LostAudio

Music 2.0: List of social music sites

Lost — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:48:22 +0000

Surely there are many missing. So please help build a complete and up to date list of social music sites, if you can. Drop a comment.

And some online music 2.1 suites.

Mobile Beat Maker, Produce Create Experiment On The Fly

Lost — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:47:10 +0000

This product has been getting some buzz, and it is actually understandable why. The Beat Maker, by intua shows great promise.

We’d love to hear from people who have tested this yet. But the idea of using this a mobile, on the road, screener for audio, ie our production music references, makes it seem like it doesn’t matter if the quality isn’t pristine. It’s just a great idea.

It is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but all the major software players should soon be sounding their pervasive guns.

Check out this video-demo:

9 fantastic music production sites

Lost — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 13:33:49 +0000

Ever search the net for music to use in a production environment? Be it podsafe, CC attribution, public domain, royalty free or other free and semi-free stuff.

Have trouble finding anything? No problem. LostAudio just found at least 20GB of sound/music that is legal to use. The below is an incomplete but useful list of the best accessible audio download sites, that are actually updated and worth a visit.

Freesound
A collaborative sound collection featuring thousands upon thousands of user generated audio for soundscaping. It’s a great site for media makers, and good for post-production in relation to music production.
ccMixter
All about the music, the mashup and the community. ccMixter features some really large and great high quality sample packs through the contests, as well as user uploads. Loads of finished (or revisited) music as well.
SoundSnap
Another of those collaborative audio sites. Focus is broad, including sound fx, loops, shots. Soundsnap has a nice user interface to search the thousands of items. Some good, some great, some sucks - but it is all licensed in a very PD-like way.
iBeat
One of the new guys on the block, featuring moderated original music production samples. Besides shots and loops iBeat carries small ‘complete’ instrumentals usable as karaoke like ready-to-perform-on material.
SampleSwap
The archive at SampleSwap boasts 5GB+ of production audio. It’s completely add free and features a nice multi download feature. Browse the site, fill your bag and get everything zipped via a mail link. High quality and progressive licensing.
Looperman
A community of audio enthusiasts uploading and sharing all about music. The quality is good, considering that it is based on collaborative sharing.
Free-Loops
We recently published a review of Free-Loops (remember the dash!) and things have quickly changed for the better in regards to user experience. This is a no-hassle database of loops and beats, which we recommend just as much for listening too it’s users as well as serving up nice audio with progressive licensing.
OLPC
Loops, grooves, licks, sound-effects, city and country soundscapes can be found in the One Laptop Per Child audio project. You’ll find over 8GB of uncompressed samples. This really is massive and quite confusing - but it’s there, highs and lows included. The easiest way to get these would be via p2p… just follow the link to find out more.
BBC Studio Samples
The BBC has over a thousands archived samples by instrument type. Quite a few of the national broadcasters are opening up with stuff like this, so there might be another quality service just a click away in your country.

If your favourite site isn’t included post it in the comments, and we’ll add it when we revisit this subject. This was just a one shot, at some of the quality material that is available at the very least for non-commercial projects.

Band Leaks Track to BitTorrent, Blames Pirates

Lost — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:02:13 +0000

via Torrentfreak: “When we reported about the leak of a BuckCherry track last week, and specifically the band’s response to it, we hinted that this could be a covert form of self-promotion. Indeed, after a few days of research we found out that the track wasn’t leaked by pirates, but by Josh Klemme, the manager of the band.”

The manager uploaded the track from his normal IP, and following replied to a mail, documenting it (more or less) was easy.

Well, the shameless selfpromotion certainly has succeed, to a degree. Lost Audio has absolutely no idea who or what they are.

Note to self: don’t mess around with Bittorrent guys and the likes, unless you have an actual idea of how to cloak yourself…

Hypebot Infiltrates Columbia Records Site With Anti-Label Ad

Lost — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:41:33 +0000

Blogger Bruce Houghton of Hypebot.com spends $3.37 to place anti-label ad on front page of Columbia Records flagship site.

read more | digg story

Goth and Emo style music will explode in Russia

Lost — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:41:31 +0000

If this is true, then goth and emo genres will predictably become increasingly popular in Russia. Just think about the western conservative approach to rock last century…

What a ban would do for these genres would of course be hard to say. But if we insist on not learning from history lessons, then it would probably streamline young Russians, and cut social teen problems to only a margin of what we are seeing now-a-days.

You can read more at Kerrang, where the comments are particularly entertaining. Especially discussions on how to spell dumbass, and what kind of democrazy Russia is are interesting.

Lost Audio on game

Lost — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:03:41 +0000

Online for just over a year.

While there hasn’t been that much activity, the basic premise for being here is still valid. Categorizing all the CC, copyleft and PD music production out there.

Until now, this has been a one man thing… but recently there has been change coming. Hopefully we can from August 1st pimp your day with daily updates, building one of the best free music archives. If you want to join, now is a good time.

Besides filtering and collection, we’ve decided to take constructive criticism to a whole new level… In a way we’ll be doing usability analysis on pages we love.

A lot of fun - and hot air… and it’s not even April 1st.

Bo Diddley dead

Lost — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:49:34 +0000

Legendary singer and guitarist dies. Sad… go read more by following the links.

Lost Audio commentary: Only fifty years until we can start publishing some of his shit. Copyright countdown started.

read more | digg story

Creative Commons spinning off ccMIxter: RFP

Lost — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:57:09 +0000

Creative Commons has posted a Request For Proposals to take over its music remix community, ccMixter, home to a thriving community of remixers and host of some high profile remix contests over the last few years.

One of the bastions of open music - perhaps even the place where ‘open music’ will eventually be said to have been coined (perhaps not) - is up for grabs, and what an awesome place it is.

Cheers for Creative Commons bringing nuances to the music table, and for their ccHost software - let’s just hope the CC board are careful handing this site over to some crazy commercial scheme.

Although the RFP states ‘nothing will (should) change’, in an evil conservative commercial kind of way … there is always a fear from a user and artist perspective that something could go wrong. Lost Audio can only comment. Fuck that. The artists and the community would just leave and pop up another place.

This is one noteworthy community. It’s not just friends picking each others belly button… this is real interaction based on real interest; music communicating with music. One virtual meta discussion that doesn’t bore you to death.

Free Loops Ad Hoc

Lost — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:40:22 +0000

If you are on the look out for free audio stuff, don’t know exactly what you are looking for, or simply like perusing non-preview audio in wav and aif format, then perhaps free-loops is a good destination.

There are bundles of different audio available, some useful some not that much.

The biggest problem with free-loops, is the click hassle. If you spot an entry you might want, you click on it, come to the sounds main page where you have the option of downloading it.

When downloaded, the file is no longer tagged with the appropriate words - it just becomes free-loops-[numbers].format.

With 4k+ sounds available, this really does become buggy … you have to rename each file before loosing sight of it on your harddrive.

Non the less. It’s one of thoose sites that actually provide content - and in a decent format.

You can buy a complete collection (20$ donation) on the site - perhaps these files keep the file name from the site. Who knows.

In the LostAudio spirit, we’d like to recommend this site getting some stream/preview option, and some kind of file handling system, that would allow the description to stay within the downloaded file.

Lost Audio downloaded some samples at random, and made the following useless teaser

Update

Free-Loops.com (admin Mike Koenig) popped by LostAudio, and noticed the review. Very fast some changes were made, which makes Free-Loops a very very nice audio site. You now keep the online description in the file name after download, and there is a very nice flash preview player.

Nicely done!