It’s a classic …

[link to youtube | please watch in 720p]

This Thursday, August 18th at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2, Tim Exile will play the first official gig on his new Online Stage at www.timexile.tv … and I’m super excited about it, because Roel and me build that site for him (with the design help of Sheikh). You have to tune in! You can watch an explanation video on the site now already.

So on Thursday, Tim will plug in his laptop, midi controllers and webcam in his studio in London. When the gig starts, the website will reveal a live video stream and a chat. Tim will make music and people can watch, listen and write fancy comments. So far a normal online performance.

The thing that is really interesting is the “REC” button under the stream. All viewers can record audio in the browser and send this audio via SoundCloud to Tim. Within seconds, the new sound will turn up on Tim’s Launchpad. Tim can instantly use it, manipulated, jam with it. Also, all sent sounds can be seen and listened to on the website via the play buttons under the stream. You can literally see the new sounds dropping in. And Tim will use the sound, that you just recorded on your little island in India or wherever, instantly in his live gig. Wicked!

So how did we build the site? The stream is done via Livestream and we also use the chat widget from there. The recording functionality is largely based on recorder.js. Playback of audio is done via Soundmanager 2. Everything is glued together with jQuery. The DOM and styles are plain HTML/CSS.

To get the newest tracks from SoundCloud we use a reverse proxy. This is needed since we do the requests to Tim’s activities with a never-expiring OAuth2 token and we can’t reveal that token in the frontend. The first version we wrote used Sinatra and Thin, but this performed very badly with concurrent users. When a request hit the reverse proxy and was relayed to the SoundCloud API, the server was blocked until this request returned. Such a request can take seconds. To solve this, we switched to Goliath, which doesn’t block on I/O, but instead suspends the request using Ruby’s Fibres, until the HTTP call returns.

The whole site is deployed to Heroku on the cedar stack.

To get the samples from SoundCloud to Tim, we use a simple ruby script that polls the activities of his SoundCloud account. Whenever a new sound comes in, it is played with mplayer to a sound card. The sound card’s output is connected with a cable (!) to the input of a Reaktor patch that records incoming sounds and maps maps then to the Launchpad.

Yes, this approach appears strange but it works surprisingly well. The two problems it has tho are 1) it needs the duration of the sound to load it in Reaktor and 2) we loose the mapping between the track on SoundCloud and the audio in Reaktor. This mapping could enable awesome stuff like a back channel for displaying which samples Tim currently uses. But for now we will leave this to future iterations.

I’m super excited about the launch. I hope you will be there to see it.

T̩l̩popmusik РBreathe

When I played a gig a month ago, I was overly excited, maybe even a bit frantic. Just before I went on stage, the sound engineer of the night noticed and told me: “Don’t forget to breathe. That’s the most important thing.” So I did and the gig was awesome. Since then, I like to stop … and breathe. I give myself 10 seconds to focus. It helps in tense situations. And it feels good to do this with full awareness. It creates a feeling for the current situation and channels concentration.

Another thing I like to do is giving names to things. Especially days, weeks and months should have a motto. With this I try to figure out, what is important and remind me of it. This month, I breathe. After traveling and stress I want to regenerate, give myself space and time. Yoga, good food and parties. Concentrated work and laid-back leisure. And ever day I listen to “Breathe” by Télépopmusik. To remind me what month this is.

Liveset 17.12.2010 @ UJZ Berlin by DiskoDNA

My live set-up: a laptop running Ableton Live, an APC-40 with custom midi mapping and a microphone.

At home my main instruments were a Novation Bassstation and a Casio Casiotone MT-400V. And a lot of samples …

Let’s see where this path will lead me. I am excited!

Now, two years later I work full-time at SoundCloud and don’t play in a band anymore. But today I discovered, by accident, that Mugison uploaded a lot of his music to SoundCloud. Many songs are free for download. And he even has a premium account. I hope he takes the discount code I’ve sent him so that he keeps using SoundCloud. This is the song that he played when my guitar got smashed:

I like that things constantly change and come and go. But it is also comfortable to know that things come back and that this life is going in big circles. I am super excited about what the future has to unveil …

There is money to be made with music apart from signing a major record deal, like:

• Playing Gigs
• Selling Merch
• Get Donations (e.g. with Flattr)
• License your music to third parties
• Do clients work
• Sell your music to a small audience but get big cut of revenue

Music can not be sold as physical product anymore. It is changing to being an experience. The experience of being a fan of an artist and being constantly engaged with them. The goal for artists is to build a loyal fan base that stays with the artist for a long time and not only listens to music but is accesible in other ways like mail or sovial networks as well.

Music streaming (like Spotify) does not generate substantial revenue for artists, but is great for building an audience and eventually making fans.

The people most complaining about the state are the ones that do not add value. The music industry has a massive infrastructure that is not needed anymore but still wants to be supported. One of the biggest problem with the decline of big labels is financing. Small artists have to find other ways like finding investors outside the music circus or bootstrap without big money.

“Everyone gets 15 minutes of fame” could be replaced with “Everyone gets 15 people one is famous to”.

Interesting people on a2n_camp were: Zoë Keating, Steve Lawson, Peter Sunde, David Strauss, Audiolith Label

]]> http://www.freenerd.de/archives/2010/1326/feed/ 0 http://www.freenerd.de/archives/2010/1238/ http://www.freenerd.de/archives/2010/1238/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:16:15 +0000 Johan http://www.freenerd.de/?p=1238

Because I got lucky some days ago buying the awesome Venetian Snares – Rossz Csillag Alatt Született on 2 x 12”

Have been listening to this over and over again …

A really great sensitive moment when Moby talks about being a nerd … *sigh*

[via Wire To The Ear]