(Cue obligatory fake glamor shot...)

Rough Rider Pro is now available in the Audio Damage store for US$49.00. Go get some.

So, you can actually expect that later today, most likely. Or early tomorrow. I know a compressor isn't as exciting as something like Automaton, but it's a plug-in everyone needs several different iterations of, whether they want it or not. So there.

Okay, I'm a johnny-come-lately to SoundCloud, I'll admit. I don't normally search out things like this because, well, I have my own co-lo box with a fat-ass pipe and tons of storage. But I do like to take advantage of the social aspect of Web 2.0 shit like Flickr and Vimeo, so I thought I'd take SoundCloud out for a spin today and see what's what. I uploaded four Micronaut tracks that I hadn't, as yet, done anything with, for experiment's sake. Tentatively, I'll give SoundCloud a thumbs-up for now. Here are my thoughts on the service:

Things I Like:

1. Very slick Web 2.0 interface. I was joking with my wife that you could gauge how Web 2.0 a company was by how large the fonts they used on their site were. SoundCloud uses extremely large fonts. But the interface is Grade A for this type of service, and since I'm gonna continually compare it to Flickr and Vimeo, I'll do so now. It beats both of them hands down, both in verbosity, and in control.

2. The uploading/tagging tool was actually designed by someone that knows at least a thing or two about music, from a content creator perspective. (I can detect the hand of Eric Wahlforss in this portion of things, I'm guessing.) The vast majority of hosting sites of this nature kind of assume you're Deputy Dumbass when it comes to tagging and such, but SoundCloud's uploader has specific sections that someone like me would need, which I really appreciate. The copyright area, although it doesn't have the specific CC license I use for my material, gives enough options that I can get a reasonable analog going.

3. The hooks for selling the track are very slick. I personally have never used Digital Tunes, which is their service of choice. It's a little Euro-centric for an apple-pie-eating gun-toting sheep-fucking fat-ass American like myself. (I am only one of those things, as it happens, but you take my point.) But the extremely cool thing is that they give you a spot to put a link to any other store in place of that, in the correct assumption that you may not use Digital Tunes. This is a nice touch.

4. The player, as you can plainly see above, is top fucking notch. It has everything you need and nothing you don't. I assume you've seen the single track player all over the place. The above embedded one is the playlist player. Nice shit, and well done.

5. The conversion from whatever you uploaded is quite good. I uploaded my tracks as 44.1/24 WAV files, and the embedded 128K MP3s actually don't sound half bad at all. And you can have an option for the user to download the original file, which is nice.

Things I Don't Like:

1. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. The speed of the site is too slow, in all respects. I think we can safely assume that they're not hosting off S3, which they should be. Perhaps it was because I chose to do all this on a Saturday, but everything was tediously slow. You'll no doubt have noticed how long it took to load the tracks for the player. Or maybe you didn't and they magically bought bandwidth. (EDIT: The second I clicked "save" on this blog post, their whole site went down. I imagine it'll come up someday, but this serves as a nice quod erat faciendum of my point.)

2. You have to upload a new piece of artwork for each song. This is silly. You should be able to choose from existing artwork. I had to upload that same picture four times. But then again, perhaps making new artwork for each track is what I should be doing while waiting for the hideously slow uploads?

3. Even the cheapest of the three "pro" options are quite expensive, at least compared to similar options from other sites, like, just e.g., Vimeo and Flickr. I would discuss the expense in detail, but this brings me to...

4. Crashy-ass site. Every time, and I do mean every time I look at the "pro" options page, Safari crashes. Since this whole thing was obviously made by Mac users, and they even use Safari in their video demos of the service, perhaps it's just me. But I doubt it. Other pages crashed Safari as well. This is quite annoying, as you may imagine. This is actually the second time I've written this post in its entirety, because like some kind of ass-tard, I went to check the prices for the "pro" shit to comment on #3 above in detail, and Safari took iteration one to its grave.

5. As a return to the subject, the "pro" shit is too expensive compared to similar services, and there's no need for three levels. That's just ridiculous. One level, at EU9.00 or so a month, would be fine.

So, any pros or cons I've missed from experienced SoundCloud users? What's the best way to get the most from the service to make the "Pro" level purchase worthwhile?

EDIT: The founder/owner(?) of SoundCloud wrote me this morning to say that they're well aware of the slowness, and are working, and I quote, "like mad" to fix it.

In other news, Rough Rider Pro is nearing completion. We spent the majority of the week (or at least the parts of it where I had electricity) chasing an annoying bug in the Mac version of VSTGUI, which led to some drawing Issues. (You never know what you're gonna find in that kit. It's full of surprises.) That fixed, we have the VST versions completely done, and Adam is working on the AU port as I type this. Beta testing early next week and presets, then it'll be out the door, and we can get back to work on BigSeq2.

Speaking of BigSeq, CDM and ChromeDecay teamed up to do an iPod Touch/iPhone-controlling-Live tutorial, and they used BigSeq as the effect of choice; it actually works fairly well in this sort of context. I even learned a couple things, and I designed the damn effect. Go figure. You can watch it here.

In any event, as a return to the subject, I expect my electricity/internet to be intermittent at best this weekend, so if you wrote me any time after, say, Thursday morning, don't go 'round expecting a big fat reply. It's not easy to answer email on an iPhone with anything but short declarative sentences. On the bright side, I can get my Hemmingway on, so there's that.

EDIT: I take that back. Adam was apparently snorting espresso all day or something. The AU of RRP is done. So full beta on Monday. Yay.

Hallo!
I am going to buy your hole Plugins!!!
There are nothing comparable for this Price!!!

My only problem is,i don´t no about your vst3 support!!!!

Are you going to support it?Please,need fast response!!

I hope you will do it!!!

This is just wall-to-wall Win, on so many different levels. Conveniently, it came this morning, so it just made the cut. Needless to say, I told him our usual spiel on VST3, which is "we'll support it when we don't have any other choice," essentially.

And in other bests...

Best Little Hardware Thingie Of 2008: I think the Mopho wins hands down in this category, really no question of that. A well-made piece of kit that sounds good for a reasonable price. How could that not be the Best Thing Ever?

Best New Album I Bought In 2008: This is a subjective category if ever there was one. I'm gonna go with "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!" This is the only time that Jim DeRogatis and I will ever agree on anything, ever. That miserable fuck got one right for once.

Best Live Music I Saw In 2008: I think I'm gonna give it to the Oregon Symphony for their performance of Carmina Burana, which was off the fucking hook. I didn't see a lot of live music in '08 (unless you count on TV, which I don't) and almost all of it was symphonic. I had to miss the Tom Waits tour because of my damn family reunion; I have the NPR podcast of the Atlanta show, so I'll say the best live music I heard in 2008 was that.

Biggest Music Industry "FAIL" of 2008: I think I'm gonna have to go ahead and go with VST3. Either that or Kanye's absolutely tragic Not-O-Tuned "performance" on SNL. (If you're a sucker for human tragedy and the like, you can absorb it here.)

Biggest Music Industry "WIN" of 2008: Well, shit. I can't think of one off the top of my head. Can I say Bettye Lavette's performance of "Love Reign O'er Me" at the Kennedy Center Honors last night? Jesus, that was shit-hot. And everybody is like "who?" (That's a pun, just in case you weren't paying attention.) This is one of those moments when an unknown becomes a Known, and it's kind of cool to see. You can see the whole Who tribute here. Keep the sound down until Joss Stone gets off the stage. Seriously. It'll just make you mad.

I think that's about it for 2008. Did I miss anything?

Within a couple days of each other in the last week, I got my 4th quarter ASCAP publisher's statement and my "Unit Of Arbitrary Time" artist statement from Sound Exchange. If you click on that picture, you can actually read the numbers. You will notice a large disparity. The ASCAP statement is 113 times the size of the Sound Exchange statement for the roughly equivalent unit of time.

I'm not necessarily pointing out the disparity in income from the two sources here, because my ASCAP checks are entirely from television, a more-or-less profitable medium, while Sound Exchange assfucks unprofitable start-ups, and businesses made of lose, so there's no real shock about that. My point is in the relative effort I expended to get those checks. When I joined ASCAP, about a week after my first album was released, the entire event largely consisted of walking in to the building across the street from Lincoln Center and saying "hey, I'd like to join up." I signed my name to a form that a members services person filled out for me, and that was that. The checks started up about a year later, and haven't stopped.

Now, with Sound Exchange, it was a somewhat different process, to put it mildly. First off, Sound Exchange doesn't collect performance royalties, which is what ASCAP, BMI et al collect. Performance royalties are split between the songwriter and the publisher of the song, are paid where music is performed (on television, in elevators, at Starbucks, etc.), and are there to ensure that the chump that wrote the song can pay his rent. Sound Exchange is entirely a child of the RIAA, and in order to justify their existence, they made up an entirely new royalty category. Inexplicably, they collect royalties from Sirius/XM (who, I might add, already have to pay MONSTER ASCAP and BMI licenses), all the interweb streaming services (ditto), that sort of thing.

The way the RIAA pulled this off was by lobbying Orin Hatch to slip this new royalty category in to the DMCA, long story short. They did it so that labels who felt they were losing money on digital transmissions (because, you know, RealAudio and Sirius are "CD Quality" and stuff) could get a little something on the back end. So entirely unlike ASCAP/BMI performance royalties, which go to the writer and his publisher, Sound Exchange royalties go to the label and the performer.

While it may not seem like such a bad deal if you're the label or performer, you obviously haven't filled out Sound Exchange's forms yet. To anyone with even a passing understanding of copyright, it was readily apparent to me from the day I started the week-long process of getting my lengthy catalog in their system that they were making it up as they went.

Now, up until Audio Damage came along, my income consisted almost entirely of royalty checks of one form or another. I'm a fairly intelligent person, I'd like to think, and I've taken the time to educate myself about what royalties I should be getting, why I get them, and how to finesse those sources of income. But Sound Exchange boggled me. I had to call them for clarification several times (and don't forget I had to do all this twice, as a label and as an artist; the above statement is the "artist" portion of the proceeds) and, as I said, I spent about a week dealing with their nonsense.

The statements they send don't actually contain any information at all. This latest one was 9 pages, and each page had the same entry, exactly as you see it in the picture: SISTER MACHINE GUN 16.47. This leads me to believe that the only performances they were able to notice were of my 90s band, even though my other two projects get equal or greater internet airplay. So there's that. I have no idea whatsoever what source this 16.47 came from, why it came, or how to make it better. I don't know what song it was for, or how to split it among the other performers. In short, the information is entirely useless, and as such isn't information at all. Since Sound Exchange sends these statements basically when they feel like it, I don't even know when the fuck this happened.

Now, I'm not the sort of person that looks a gift horse in the mouth, and as a content provider rather than a content consumer, I value all income streams that I can get my greedy little hands on. But Sound Exchange has got to be one of the dumbest rackets in the music industry, and is yet another way that the RIAA is steadily trying to turn the recording industry back in to the sharecropping of the 60s when they were happy. Leonard Chess would be proud.

Long-time readers will note that I used to often put up pictures of people with sprawling rigs of high-end instruments, and then point out that they were mixing all this gear a cheap-ass Behringer or Mackie mixer, with a certain note of derision. Almost every time I'd put up one of these sorts of entries, I'd get a couple e-mails that said "well, okay, what should I use, then?"

To answer that, we have to put it in context. My snide comments are the result of a particular combination of really expensive (and theoretically quality) instruments and really shitty mixers. This bothers me to no end. I could (and have) put up many examples of people with keyboard rigs that run in to the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars, who are mixing it all with a $199 mixer. To say that this defies logic is to understate the matter entirely. Why would you spend $3000 a piece on a Prophet 5, Jupiter 8, MemoryMoog, whatever, for their "vintage warmth" and "better sound," then mix them through the absolute lowest quality op-amps, shittiest available mic pres, and EQ that isn't even worth the name? It really beggars understanding.

So, I'm not saying you need to go grab a Speck line mixer for your Alesis Ion and circuit bent Speak 'n' Spell. Your EuroRack will suffice. If that's what you can afford, it'll do the job, and for live purposes, if you're anything less than a theatre-sized band, it's fine. If you're playing theaters, you've obviously got your shit together, and you're probably not asking me for my opinions, as your own have credence.

Personally, I just have stereo inputs on my rig, and I record everything individually. I'm in no particular hurry, and I usually have a vision of what the song is gonna be before I even start recording. If you have the kind of cash that results in some of these monster rigs, you have the kind of cash that can result in an Apogee AD16x or an Aurora 16, and you've got eight stereo inputs to your DAW. (Or 16 mono ones, if that's how you roll.) I personally prefer to use mic pre/DIs on my keyboards, but that's how I roll.

The instrument Gods gave us patch bays for a reason, you know.

If you absolutely must mix with a hardware mixer, there are many options that aren't Behringer. A simple rule-of-thumb applies here: if the word "Pro" appears in the literature or name of the product, it is To Be Avoided. Stuff that actually is pro doesn't need the label, because it is obvious. Chandler, Aurora Audio, Speck, API, Midas, Allen & Heath, Crane Song, Manley, Neve, SPL, Toft, and several other companies all make line mixers in the $2500 to $8000 range (roughly the same as any given MemoryMoog) that don't suck, to put it mildly. Each one has a particular feature set, and I have no doubt whatsoever that there is one that fits your purposes exact.

This will bring up the inevitable "yeah, but Record X by Indy Rock Artist Y was mixed on a Eurotrash 9000 with the ClusterFuck Mk2 meter bridge! Good enough for them, good enough for me!!!" Sure, it was. It was also mastered by Bernie Grundman, because the label knew it had a hit song, and was willing to spend the money to fix it. Bernie spent several days at a thousand dollars an hour fighting through the haze to make that shit listenable. On top of that, garage rock is the single most resilient form of music, when it comes to recording. If you make that, you're reading the wrong site anyhow.

So, once again, I'll reiterate the obvious: there really aren't any good mixers that are under a thousand (or even two thousand) dollars. Mixers are, by their very nature, expensive, because there are a lot of controls. The better quality the controls, or the more features you want, the more it's gonna cost. There is no Magic $300 Solution that will suddenly make everything all better. My advice is to save your pennies for a Rosetta 800 or Aurora 8, at the very least, and mix in the box. This is the cheapest possible solution; until then, you're pretty much stuck with bullshit, plain and simple.

But then again, I am a total snob when it comes to this sort of thing. If you have to buy cheap mass-produced shit, buy Yamaha. Always a safe bet.

I'm also going to lose the computing contraptions I currently have and get a new Mac Pro, so I'll have to swap the Lynx AES16 for the PCIe version, and I'll be replacing the Rosetta 200 with an Aurora 8. The PreSonus Central Station will go to the dump, as it so richly deserves (I could not, in good conscience, accept money for this complete piece of shit, nor inflict it on anyone else...) and will be replaced with a Dangerous D-Box.

So, this is really an initial feeler. If there's anything of the above that you can't live without, feel free to drop me a line with an offer, or any questions you might have. You and I both know what that shit is worth, so don't bother lowballing me. I don't need the money, and I'm not in a bind. I just want to clean my musical clock. I will accept a good working condition 909 straight across, or a Linntronics-modded Memorymoog + the appropriate amount of my cash, as trade for the MKS80, or the equivalent combination of the other stuff. I will also accept an Aurora 8 in trade for the Rosetta 200, but I'm not sure why anyone would want to do that. Otherwise, I'm not interested in trades, unless you're in the PDX area and have a fucking pristine perfect Rhodes.

EDIT: Please stop writing me about the damn Central Station. It's broken, kaput, worthless. It was a piece of shit when it was new, and now it's a broken piece of shit. You don't want it.

EDIT 2: MD is sold.

EDIT 3: Some prices. I'd like $800 each for the MonoMachine and Source, a grand for the MKS80, $1100 for the Moogerfoogers + accessories, $1200 for the Rosetta 200. I'll put up a full post with complete descriptions and pictures and such next week, but that'll save you the trouble of writing and asking for the now.

Our electricity came back on (lo, and furthermore hark) but seeing how the power grid round these parts is made out of despair and broken dreams, I'd be shocked if we still have juice past noon tomorrow, what with Round Four of our Winter Of Discontent on deck. We plan to have a "retro" (read: candle-lit) Christmas here.

In that light, I thought it wise to put up my Christmas Post now, so I don't have to do it from my iPhone. YouTube took down Coltrane's smoking-hot '61 Village Vanguard performance of Greensleeves, so I settled on this Allison Crowe performance as a reasonable placebo. (If Coltrane is uncut China white, she's like a capful of Robotussin CF, but needs must when the Devil drives.) Have a happy Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah/Yule/secular gift exchange/animist sacrificial ritual/whatever-the-fuck , and hopefully we'll have rejoined civilization next week.

Note that I'm actually sitting in the McDonalds in Stayton, enjoying their McWiFi, so I'm just assuming these don't suck; I haven't heard them. But Hugo is remarkably consistent, quality-wise, so I think you're in good hands.