Want 5 (Free) New Songs Every Week?

Maybe you’ve run into the concept before, or may not. Jonathan Coulton was the most famous with his “Thing a Week” (now ended), but many people appear to have taken on the challenge: write one brand new song each and every week and give it away to whoever is interested. Why would anyone take up this challenge? The usual reasons seem to be fairly consistent:

1. To get wider exposure for your music.
2. To hone your songwriting skills.
3. To be able to sell “best of” compilations on a periodic basis.
4. Because it seemed a good idea at the time.

In the case of Coulton’s effort, it seems to have been highly succesful. His Thing a Week ran for the scheduled year, producing 4 albums and several internet hit songs — notably Code Monkey and Re: Your Brains — and vastly increasing his name recognition. (Of course, the recent write-up in the New York Times isn’t going to hurt him either.)

I knew that several other people were attempting the same experiment, but had no idea how to find all of them. Given that there was no organized list, I figured it was time for me to try to fill in the gap. These are the people (or groups) that I could find who are making a current effort to put out brand new songs on a weekly (or near weekly) basis for public consumption. I believe that they all allow free downloads, although they may encourage you to voluntarily support their ongoing efforts, or buy the final albums. (I too encourage you to support them if you like their stuff. If more independent musicians can make a living, we may start to escape the stranglehold of the major labels.)

• Various: The FuMP: The FuMP is”The Funny Music Project” — a collective of 7 primary artists, 6 supporting artists, and assorted hangers-on who produce what is best described as “Dementoid Music”. This means that the style might be folk, rock, rap, or metal, but it’s always designed to make you laugh. (Given the wide range of styles, you are probably going to find that you hate at least some of it, but I’m not going to try to guess which songs you’ll like and which you won’t. Your mileage will vary, but on the average you’ll still come out ahead.) Given the number of artists contributing, these folks seem to have little trouble keeping to their schedule of two songs a week, and have just released their second semi-monthly album. For some classic examples, check out Don’t Shoot and 99 Words for Boobs.
• Tom Smith: iTom — Tom specializes in tremendously funny music, though he’ll sometimes surprise you with a sad or scary song that will tear out your heart or your spleen. He’s been keeping to a weekly schedule since August 2006, and has just finished his 3rd compilation. Each album in the set explores a different theme: “And So It Begins“, “Transitions“, “True Love Waits“. For highly contrasting examples from his first album, check out Lars Needs Women and The Here and Now.
• Various: Song Fight!: Song Fight isn’t quite the same deal as the other offerings. Instead its a (roughly) weekly challenge. Somebody proposes a title (and album art) and folks are encouraged to submit songs to match the title. Thus, you’re likely to get one song title and 24 instantiations of that title as actual songs. The quality will be highly variable, but the gimmick is hard to resist, and there can be some very pleasant gems hidden away amongst the hunks of gravel.
• Tom Flannery and Lorne Clarke: SongaWeek: Flannery and Clarke have been providing at least one folk song a week since early 2003. Their subject matter is almost exclusively political, and will likely offend you if you don’t agree with their politics. However, whether you agree or not, you must admire their dedication to chronicling the news of the week. For examples of what you might expect, check out two comments of the same event, 9 months apart: Katrina and Re-Electing Nagin.

My musical tastes, gift-wrapped

I’ve written before about one of my favorite pieces of software, Music Magic Mixer. Well, the latest beta version has a new feature which lets you package up a particular “mood” playlist generator and distribute it to another user who doesn’t necessarily share any of the tunes in your library. He can then use it to find somewhat similar music in his own collection. This lets him get a feel for your tastes, or let him play the small fraction of his collection that you’ll actually like when you happen to be visiting.

Anyway, I’m interesting it finding out how well this works in practice, so I’ve packaged up a few of my favorite moods, and anybody who’s on the beta test list is encouraged to give them a try and let me know how they worked out. So without further ado, I present:

• Strange Brew: This mood tends towards somewhat edgy vocals with clear meaningful lyrics, and just a few jazzy instrumentals thrown in for good measure. No grunge or easy listening here, but the lyrics are going to cover a lot of ground. (Download strange_brew.m3mood)
• Sweatin’ It: This is a straightforward exercise mood. It’s all about getting the heart beating and making sure that you have fun in the process. Pump up the volume; pump up the adrenaline; and let’s burn off some calories. (Download sweatin_it.m3mood)
• Wild Melody: Whether you are working in the office or trying to head off to sleep, this mood tries to ease your way by dispensing with the lyrics and giving you clean melodic instrumentals. Don’t expect pure new-age, though. It’ll give you celtic, classical, bluegrass, ragtime, and maybe even a few real surprises. (Download wild_melody.m3mood)

Update: As pointed out in one of the comments, there is now a site dedicated to swapping of MusicIP moods. You can download all of the above mixes, and many others, at the MusicIP Mixer Add-ons  site.
I should warn you, however, that the version of the program that supports this feature really is beta software, with all the instabilities that implies. If you aren’t prepared for a few rough spots, and willing to report any bugs you encounter, I encourage you to stick with the stable release and try out these compiled moods in a little while when the next full release comes out. (One of the things I love about the folks at Predixis is that they come out with new versions and new features on a regular basis, so you always know that there’s more good stuff coming.)

My Favorite Software: Part 1a

In a previous post, I promised to give the lowdown on the auxiliary tools that I use to maintain and enjoy my digital music collection.  Several people have been asking about it, so it is apparently time to keep that promise.  So here it is in one large, boring list:  the Gclectic digital music toolbox.

• Ripping: All of the big name jukeboxes will let you rip albums, but I chose CDex because it allowed me to plug in my choice of encoders, and because it supports the open freedb database rather than the proprietary Gracenote database.
• Encoding: Regardless of your bitrate preferences, LAME is the encoder to go with.  This is an excellent example of the power of open source software, and is the standard used by a number of commercial music vendors.  I am a bit unusual in my bitrate preferences, however.  I have found that nobody in my household can hear the difference between a carefully encoded 64kbps track and a bit-hungry 192kbps version.  Since I carry 6000 tunes on a heavily loaded laptop, that factor of three really pays off for me.  The key here is the "carefully encoded" part.  I use average-bit-rate encoding with min/average/max settings of 32/64/320, and I make sure to specify –alt-preset-abr.  If you want a higher bitrate, you can simply change the average value and leave everything else the same.
• Tagging: I like my tracks to be consistently and correctly tagged, and I wholeheartedly support the MusicBrainz project for maintaining a high-quality collaborative album-info database.  MusicBrainz has a good working relationship with the aforementioned freedb and the abaftmentioned AudioScrobbler, so that all of these tools can work together nicely.
• Listening: There are many programs that’ll play your music for you, and probably at least two of them shipped with your computer.  I prefer to grab my own copy of WinAmp however.  It’s lightweight, has an active community developing plugins, and doesn’t feel like it’s trying to drag you into somebody’s music shop.  (I sometimes wonder about its unhealthy obsession with llamas, but that’s neither here nor there.)
• Tracking: I track my listening patterns and preferences through AudioScrobbler (which has now been merged with its companion broadcasting site "last.fm").  A simple winamp plugin pings their server whenever I play a song, and then they provide me with exhaustive information based on those pings.  (There are plugins for most major media players — winamp just happens to be the most popular.)  In addition to summarizing my interests, it can also point me to other bands that I might like, other users who share my tastes, and aggregate statistics on bands and tracks.  To the best of my knowledge, this is the only piece of "spyware" I have on my system, but since I voluntarily installed it for the explicit purpose of watching me, I’m not about to complain about it.
• Syncing to portable devices: I have yet to find any tool that meets my needs for transferring tracks to my portable MP3 player.  The problem lies in the fact that many players on the market play through all of the tracks in a directory in alphabetical order by filename.  Every piece of jukebox software I’ve dealt with copies the files from a playlist into a directory without changing their filenames.  The result is that the carefully contrived order of the playlist is lost.  I deal with this problem by running 68 lines of homebrew Java code which copies files referenced in playlists and renames them so that they will play in the right order.  I believe that every commercial jukebox program should be able to do as well as my 68 line program, but I haven’t seen it yet.

I hadn’t realized it until I finished compiling the list, but not a single one of these tools requires that you pay to use it.  I’ve got nothing against buying commercial software, and have voluntarily contributed money to support several of these tools, but the array of high-quality free tools is quite impressive.

There you have it.  Along with MusicMagic Mixer, these programs have given me a clean, well-organized music library and many happy hours of listening.  Hopefully, they’ll do the same for you.

My Favorite Software: Part 1

How do I figure out what music to play?

Back in the old days, music collections were static things.  You had a whole bunch of records, 8-tracks, cassettes, or CDs sitting on a shelf, or in a case in your car.  When you wanted to listen to music, you either turned on your stereo and listened to what was already queued up, or you went to your shelf and scanned through all of your albums until you found one that interested you, and you queued it up instead.  If one album wasn’t enough, you could risk the health of your vinyl records by putting a stack of them the auto-drop spindle or buy a fancy cassette or CD deck that could handle more than one album at a time.  The latter would even let you "shuffle" the tracks with delays of only one to thirty seconds between tracks.  In time, this trend grew to the point where you could buy 200 disc CD changers, but they were clearly kludges, and nobody was surprised when it was a bit difficult to find the music you wanted.

That was then…. 

Now we’re living in the MP3 age, and CDs are just a transport and backup mechanism.  Whether you are playing your ripped tunes on an iPod, MuVo, laptop, or TiVo, the unit of exchange is the song, not the album; and you can have a lot of them.  (I know there are a few readers browsing this via their favorite coal-fired RSS readers who think that the old technology is just fine.  Hopefully, by the end of this post, they’ll see a glimmer of what they are missing.)  I compress my songs pretty tightly, so the 600 albums I’ve currently got online only take about 13GB.  For the audiophiles in the audience, that would come to more like 40GB.  (For any MP3 geeks paying attention, I’ll give more details in a later post.)  That’s a pretty fully loaded iPod or Zen, and a comfortable fraction of a modern desktop drive.  It’s also more than seven thousand songs, totaling just under three weeks of continuous play. 

I should stop to note here, in case the RIAA is trolling the blogosphere, that every one of those tracks is legitimately purchased.  Most of them were hand-ripped from CDs which are still stored away for backup purposes, while the remainder were purchased from online sources such emusic.com.  For me, electronic media are about convenience, not file sharing or copyright avoidance.

How not to play music….

With modern media library software, I’ve got much more control than I had with my old bookshelf.  I can scroll through a list of all 1,700 artists till I find the one I’m interested in, and then select the album I want.  Or I can scroll through the 600 albums in alphabetic order.  (Yeah, the numbers seem odd.  I like compilation albums.)  I can narrow things by genre and only have to search through 72 rock albums — and hope that the album I want wasn’t one of the 10 filed under "oldies" instead. 

Even better, I can ignore the concept of album, and just throw all my music into a heap and tell my player to do a random shuffle.  Unlike the bronze-age systems I described above, the transition from track to track is instantaneous.  Unfortunately, an instantaneous transition from "Prince of Darkness" to "Day by Day" is just a little bit too jarring.  You can try to divide albums into compatible groups, but that gets tricky really fast.

There’s got to be a better way….

Enter a company named Predixis.  As far as I can determine (and I’m an outsider here, with no company affiliation or inside info) they started out with a great deal of expertise in machine learning and a desire to use that expertise to help people with real-world problems.  They recognized the problem that I described above (long before I did), and set to work.  The result is a truly marvelous program, and (at long last) the real subject of this post:  MusicMagic Mixer.

Now I don’t work for the company, so I’m just guessing, but these seem to be the guiding principles that they started with:

1. Users want to listen to music rather than laboriously enter data. 
2. Existing information (such as album or genre) should be available, but shouldn’t force a single organization on the music. 
3. It’s easiest for users to describe what they want to hear by pointing to concrete examples and saying "give me stuff like that".

These are principles that many folks have seen before, and some of my readers are now nodding their heads and muttering "collaborative filtering".  (For the rest of you: this is the technique that Amazon uses to recommend books and AudioScrobbler uses to recommend bands.)  This is a good guess, but it’s not what they came up with.  Collaborative filtering really only works well with a very large user community and a perfectly shared data set.  If your music collection contains three albums recorded by your best friend’s garage band, the odds are against anyone having enough information to make reasonable inferences about them.  Likewise, you’d have to wait to accumulate information on each newly released album, no matter how popular — and those are the ones that you want to start including in your mixes immediately.

No, the folks at Predixis did something much more clever.  They actually wrote software that performs an acoustic analysis of each song that you own, and creates an analysis record for each song which can then be used to determine how well the song "matches up" with all the others.  (Basically, it automatically fills out a dating service questionnaire for each song.)  The exact content of this analysis is a secret, but we can guess that it includes things like tempo, variation in tempo, smoothness, timbre, etc.  Ultimately, we don’t need to know, because the important thing is the result:  it spends some time looking at your music, and then it figures out what songs will sound good together.  It really is as easy as that.

Okay, you’ve got me — nothing is ever as easy as that.  These are really smart people, and they’ve thought of lots of angles.  One of the things it can do is lump all of the songs by a specific artist together to come up with an "artist profile".  You can choose how much your mixes are influenced by the artist style and how much is is controlled by individual song style.  Personally, I like to tilt it towards song style, but your mileage may vary.

At this point I could waste a lot of time telling you about all the features in the program.  Trust me that they are there:  you can skin, tweak, resort, customize, and filter as much as you’d like.  But the good news is that you don’t have to.  This is what I like to call "Liquid Plumr®" software — "Just pour it in and it works". 

The ideal case can be found when you hook up to their TiVo server.  You select "Instant Mix" from the menu, and it gives you one hour sets of music which sound good together as a set, and it carefully orders the tracks so that they flow cleanly from one to the other.  That’s it.  It’s just as easy as hitting "random shuffle" on your primitive player, but the results are much more pleasant to listen to.

The desktop mixer doesn’t give you quite this full one-click strategy, but it’s almost as easy.  You just tell it what you’re in the mood for.  Give it a song, an album, an artist, or a "mood" and it’s off and running.  Push a button and it gives you a playlist.  If it’s not perfect, tweak it or try again.  Now hit "play" to send it to your favorite on-line player, or hit save to save it as a playlist for later.  You can load it into an MP3 player directly via MMM or through your favorite media player.

Now the program isn’t 100% perfect.  There have been occasional reliability issues, and there are always features that I’d still like to see added.  On the other hand, I could find faults with the "Mona Lisa" as well.  If it’s not perfect, it’s still utterly indispensable and so far ahead of anything else out there that there literally is no competition.

On the commercial side, the price is incredibly reasonable — free for the basic version; $29.95 for the premium.  Even better, the folks at Predixis are incredibly responsive.  They appear to push out a new release every three months, and adding real features in each release: TiVo support in November; full external device support in May; etc.  They pay attention to their forums and respond to both problem reports and suggestions.

In summary….

It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread: go get a copy.  If you have more than 25 albums: go get a copy.  Sliced bread is actually overrated: get MMM instead.  I am in no way affiliated with Predixis, and they did not pay me to say "go get a copy".  If you have a TiVo:  go get a copy.  Did I mention that it was one of my favorite programs?