A word from the trenches… We’ve been working all day long on mp3 mixdowns and it looks like we’re getting somewhere! As a little preview here are two tracks I rendered as a test:
There are some details missing, but still… I think we can start rendering tracks at the end of this week. We know we’ve been stretching your patience, it’s been a long wait, but we’re slowly getting there!
We’re going to be using a new and exciting technology for the rendering called Amazon EC2, which is a little bit like suddenly owning 50 computers for half an hour and having them all do what you want them to do. 100% geek fun for us to play with!
Hey everyone, Bram here! I’m taking over this blog for today’s tech post
We’ve been getting a lot of comments about the note editing in the sequencer, and well, once we thought about it, shift-clicking for adding notes wasn’t the best idea in the world. So, I just got dirty with the flash code and changed the way it works. To add and edit notes it now works like this:
To add a note, just click. Drag to give it a length or just click and release to make one of those really short ones.
To select a note, click on it.
Select more than one note (selection rectangle) by holding down shift, click in an empty space and drag.
Extend a selection by holding down shift and click on a non-selected note. You can do the inverse as well: remove notes from the selection by shift-clicking a selected note
Change the length of a note (or notes!) by selecting the note, then click + drag the small rectangle at it’s tail
Remove notes by selecting them (as above) and hitting delete or backspace.
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!
Hey everyone! Thanks for waiting so patiently while we get the new site up. We are currently converting all of your sounds and songs into the new Splice format. It takes a little while to change over so much information, so sit tight and we will be back as soon as possible.
I know some of you are hanging around without much to do while we have some downtime here, so I have a little present for you: A short tutorial for the new sequencer. This way, you can study hard and be ready to go when we are.
Don’t worry - the quiz results will be graded on a curve.
I wanted to tell you guys about some major changes ahead for Splice. We launched the original site near the end of the summer last year, and since that time, we’ve gotten a LOT of amazing musicians (and their fans) to join us in creating music together. You guys have been great users - not only because you participate and support each other so well, but because you are constantly giving us great feedback about what you like about the site and what you’re still waiting to see.
We’ve been listening.
I am really proud to announce that we will soon launch a brand new version of Splice. You had so many great suggestions for us that we started from the ground up and built you a whole new site that’s faster, cleaner and better than ever. There are so many new features that it would be impractical to list them all here, but here are some big ones that I think you will enjoy reading about:
* Private Drafts: SO many people have requested a more private space where they can work on their songs in sessions BEFORE sharing them with the world. Now, you can do just that.
* Delete your own sounds and songs: If a sound or song has not been used by another user, you will be able to delete it out of your page without a moderator’s help.
* Easier Friending: Manage your friends all from one page
* Easier Searching: All new explore pages make it easier than ever to find the best music on Splice
* Upgraded Forums: These will speak for themselves, but you guys will love them - they are embedded right into the site, much easier to use than the old one, and allow images and links.
* Flag unauthorized material: We know that users are growing frustrated with the ever increasing amount of copyrighted material on Splice. We know it makes it hard to find REAL samples to play with and make music out of. You will be able to flag suspected copyright violations to bring them to the attention of staff moderators, who can then more easily remove them from the site. With a little help from you guys, we can keep that stuff off our pages and continue teaching people about Creative Commons and why it works best for Splice.
And of course, the biggest upgrade of them all: Our new sequencer. We will be writing about the sequencer a LOT in the next few weeks - it’s really the most advanced thing of its kind out there, and deserves several posts of its own. Until now, all you could do in the Splice sequencer was line up samples and play them in various sequences. Imagine, though, what happens if you can take one single sample and manipulate it in real time to sound completely different? The biggest change in the new sequencer is exactly this: realtime effects. Turn that sample on and start twisting knobs. Or better yet - what if you could create your sample entirely in Splice, instead of making it somewhere else and then importing it? If you had a little place to create melodies, which could then have effects, what could you make? I think you are going to find you’re getting a lot more mileage out of your sounds soon, and that IS something to be excited for.
Check out this little sneak peek of what’s coming up:
Many thanks to our user Airtone for giving us such a great song to promote!
You can expect the new site to be up and in action sometime this week, so keep your eyes peeled and your samples at the ready. Thanks to everyone who has been part of this process. Your feedback, input and (most importantly) your MUSIC have been invaluable in helping create a better place for musicians everywhere.
If you have questions or comments about the new Splice, you can email them to human@splicemusic.com.
If any of you love LiveJournal and Splice as much as I do, you’re going to love this:
You can now embed your Splice songs right into your Livejournal.
It hasn’t been possible until now to embed content unless it was from a whitelisted site, such as YouTube. However, thanks to their new media embeds, you can bring your favorite Splice songs to your stories and share them with your friends. It’s really easy.
First, open the song you want and look for this section, located on the bottom right of your page, and copy the code in the Player Tag box:
Then, start a new entry in your LJ. Click the new “Embed Media” button at the top of the entry box, and then post your Splice code in the window that appears:
That’s it! This is great.. there are so many excellent music communities there that I’m sure you’ll find some new ears for your songs. Also, did you know that you can add the Splice feed to your friend’s list? It’s a great way to keep up with our contests, stories and news! Rock on, LJers.
Rig sent me an interesting video from Dick Dale, The King of Surf Guitar.
He has an excellent point about remaining independant. Any musician will tell you that when you write a song, it comes from your heart and your guts - an audible reflection of your own experiences and emotions. It’s astounding how many artists can’t even play their own music without getting the OK from someone in a suit first. I had the exquisite pleasure of sitting front row center at a Joni Mitchell concert a few years back, and at one point, she started to tell us the story of how she didn’t even own the rights for Blue. I remember watching her literally choking back tears as she recounted tales of music just for the sake of contractual obligation. Other artists have made similiar statements; I remember John Mellencamp’s Rough Harvest album, which completed his contract with Mercury, had a big stamp on the disc itself which I believe said “fulfilled.” And who can forget how Prince used to write Slave on his face at all his shows? It was his way of pointing out that because he doesn’t own any of the rights to his own music, he was really more like the slave machine in a studio, which creates copies of songs from the master recordings.
The battle between artists and their labels has been very interesting to watch as the internet gives musicians more and more venues to promote themselves without going through a label. I don’t know a band that doesn’t have a MySpace page these days, and with good reason: MySpace has more users than Mexico has people. It’s like having an entirely new country to market to - the 11th biggest on earth if it actually existed.
We think Creative Commons licensing takes this one step further, by easily allowing artists to control what rights they keep and what rights they share, for all of their works. I think that in music it’s especially important to share - think how many people have covered just the songs of Robert Johnson, or how many recordings there are of Joni’s “River”. Think of all the samples that make it into your favorite hip hop songs. There are entire genres of music spawned out of single samples. Creative Commons licenses make it possible for artists to allow this kind of positive re-use of their music, without giving up the originals.
For a long time now, Splice has supported the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows people to re-use your music however they would like, as long as they are crediting you on their final product. The feedback we’ve been getting from artists and Splicers alike is that while you love this feature, you would sometimes like to be slightly more restrictive in how people can use your music, particularly in it’s allowed uses commercially. We want everyone - even professional musicians - to feel comfortable sharing their work in this venue. Splice is a great place to promote your band and let your fans get involved in your music. We’re aiming to keep it that way. We took this under careful consideration while planning the new version of Splice. Coming soon to a computer near you will be more choices in how to share your music with others, so that you can do it with confidence.
Judging by the happy squealing mail in my inbox, SOME of you have noticed our latest improvement to the sequencer. In case you were not one of those people, I’m here to let you know we’ve added four more tracks! So go ahead - take that old song out, dust it off, and add that ONE LAST SOUND that you knew it needed to make it perfect. We know you’ve been waiting.
We’re launching our embeddable MP3 player today, which will make it easier than ever to share the Splice insanity with your friends. More on this later today, but for now, give this one a whirl and let us know how it works for you!
What’s the sense of making all this music if you can’t take it with you, you ask? Well, we agree! We’d like to introduce MP3 downloading of anything you hear on the site. We’ll be adding ID3 tags to them by the end of the week, but if you’d like to try it out now, we would love your feedback!
