Jack Black has pretty much summed it up nicely here, but we should go over this some more.

Here are some things that are NOT OK to upload to Splice, almost always:

• Music from most CDs
• Music you found on Limewire or other file sharing sites
• Most rap a cappellas
• Covers of someone else’s music, even if you played them yourself
• Clips from movies
• Samples from anything listed above

This might seem like it’s kind of limiting, but that’s only until you start to discover how many amazing things are already out there that are ok to use. There are a lot of musicians who like to share their music for remixing. A good place to find them is through the search engine on the Creative Commons website.

But better yet, why not upload something you made all by yourself? You can upload:

• your own song or riff
• yourself reading some original poetry
• your audio diary
• your own podcast!
• your cat purring
• your impromptu breakfast drum session with your fork banging on your coffee mug

Or anything else you can think to put a microphone in front of that’s happening right in front of you. Get creative!

The best thing you can do if you want to hear music from your favorite band’s new CD on Splice is to contact your favorite band and let them know. A lot of artists are starting to allow this kind of remixing, but only when they know their fans really want to join in. Get involved! Just remember that uploading copyrighted works is bad for everyone. It takes a lot of time for the staff here to delete them, and they plug up the works by wasting space and making it really hard for people who want to CREATE music to find legal sounds.

I always tell people to think of music in blocks, and so I was delighted to see these videos of the Tangible Sequencer today. They took that phrase quite literally. Each block contains a single ‘chunk’ of sound and nearby blocks react to that sound. I wish I would have had a set of these when I was small.

We like friendly and musical people here at Splice. One such person is thettpproject. Another user pointed him out to me as being extra helpful and having a page full of fabulous sounds to share. What better reason to put him in the hotseat and remix his music for this week’s contest?

The rules are easy:
1. Splice together a song using at least 3 of the sounds by thettpproject. You can make a song from scratch, or remix one that he’s already made.
2. Tag your song with remixTTP to be automatically entered to win!
3. Entries are due by Midnight CST, Sunday May 20th, 2007.

The winner will receive a VS3251 Powered Audio System from our ever gracious sponsor, Altec Lansing.

If you need a little help getting inspired, you should listen to this song. As Fenix aptly said, “…it sounds like music from a ‘Matrix’ fight scene.”

Extra appreciation goes to thettpproject for sharing his music with us. Be sure to stop by his page and say hello and thank you!

This week is just one big dance party in my head. In pursuit of my neverending quest to show you why music is FUN, I bring you this - Yet Another Dancing Robot. Oh yeah.

I am very proud of what an international staff we have at Splice, and when I’m working out of my house in Chicago and not our office in Spain, I am always severely jealous of the weather reports I get from the team. I clearly remember a day in March when someone over there told me that there were people swimming in the ocean already, and I was amazed and jealous because we had at least several inches of snow here still. And with so many of our business contacts being in San Francisco, the weather from the other direction is usually warmer, too!

Chicago is finally thawing out, though, and the weather here has been phenomenal this week. The sun has been shining, there is a vase of fresh flowers from the garden on my desk, and there are rumors of a cicada invasion in just a couple of weeks. But the best part is the music! People everywhere are driving around with their windows down, blaring the radio, and the clubs are packed full of people who have been hibernating until now.

Summertime is when most people I know dust off their CD collection and start pulling out the happiest party music and really get down. It seems like a good time to do this at Splice, too, so this week, the contest is dedicated to summertime dances and happy times. You guys as a whole have improved drastically at making songs since last summer, so let’s put those skills to work and make some feel-good songs that are great for the summer.

The rules are very simple this time:
1. Create a dance song in Splice. It doesn’t have to be any special kind of dance - just whatever gets your feet moving!
2. Tag your song with DANCEOFF to be automatically entered to win.

Entries will be judged based off their grooviness factor and how hard it is to sit still while listening. Submit yours by Sunday night, May 13th, Midnight CST.

Remember - DO NOT use copyrighted music in your songs, or they will be automatically disqualified and the offending samples deleted!

Airtone never ceases to amaze me in the way he can take nearly any sample out there and do something different and beautiful with it, so I’m happy to announce him as our winner in the Remix Groovebox contest. Even Groovebox agreed that it was some very clever arranging.

Once again, our super cool sponser Altec Lansing is going to send Airtone an IM9 audio system. Great work to everyone who entered this contest and thanks again to Groove box for taking the hotseat for a week!