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! 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!

Fartlord has been busy while the site is down. He made a video to help promote Splice. I smiled when I watched it and you probably will, too. Thanks, Fartlord!!

Hello everyone!

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.

See you soon!!

Thaumata

Someone pointed me to a song made by Wigglez and Homeslice recently and I wanted to share it. The loss of a good friend is one of the hardest things we can ever go through, but it’s good to write some music about it, and that’s just what these guys did.

It’s great work and a lovely tribute. Like I told Wigglez, I’m sure their friend would be happy to hear it.

…Splice! Dot has created a very catchy little tune, with the help of Fartlord, Rig, and Skyhawk.

Give it a listen!

It’s not finished yet, but that’s where YOU come in!

You have to give credit where credit is due, and I am cracking up and happily pointing all eyes to fartlord’s new song:

You know you’re GOOD when you can take random samples and not only line them up into a great song, but also make them RHYME. Hilarious.

I got some mail today about SheStory.tv. SheStory is “a new online magazine inspired to cover stories of women in history and women working today who are the embodiment of spirit and passion”. We think that’s cool. What’s especially cool is that they’ve used some sounds that I uploaded and made as the theme for their video casts. Their recent story about jewelry maker and entrepreneur Kate Pokorny uses samples from my song The Missing Beat. How fun!

I love seeing Splice music used in video. Rig has done really well with this, having had his samples used in several stories at Ibrido.tv, some cool photo retouching videos by fellow Splicer bressane, and there’s even a website using The Happiest Song Ever as it’s theme music on every single page. (I can’t find the link for that one now… perhaps Rig can enlighten me when he comes online today.)

I was reading gurdonark’s blog this morning and learned that his song Mourning Pluto was featured in matzumotto’s film called Time Sees and Hears, which was recently featured in the Kosmorama Film Stunt competition. (You can watch it here on YouTube.) The film also features music from kasda.

I love seeing so much creativity happening involving Splice. If you’re using music from Splice in your project, I want to hear about it! It’s my favorite thing to blog about and I’m always happy to plug your site or project if you’re working with our users to make it sound good.