Recently in Music Category

If you've followed this blog for a bit, you know that I write music and (finally) released an album last year.

One of the places my music is available for download is bandcamp.com, who offers up a nice little download/portal service where you can make your music available. You can get my music there for free at 128kbit, or if you want to support my music, or get a higher-quality format (all the way up to FLAC and Apple Lossless!), you can name your own price.

I was looking at my download/listen statistics, and I saw something strange. They do 60-day, 30-day, week, or daily graphs, along with defender graphs.

Defender?!

So I clicked on it, and I saw the coolest most useless statistics graph ever. You can play defender in your graphs. The little UFO flies around, there's people on the ground, and you can move your ship back and forth and shoot them. Awesome!

60-day graph:

Defender graph:

How cool is that!!?

In addition to digital downloads through Amazon MP3, iTunes, and a host of other services, my first album, Finally, is now available on CD.

Order now!

Finally is now available for immediate download!

You can get it at iTunes, Amazon.com, eMusic, and a host of other digital download sites.

Check it out, and let me know what you think!

I've set up a separate site for my music, since it's a little off-topic for this blog. Major announcements will still be posted here as well, but I intend to post other news, information about releases, previews, and other things relating to my music to the other site instead.

Feel free to check out music.raccoonfink.com for all the latest happenings.

Thanks!

So if you've followed my blog for a long time, you might have noticed me mention that I have, on occasion, written music.

I've finally found some time to really work on getting everything set up again so I can write more music (and, in fact, I've got a guitar on the way as a birthday present from my wife!). This past month, I've worked really hard to do something I've meant to do for a long time: release an album.

Now, my music has always been freely available, it's a part of the demoscene culture, not to mention my open-source roots, working with OpenNMS, Fink, and tons of other stuff. One thing that's very hard to do, however, when writing tracked music, is get that "finished" sound.

I've spent the last month going through my catalog, dumping everything to Garage Band and ProTools, and re-mixing, remastering, and all-around cleaning up my tracks.

Without further ado, I announce my first single, Pointillize, available immediately on Amazon MP3 download, and soon on iTunes, Rhapsody, and other music download services.

On May 20th, my album, Finally, will be available as well.

Full versions of the songs from Pointillize and Finally are available for preview on last.fm. Just click on the album and hit play.

It's been a long time coming. If you like it, tell your friends; if you don't, um... well, don't tell anyone! Special thanks to Cynthia for putting up with me obsessively listening to these songs, over and over again, and spending way too much time mixing and remixing them. ;)

So this is a bit off-topic, but I am addicted to Rock Band. One of the things that makes it so great is the huge amount of downloadable content available to expand the game with new songs, and stuff comes out weekly.

However, it's hard to tell what a song is, just from the title sometimes. Turns out you may know it but not realize you know it. I wanted to be able to hear the song before deciding whether it was worth downloading. I suspected that there were plenty of other folks who had a similar itch which needed scratching. So, I did something about it. =)

I've been looking for an excuse to do something "real" with rails, and this was it. In just a week of spare time, I've thrown together this:

     rockband.racoonfink.com

It's not yet very pretty, but it does the job, you can preview the original artist tracks for each of the songs available through XBox Marketplace and the PS3 Online Store.

If you notice any issues, please let me know.

This is outside of the usual scope of my posts, but too cool not to talk about.

Trent Reznor released a garageband version of The Hand That Feeds (a single from his new CD) for remixing purposes.

Whoohoo!

(Bump) He's now released Only in a number of formats, including GarageBand and ACID.

I've got a new CheeseTracker binary built for Mac OS X, using Qt/Mac 3.3. It's looking pretty good, although sometimes it freezes on logout, seems to be some kind of thread-locking issues in CoreAudio.

If you want to give it a try, you can grab it here. I've registered with VersionTracker so I can put it up there as well. Whoo!

There is now a stable release of JACK for Mac OS X. JACK is an audio system and low-latency audio server that was initially developed on Linux, and aims to be portable, well, everywhere.

Previously, there was an OSX port of JACK using PortAudio, but it was incomplete and you lose a lot of the low-latency advantages of JACK by going through an intermediary.

This is excellent news! A lot of very nice Linux audio apps used only JACK because it's basically the only pro-quality audio implementation there.

Finally wrote a new song.... Actually, finished it up sometime last week, but my microphone was horrible, so I just finished re-recording the lyrics and re-mixing it, it sounds *much* better.

I don't do lyrics much, so this is pretty new to me, let me know what you think.