We’re happy to announce that Splice was selected as a finalist in CNET’s Webware 100 Awards! Go vote for us now! You can find Splice under the ‘Audio’ category, naturally…

Hellooooooooooooo. I’m already getting questions about why I’m not on your friends lists anymore. The answer is that in the beginning, I was auto-friended to everyone, to help get this party started. But now that you guys are friendlier and have better ways to find one another, we’re discontinuing that.

So, if you’ve never sent me a friends request in the past, but want to be friends still, now is your chance!! I’m still here and I still would love to hear from you.

My page is here. Be my friend?

Hello! I’m thrilled to finally be announcing that the new Splice 2.0 is officially OPEN FOR BUSINESS! First, we want to thank every single person for hanging out so patiently while we moved your files to the new site. You guys have been really wonderful the last few days and we appreciate it!! Secondly, we really want to thank all of the users who have been helping us beta test the new site. Your feedback and patient bug reporting have been so valuable to us and to all of the users on Splice. You rock.

There are a ton of new features in the site. We’ve been listening very closely to your feedback since our original launch and I think that you’re going to appreciate the changes we’ve made.

Welcome Home
Your new home page helps you to manage your Splice experience by giving you better access to the information that’s important to you:

• See who is linking to your music using the referrers link
• Manage your incoming friend requests all from one page
• Quick access to your favorite sounds, songs and people.
• Catch the latest Splice Blog headlines as soon as you log in
• Quick access to common features, such as uploading and recording
• Manage your mail and license preferences and more from the new ‘Account Settings’ page
• Geotag yourself - show us what part of the world you’re in and meet local friends

A Bright New Face
Improved profiles for people, and new profiles for sounds and songs!

• More space to tell the world about your music, your goals, your dog… it’s all up to you.
• Html editors were added to make it easier for you to include your photos and videos
• New people tags make it easy for you help people find you.
• “Become a fan” option lets you bookmark your favorite users without becoming friends
• “Send to a friend” let you share your favorite Splicers with the music fans in your life
• New Song and Sound pages let you upload an image and detailed information for all the music in your profile.

Explore Your Community
We know how much good music is showing up on Splice every single day, but we wanted to make it easier for everyone else to find it, so we’ve created some ultra-improved explore pages that make it easy for you to see what’s hot. You can search songs, sounds and people many different ways now, including:

• Top Rated
• Most Remixed
• With Most Fans
• Most Discussed
• Most Played
• Most Downloaded
• Recently Featured
• Most views
• A NEW forum gives you a great new meeting place to hang out and talk with your fellow musicians
• NEW flagging options let you help us keep copyrighted sounds OUT of the library

So that’s all well and good, but what about the MUSIC? That’s why we’re really all here, right? Right! So - deep breath - here’s what’s happening on that side of things:

• Sound Case: The sound case is a brand new feature. As you are browsing through the site, you can gather up sounds you want to try in your next song, and they will be temporarily saved in your Case, which you can access easily from the sequencer.
• Work in Peace: That’s right! You have been begging us for private drafts for ages, and we’re making that happen for you. Save your WIP posts until you have some more time to polish them up, and then save them. Shy people rejoice!
• Virtual Instruments: Create melodies directly in Splice using our Cheap Piano and Synth. More instruments are coming soon.
• Real-time Effects: (This is the really fun one!) Now add effects to your tracks - try a delay, or a flanger, or add some distortion. You will be amazed at how much mileage you get out of a single sample now.
• Choose Your License: While we have had nothing but luck using a standard Creative Commons Attribution (BY) license, we wanted to provide our users with more options for how their contributions to the site are used. User can now select from a range of CC licenses, as well as a Public Domain designation. Don’t worry about how they work together - Splice does the math on that one and lets you know which licenses are available for your finished product. You can read more about licenses here.

Whew! Is that enough for you for now? I think that should keep you busy for a while. We’re waiting to hear your feedback, so feel free to comment here, in the Forum or to email us. If you get lost, you can get some help, and -naturally- you can always come ask me personally.

Last but not least, don’t forget to enter the latest contest - and especially don’t forget to vote in it. You’re picking the winners from now on, so just like you did with all these features here, make your voice count and show us what you like. See you there!

In case you missed it, Splice is going to be down for a day or two while we upgrade to our new version. You can read about it in the blog or, if you’re the impatient sort, you can just skip to the youtube video about it.

We will see you soon!

If you’re looking for cowbell sounds to complete your masterpiece entry for the MORE COWBELL contest, don’t forget that you can always look in search to find cool cowbell sounds that other users have uploaded. If you’ve uploaded some of your own, be sure to tag them with COWBELL so that others can find them, too!

Ever wonder how guys like Rig make all those cool loops in their profiles? Well, wonder no more! Rig himself was kind enough to write up a tutorial on how to make your own loops - for free! Come by the blog to read about it, and be sure to pop over and say thanks to Rig!

Jack Black had some things to say about pirating copyrighted music recently. Come check it out in the blog.

Want to get in on this week’s contest? It’s not too late! Just Splice together a song using any three loops from your friendly neighbor thettpproject (be sure to stop in and tell him thanks while you’re there!) and tag it with remixTTP. Read more about it in our blog.

Do you read the blog? If not, you aren’t getting the whole story! Did you know that openthegrave, mamanfie and fartlord all just won awesome prizes from Altec Lansing? Did you see that video of Michael Jackson beatboxing to Oprah? Or that I’m collecting photos from users? Most importantly, did you know we do fun things there all the time? Come out and play!

You know, you don’t need any fancy equipment to share sounds with the community here. All you need is my fancy new tutorial on how to use the record feature. Come give it a read and then show me what you’ve got!