We rather enjoy all the unique and weird sounds people record using Splice. We get everything from secret confessions to shower singers to Spanish lessons and even occasionally some music. We thought we’d encourage this with a new contest. Here is how it’s going to work:

Part One: Tell Us Who You Are

1. Record yourself saying your name. It can be your username, if you’d rather not people know your real name. Use an ultra-fabulous superhero name if you want. Just remember that Kenny Reynolds is already taken.

2. Tag your name recording with “MYNAME.”

Part Two: Meet Your Neighbors

1. Ready to make some music? Search for other sounds tagged with MYNAME and create a song using the name of at least five of your fellow Splicers. (Really though, the more the merrier. This contest is about meeting new people.)

3. Tag your finished song with “NAMEGAME”.

4. Your finished song does NOT have to include the loop you made yourself, but if you didn’t contribute a name to the pool, you will not be eligible to win.

The Goodies

The winner will be judged based upon how many other users have marked it as a favorite. If your song has been favorited the most, you will be receiving a VS3251 Powered Audio System from Altec Lansing, so you can crank it up and bask in your own glory.

The winner will be decided at Midnight CST, Sunday October 7th, so finish early and bring your friends to cheer you on!

Hello, everyone! I wanted to share an updated tutorial for using the record tool. Whether you’re rapping, singing, or telling a story, the record tool is the one of the best ways to get those sounds into your profile so you can share them easily with friends. Here is how:

1. Make sure you are logged in.

2. Go to your home page. Look next to your user photo for a menu option that says Record.

Clicking this will take you to the uploading and recording page. You can also access that page easily at any time by clicking the little microphone that appears just below the navigation bar on most pages. It looks like this:

3. Look towards the bottom of the page for the actual tool, and click it:

4. A window will pop up for you to allow Flash to access your microphone. You should select Allow.

5. Once you’ve done that, the record window will pop open. Just click the red button and start recording your sound!

6. When you’ve finished recording, just press stop, and the window will change a little. From here, you can listen to your recording, re-record, adjust your settings or save it. If you like your sound, just hit ‘Save This Recording,’ and you will be taken to the normal upload page, where you can name your sound, tag it and select license and privacy levels.

That’s it! As lots of Splicers already know, recording is a lot of fun. I can’t wait to hear what you’ve got to say!

I got a lovely email from Teru at CCMixter.org that some Splice music has been used on a Canadian radio show. The show plays on CBC Radio one and is called Spark. You can listen to the show here.

It’s great to see more and more broadcasters recognizing the value of Creative Commons music, and especially great to see so many people from Splice on the list of contributors. Congratulations to all of you!

I don’t know about your home, but here in Chicago the weather has definitely turned towards autumn, and of course, with this comes school. I have six nieces and nephews who have been lamenting about this to me for weeks now. Oh, the end of long, lazy days and the return to early mornings, paper bag lunches and …. HOMEWORK. But some people are getting really creative with their homework and are using Splice to get the job done.

For example, if you peek around over in things tagged with ‘verano’ you can find some bright stars practicing their Spanish. Our staff hails from five different countries, with English being our only common language, but Spanish is a VERY close second, so we highly approve. (Discutimos Splice en español aqui, por favor!)

And we’ve got a budding politician in the works with spliceuser2007, who has very cleverly used Splice to record an impassioned speech as to why she should be elected to student council. Great idea! Someone so enterprising SHOULD be in a position of responsibility. Good luck!

But the students shouldn’t get to have all the fun! The Casa Grande Library has been using Splice forever to prepare their technology podcasts and information about their current programs. Librarians know a great resource when they see one. You should trust them.

If YOU are using Splice for your educational projects, we would love to hear about it. Better yet, we would REALLY love it if you’d stop over in the educator’s forum to chat with each other. After all, that’s how great ideas are born.

Hello everyone! I wanted to show you a quick tip that will help you better manage the mail you get from Splice, including how to turn it off entirely. We know that these days everyone feels like they’re fighting a constant battle with their inbox, so we never send mail unless you tell us that it’s ok. Here’s how to edit your mail preferences:

1. From your home page, choose Account Settings from the side bar.

2. Scroll down a little bit until you hit the section for Mail Preferences. From here, you can choose to get the occasional newsletter, and how often you want to be notified regarding actions on your account. You can also choose WHICH actions to be notified about. Just choose what’s best for you and hit submit at the bottom.

If you haven’t verified your email yet, you won’t be able to get anything from Splice at all, including password help, so make sure you do that! You can do it at the top of this same page and you only have to do it once.

Hopefully that will help those of you who do not wish to receive mail from us to better understand how to turn it off yourselves. You’ve got the power - don’t be afraid to use it!

We’ve got a winner for the Your Voice, Your Choice contest. Actually, we’ve had a winner for a little while, but I wanted to be able to post the entry here in the blog and couldn’t do so until our mp3s were back up and running, as they are now. As always, we had some really fun entries, but what’s new this time is that I don’t have to struggle with picking a winner this time! Thanks to the wonder of functional ratings, you guys got to to the hardest part for me and I have been happily demoted to ‘just the messenger.’ Yay!

Therefore, I am pleased to announce that our winner this time around is toddnrgi, for this song:

Todd is going to get a beautiful new surround sound system from Altec Lansing, who graciously continues to sponsor our contests and encourage great music everywhere.

Be sure to hear our runners up, too:

You can listen to all the contest entries here.

Thanks again to everyone for participating in this! If your favorite didn’t win, be sure to bring some friends to help vote next time around. We’ll have the next contest up shortly!