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!

Despair no more… Here’s a nice page that will help you all get the right flash version:

http://www.splicemusic.com/flashversion/

We know some people have been having trouble with the sequencer, others have had trouble with the embedded players. Most of these can be solved by checking this page and figuring out what version of flash you have (and updating if necessary).

- bram

We’ve all been there - you’re just getting into the groove of your new song and suddenly get called away, leaving you an unfinished number that you’re not sure what to do with. Did you know that in Splice you can save your work privately? This lets you go back later on to get it ready to share with others. There are a couple of ways you can do this:

Check this box to make your song PUBLIC.
If you don’t check the box, your song will remain as a private draft.

Or, you can set a default choice for your account. To find this box, go to
Home > Account Settings and scroll down to the bottom.

Ever wonder what you can do to help make it easy and fun to remix music with other people? The best thing that you can do is to help ensure that the right kinds of samples are going into the public pool. This ensures that when you go to make a song, you don’t have to sort through lots of awful sounds that don’t mix right.

So, what kinds of sounds belong in Splice?

• Creative Commons sounds: Basically, if you didn’t make the sound yourself, you have to have permission from the original creator to upload it to Splice. You can learn more about CC licenses here, but in the end, if you’re not sure, it’s best not to upload it.
• SOUNDS, not songs: It’s almost impossible to do anything useful with a completely mixed track, so we generally don’t allow them here, even if it’s YOUR band and YOUR song. The best thing you can do if you want to share an entire song you’ve made is to break it down into different parts: The vocal line, the drums, the guitar, etc. This makes it super easy for someone who wants to do something like change the beat to do so.
• SHORT sounds: You’ve probably noticed by now that the new sequencer doesn’t like long sounds. We don’t, either, really, because long sounds are harder to remix than short ones. If you’re uploading your vocal track, for example, try to split it into smaller parts, like different verses and a chorus. You’re going to get a lot more remix action from the community by doing it that way.

Cleaning up after yourself

Did you know that in the new Splice, you can delete your own sounds and songs? The only rule is that they can’t be in use by another song on the site. So, if you’ve ever accidentally uploaded multiple copies of sounds, or dozens of Work In Progress copies of a song, or maybe even something that’s copyrighted that you uploaded as a test before you understood what CAN be here, now is a great time to go through and clean up your old files. It’s really easy. Just open the sound or song’s info page by clicking the title, and then look for the delete button on the left side.

Community Watch

Another new feature is that you can now flag someone else’s sound or song for being copyrighted or inappropriate. This brings them to our attention so that an admin can delete them if they don’t belong here. Copyrighted sounds are things like mp3s ripped from CDs or p2p sites and are usually things you’ve heard on the radio, but they can also be things like movie quotes and video game music. Inappropriate sounds are things like hate speech or anything depicting graphic violence. We don’t actually delete things just because of bad language… we’re working on a parental advisory feature that will help people avoid those when they wish to. If you see a sound that you suspect shouldn’t be on Splice, please let us know by flagging it. Just click the title of the song or sound and then look on the left (under the speaker) for “Flag as Copyrighted” and “Flag as Abusive” options.

With a little help from everyone, we can keep the sounds on Splice great for remixing. Thanks!

Did you know that you can use Splice Studio to change not only the speed of your entire song, but also of individual clips? Here’s a little tutorial to help you master all the options you have now for speeds.

1. Changing your song’s BPM

The first thing you need to know is how to change the BPM of a song. BPM stands for Beats Per Minute; the higher this number is, the faster your song will go. If you click and drag up or down on the BPM in Splice Studio, your entire song will speed up or slow down accordingly.

2. Changing the speed of your sample.

The next great thing to know is that you can change the size of a single clip to make it faster or slower. This can be useful for making clips match speed. For instance, maybe you have some great drums that you want to speed up to match a vocal line you have. To change the size of your clip (and therefore, the speed) just click your sample so that you see the little white square at the end. Grab this square and drag left or right to change your sample’s speed.

3. Choose your sync.

When you change the speed of your clip, you have a couple of choices for how to sync it to the rest of your song. By default, the sound will sync via time stretching. What this means is that the clip will go faster or slower but the pitch will stay the same. For example - if this were a vocal sample, it would sound like you were simply speaking faster.

The other option is to sync by matching the pitch. Choosing this option will allow the pitch to change when you change the sample speed. For example - again, if this were a vocal sample, you could use this option to make someone sound like a chipmunk, or (if slowed) like a monster. This is just silly with voice but with something like a synthesizer, you can use this to get the melody in a different key, which can actually be useful. Syncing by pitch uses far less resources from your computer, also, which can help reduce skipping.

You may also choose not to sync the clip at all, and it will remain as it was uploaded.

To get to these different options, just double click the sample to pull up the sample editor. You will see the options on the left:

A little tip: This page is also where you can CUT a sample, too. That’s how people pull just one word out of a sampled sentence, for instance.

I hope that helps clear a few things up for you. Just think - now you can break your song down in the middle and go to half-time, and then speed back up again, all using the exact same samples. How fun is that?

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.

That’s all for today! Cheerio!

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.

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.

With a beatbox competition coming right up*, it seems to be a good time to go over the recording feature here at Splice. I’ve put together a very basic tutorial here to get you going. All you need is some kind of microphone!

1. From the music menu, select Music -> Record Sounds.

That’s it! After you hit save, you can go back and put in the name of your sound, or you can make more. If you have your own tricks you use to record, or if you have questions about how to make something work, come try asking over in the forum and someone will help you out. Have fun!

*OMG did I say that OUT LOUD? Shhhhhh.

Hello, my beautiful and lovely Splicers! Just me, Thaumata, popping in with my periodic friendly reminder about what is ok to upload to Splice, and what is NOT ok to upload to Splice. I like to think of the sounds I upload as Legos. (Remember Legos?) They should be little bricks of sound that other people can stick together in different combinations to create big giant creations that are cool and unique. A drum loop or a melody, for example, are great, and you can make these using all kinds of programs.

What is NOT ok to upload here are entire MP3s of your favorite band or rapper. For starters, even though they are fun to listen to, they’re not very easy to remix, and remixing is what brought us all together, right? Right! Most importantly, these songs are almost always copyrighted, which means that you don’t have that person’s permission to put their music here. These things will get deleted from the site, and that will leave a big hole in your song (and the songs that anyone else made with it.) Nobody wants that, so don’t do it, ok?

The best thing you can do if you want to see a certain artist here is to tell that artist! A little peer pressure can go a long way, you know! So, do your part to keep Splice rockin’, and know that your fellow Splicers will love you for it.