Latest Music industry news

Togu Audio Line updates all AU plug-ins (Final Cut fix)

21st November 2008: Togu Audio Line has released updates for the AU versions of its plug-ins, fixing a bug that caused crashes in Final Cut Pro . There is an update available for these Audio Units: TAL-Bassline TAL-Ch...

MellowMuse releases AU versions of EQ1A, CP1A, IR1A and Mellowhead and RTAS of Auto Time Adjuster

21st November 2008: MellowMuse has announced that Auto Time Adjuster is now available as a native RTAS plug-in for Windows and Mac OS X and the VST version has been discontinued. Also, Audio Unit versions of the EQ1A E...

BCM presents: 20-11-08: This is how it goes... (MP3)

The 20-11-08 mix on BCM is an other answer to all that... Goes straight out from Lupo (me). In germany we say "lustigkeit hat vorrang, und honey sorgt für den vorgang!" Check some of the newest * funky * schizzle * dizzle * technoidzzzle * fizzle * schalala... This is what Luetze hears when he gets up with the crack of dawn ;) Enjoy... and await a lot to come... YEAH! - Source Site:http://www.bassculturemusic.com

Round-Up: Samples, Stealing, Fakery, the Law, and Lots of Sample Shenanigans

Who’s sampling what? When is sampling stealing? Who’s stolen sampled samples, and was the sampling stolen stealing? Is anyone actually playing live? Does anyone know what the law is? Does anyone care?

Yes, it’s been a lively November so far for massive, complicated legal battles, PR battles, who-said-who-sampled-what battles, and general sampling messiness. Here’s a quick round-up for those of you who haven’t been able to keep up (understandably).

And we’re going to play a game. I’m going to start talking, and you can see at what point your head starts to spin and you need to go lie down.

Ready?

Here’s the executive summary:

• Justice steal samples and talk about it, because you can’t recognize them.
• US courts said long ago “nowhere to run, nowhere to hide,” to the dismay of even the RIAA.
• German courts, disagreeing with the US and with other German courts, say it don’t mean a thing if you can’t hum along.
• FL Studio turns “Faxing Berlin” Deadmau5 demo content into “Berlin” mostly-the-same demo content and a bunch of people start screaming obscenities at each other and most of us lose interest.
• Justice can’t keep their USB cables from falling out, may have to pirate samples of themselves.
• The Killers plagiarize an entire stage.
• My head hurts already.

1. Justice admits they steal samples. French duo Justice admitted to borrowing the likes of 50 Cent without clearance because “they are such short samples no one can recognize them.” (See Beatportal story.)

Of course, the fact that they’re non-recognizable is kind of defeated if you talk about them. In a sane legal world, a completely unrecognizable sample warped until it might as well have come from a field recording of tree frogs wouldn’t be litigation bait. But this is the United States. As I covered way back in early 2005 for Keyboard Magazine, the standing circuit court decision in the US says all sampling is illegal, whether it’s recognizable or not. The elimination of what lawyers call a de minimis (plain English: common sense minimum) standard actually got the RIAA and the plaintiffs concerned about over-litigation. (Yes, you read that right: the ruling was so stupid, the plaintiffs appealed a case they themselves had just won.)

Don’t like it? Move to Germany. No, really.

2. German court says sampling is fine, unless you can whistle the sample. Kraftwerk suffered a legal defeat that made it (via Associated Press) all the way to the front page of CNN.com. It seems a court in Hamburg said what US courts did – no matter how small, sampling is illegal. The highest civil court in Germany says the opposite, but then goes on to be explicit about what constitutes illegal sampling (if un-cleared):

The civil court ruling, however, forbids sampling of a song melody and insists that the sample must be part of a completely new musical work bearing no resemblance to the original.

What’s interesting about this: the length and nature of the sample of Kraftwerk (two seconds of rhythm from “Metal on Metal,” as used un-cleared by Sabrina Setlur) is the same as the sample in the US civil case (two seconds of Funkadelic’s “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” as used in N.W.A.’s “100 Miles and Runnin.”) That’s neither here nor there, except to say if you sample anything in a recognized track, some court somewhere will probably make your life miserable, especially with no international framework to smooth out the difficulties. (Case in point: the US samples had been cleared by N.W.A. – the movie studio No Limit simply forgot to clear the samples in the song for sync rights when they used it in a film.)

3. FL Studio user uses demo loops, meets irate Deadmau5. Thanks to reader Scott Metzger for tipping us off on this one. FL Studio 8 ships, as do many programs, with included loops. It also comes with demo content. An FL 8 user released a track that uses some of that demo content almost wholesale. Now, some people are defending the FL user, because Image-Line says its loops are released royalty free. (They claim they never said that explicitly about demo content, causing confusion.) Image-Line clearly should have been more explicit about this, or this might not have happened. But royalty-free sampling is one thing – plagiarism is another. The user in this case released a track that basically was Deadmau5’s Faxing Berlin. He even copied the name, calling his track “Berlin.” (Smooth.) It’s almost not different enough to count as a remix. I could make some general criticism, except that he’s already been roundly flamed in especially colorful terms by the FL forum users.

I’m still looking for ways of getting a laugh from fellow nerdsters by sneaking some of the roundly-despised Ableton demo track into a set. But, in case your eyes haven’t already glazed over, here are more of the gruesome details of this story.

FL Studio user faces legal action for using built-in samples [MusicRadar, who have more patience for digging through this story than I do]

Don’t use FL Studio loops! [FutureMusic, inadvertently giving users some good advice]

Lesson: software developers, label your loops. (And in all seriousness, it does sound as though Image-Line has lost some of their credibility on this one.) Users, don’t … do this, okay? Just don’t. We can hear you. We can hear those stupid Garage Band loops, too, for crying out loud. Or, alternative names, how about “IMing Hamburg” or “Skyping Munich” or “Snail Mailing Frankfurt”? Maybe change your name to L1v3M0us3 or Deadr4t. I’ll stop. We’re not even done with this damned round-up yet. There’s more.

4. Justice, the Milli Vanilli of Our Time? In case Justice weren’t in trouble enough already telling MTV they’re sampling illegally, they’ve got MPDgate to contend with. Beatportal showed an image of them grooving away with an MPD24 that was, rather inconveniently unplugged. (Their answer: the cable fell out.) Don’t worry, though, Justice fans — Resident Advisor springs into action with a series of photos that would do Oliver Stone’s JFK proud. (There it is – a loose USB cable on the grassy knoll! The screen gone blank, then on again in the Book Depository! Again! Change the angle!)

I’m inclined to give Justice the benefit of the doubt, especially because I care less about this one gig than I do about this outrageous comment by Beatportal’s Terry Church:

Anyone with a shred of understanding of how the music is made knows that it’s near impossible to play electronic music 100% live, unless you have the talent of somebody like The Bays.

Of course, if it were 100% live, it wouldn’t be electronic music. (You could get really literal and claim that you have to be Bobby McFerrin and not even use instruments.) But taking this as I think Terry meant it, uh, Terry, the entire readership of this site has something they’d like to discuss with you.

He also didn’t say “play electronic music 100% live well,” which means for each time one of us has screwed up catastrophically onstage by getting overcomplicated with live sets, we’ve done our bit to demonstrate that we’re not faking it. Unless the USB jack fell out, in which case, no photos!

But yes, I think we can safely say Justice are performing clips they stole from 50 Cent completely live.

5. Killers Plagiarize / Sample an Entire Stage. Okay, forget about two-second samples or even FL Studio demo songs. How about if you showed up in motorcycle helmets and a giant pyramid that looked exactly like Daft Punk? Erm, not in a tongue-in-cheek, parody sort of way.

Etienne de Crecy did a live stage show in France with giant projections mapped to a big cube, as produced by the talented Exyzt crew in Paris. Then, US band The Killers does … exactly the same t

hing?

Exyzt installation Ripped off by “the Killers”

In fact, the two were so much alike that over at Create Digital Motion, we just assumed it was another Exyzt install job. (Apparently, that isn’t so; even if it were, uh, novelty wears off a bit when you do exactly the same thing with another artist.)

Originality. Try it. It’s amazing.

You know what, by contrast have at those two seconds of rhythm that no one can recognize anyway.

How’d you score?

How far did you get before you had to lie down, or strum an original tune on a ukulele? (Wait, damnit, that sounds just like “All the Things You Are.”) Let us know in comments.

HTC Touch Pro as a Portable Beat Sequencer, with Windows Mobile, AudioBox

It’s easy enough to dismiss mobile music devices as toys, and I’d add, there’s really nothing wrong with toys. But the test – a personal one – is whether or not you can develop your musical ideas with them. Some of the deepest, most consistently satisfying tools for mobile devices are the ones that shrink down real production capabilities to a handheld size. Look closely at these apps, and you’ll see software that could easily have passed for “advanced” sequencers on computers fifteen years ago. (Indeed, I think arguably we’ve lost some usability with the complexity we’ve added since.)

While the iPhone phenomenon continues to grow, don’t write off Windows Mobile for music. Tony Stone sends a video showing off the piano roll-style sequencer in an app called AudioBox. It goes beautifully with the stylus – precision input that isn’t possible with your finger on the iPhone.

AudioBox Micro Composer is available at various online software stores. Here’s where Tony says he picked it up:

AudioBox Micro Composer @ ClickApps

AudioBox Product Page @ 4pockets [developer]

AudioBox has come up many times on Palm Sounds; see the interview with the developer

US$44.95, but for that you get the sequencer, an analog synth, a string pad synth, a samples, a drum machine, 16 channels of mixing, effects, editing capabilities, and “device automation” (not sure what that last one means). Part of the reason this is all possible is that developing for Windows Mobile is very much like developing for Windows – and unlike Google’s Android, you can write the apps in C/C++. If you’re not a developer, what that means it that you’re basically getting desktop-like apps.

Tony is worth checking out, too. He’s a Christian hip-hop artist, beatmaker and producer, and youth minister, and he’s promised some very interesting DIY projects coming soon. See his blog and MySpace page. We actually have a whole lot of readers making music in communities of faith, demonstrating that there’s a lot more diversity of musicians working with technology. It’s not at all limited to the view people have of the club or DJ scenes.

Side note: Microsoft should never have gotten rid of the Pocket PC moniker.

Kid Deep - The Warm Up (MP3)

A warm up style mix which is the beginning of what will develop into a long 3 hr mix. Deep house vibes for a those deep late nights. 1. Dshe - unknown 2. Newworldaquarium - Avon Sparkle 3. Markus Enochson & Subliminal Kid - These Won't Put Me Down 4. A.D. & Mr. Barth - Above The Skyline 5. Omar S - Day 6. Herb LF - Miles 7. Still Going - Still Going Theme 8. Ferdy & Edwin Mulder - A Love In Paris (Seva K Mix) 9. Trus Me - Working Nights 10. Ark & Mikael Weill - Elephant Hunting 11. Peace Division - Voodoo (Its In The Wall) - Source Site:http://www.purehousemusic.net



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