many phone calls and a whole heap of that special ‘fuck you’ attitude you only find in the music instrument retail industry.  Oh, and the small matter of being without my live rig for at least two weekends.  Years of dealing with local music stores, Guitar Center, Musician’s Friend, MARS, etc., have conditioned me to expect nothing less.

Instead, I sent an email to my sales engineer, Paul Allen, describing the problem.  Within three minutes, his assistant Peter responded with ‘Paul’s out of the office until Monday, but can I send you a replacement? ‘  I mean, a response that fast would be a delight regardless, but when the guy is out of the office?!  To make a short and painless story even shorter and less painful:  Not only is a replacement on the way, but they offered to expedite shipping—with no whining from me!—so I’d have the minimum amount of down time.

I’m so excited that I profess my true love on Twitter.  Where they also respond!  Note that I didn’t even use the @ notation in my original tweet so it wouldn’t have shown up in their mentions.  That means they’re keeping an eye on any mention of their company on Twitter. 

So not only do they have amazing customer service, they’re also seriously on top of all this social networking business, running a constant search on Twitter for buzz about their company.  That smacks of caring.  A lot.  And about the right things.  Needless to say, I won’t be buying anything from anyone else in the foreseeable future.  Thanks for everything, Sweetwater!

From The Techmium:

At its core the digital copy is without a body… And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive.

Truth. Quit perfecting tracks in your home studio. Quit debating the merits of different music software on forums. Play shows. Play lots and lots of shows.

From Jonathan Coulton’s blog (via Daring Fireball)

But somewhere along the way the bottom line started improving, and I became less obsessed with tracking every little thing. Now I sort of think of the whole engine as a special genetically engineered cow who eats music and poops money — I have no idea what’s going on in its gut, and I have the luxury of not really caring that much about the particulars. […]

The state of the industry makes a lot more sense when you think of it this way, all these new business models rising and falling, internet radio choking on insanely high performance royalties, Radiohead and NIN giving stuff away and making a killing. This is the thing about the new landscape that drives everyone crazy: you can’t see inside the cow; you can only build one, feed it music, and wait for it to poop.

I think that’s the best description of the current state of the music industry I’ve read. In long over-beer discussions with friends I’ve called it a black box: put music in one end, money comes out the other and don’t even think about trying to directly correlate inputs with outputs.

But man, feeding a cow and waiting for it to poop is a much more vivid way to put it.

-1 for using ‘cloud’ in their company name, but +1000 for what looks like an *awesome* service. Check out this blog post at SvN: Soundcloud Expands The Audio Player

And the site itself: Soundcloud

For anyone that participates in far-flung collaborations over the internet that don’t involve a webcam and a towel, this looks like the business.

Registration is closed, so if any of my dear readers are already members please invite me!!!