Just reading this story about Goldie kicking Redeyes for inofficially remixing Inner City Life and then handing the remix over to Fabio, and I thought “Man, this is so dnb 1.0″.

What’s so wrong with remixing a tune that’s already released? Remember Chris Su’s unofficial remixes? And look where’s at now. I don’t see the dark side of such unofficial remixes. If they’re done badly, noone will listen, and if they’re great you may want to release it. And even if you don’t, it’s good publicity, right?

What made me think of the parallels to the recent web2.0 phenomenon is that we’ve come to a technological power where it’s easily possible to extract fundamental elements of a released track and then combine them in new ways, thereby creating some kind of a remix, only with extra boundaries. Call it a mashup. This approach a dogma. We need more unoffical remixes! Who wants to wait until Renegade Hardware after some boring remixes finally decides to have someone remix Beckoning? It’s close to official, that tunes older than two years productionwise can’t compete with the new stuff, no matter how interesting they are trackwise. Why not take some old favourites of yours and give them a special treatment? Layer new drums? Play it out in the club?

Remember John B? Why is he so popular? Because he’s crazy guy, dressing up like huh, playing electrostyle tunes? Maybe. Because he always has fresh mashups to play? Sure!
And one thing that’s spinning in my head for ages now: Why not remix a remix? There dozens of examples where the remix is way better than the original. Trace used to do that with Mutations, and it’s been a great success. Where are the innovating labels?

Thinking 2.0, maybe there’s even new ways of making money out of this. Selling remix packs. Licensing. Micropayment percentage of a re-remix. If anyone is willing to put work in, why not cooperate?

CD 2

Inspired by the idea of deep video tagging (applying tags to certain parts of a video file, published by great resource Lifehacker), I thought about the benefits of deep tagging for audio files. Using keywords in audio files traditionally means filling IP3 tags in MP3 files. This allows for automatic indexing, network services like last.fm, and enhanced convenience when skipping through a list of new tracks. Seems nice, but pretty limited to me.

What about inserting cue information and naming certain intervals? This could prove rather helpful when djing digitally. This may already be possible (I remember pre-set loop points in aif files), but what about a djs use? It would be highly appreciable if the producer could mark and tag those intervals in the sequencer. When the track mixdown is performed, those block information is saved in the output file.

Currently, audio files are totally dumb in that they just contain raw data plus very few metadata at best. By tagging parts of it, we could help increasing value of the file, enforcing the idea behind sematic web, here as semantic media.

Update: After some interesting comments I thought about tagging in general, whether applied to certain parts or the whole file. Do you know that strange genre ID3 property? Well, firstly there are verious obscure options, and on the other it’s often pretty hard to categorize a track. I remember a German music magazine, Groove, using icons in their reviews to categorize. There was e.g. one to denote tribal elements, and another for vocals, so if there was a really vocal-based track, then there would have been two times the vocal item and a couple of others for other aspects of the track. Why not build a system based on icons where you describe a piece of music by up to ten icons, being allowed to use several icon elements more than once.

Do you have other suggestions on how to enhance audio files by deep tagging?

Yesterday my annoying Sony Ericsson cell phone finally decided to have its joystick defunct. Luckily, I still had my old Nokia mobile (which weights about a ton), so I put in the SIM card. Having totally forgotten about that, later that day I heard its ringtone, which goes

daaaa-da-dad-da-daaaaa daaaa-da-dad-da-daaaaa (BC – TORPEDOES!!!!!).

Wow, that felt so good! Best moment of the day.

Musicthing has screenshots of the upcoming Cubase SX4. Let’s see whether this turns out to be a fake, too. Looks interesting though.

Gearjunkies has more info on the product, big screenshots, too.

The guys at ThePcSpy have put together a nice list of applications which slow down Windows booting time. And whatever delays bootup will probably also slow down in standard Windows operation mode, i.e. when running a sequencer.

The testers grouped apps by type, so you may find interesting alternatives to slow programs you’re using.

Update: Here is another great resource on that topic, which also covers the enigmatic prefetch file mechanism. (via Lifehacker)

The web obviously is a busy place. The DnB community is no exception to this rule, leaving its daily mark through dozens of updated forums, news aggregators, and personal pages. Actually there is more traffic than anyone could possibly read, especially as there is (yes, there really is) a life beyond the beat and the bass. Most headz I know cope with the problem by focussing on certain key sources, like reading two or three forums’ updates and skip the rest. Good strategy to stay sane in the digital vastness, but in the last few years new techniques have come up which allow for providing content beyond forums and for readers to apply your focus to a wide range of sites.

Blogs
Blogs are personal pages kept by one or a few authors. One example is our blog, www.neurocode.de. Honestly, I’m still surprised how little content is actually written in DnB blogs, especially when compared to the huge amount of forum posts like “Re: Re: Re: Where is Rob Data *now*?”. Most forums tend to annoy me more and more, so I primarily see them as data sources on new releases and just watch the most general stuff that’s hot on the scene. As blogs are – in contrast to forums – highly connected, they together span the blogosphere. Interestingly, the scene which contains the most actual blog posts is the Russian. I sometimes even spot translations of our articles! Big up, guys, spread the word! Nevertheless, blogs are just another way of providing people with content, so there still is the problem of reading all that stuff.

RSS
I’m puzzled way too often when I hear someone not even knowing about this simple yet effective way of staying updated. RSS feeds, little and therefore easy and fast transmittable files containing short, standardized versions of updated articles, provide a way to use aggregating readers, like online service Bloglines or windows/mac-based applications. Means those readers will constantly check the feeds provided by updating services like blogs to provide you with the new articles. Moreover, you can choose to being prompted with different levels of updates, from whole articles to headlines only.
What’s the use? Instead of you crawling through the net, checking for updates, your RSS reader will do the dirty work. Whenever you switch to the reader, you see your updated focus of the web’s events. To do so, you subscribe to RSS feeds, which are marked by the icon above.

What do we read?
I’m using Bloglines, because it’s web-based and therefore lets me read my subscriptions wherever I am. I’m using several groups to keep dozens of feeds, one being labelled “DnB/music”:

• Basswerk Records
• breaksblog.biz
• dailydrone.org
• DE:BUG BLOG
• DE:BUG MUSIKTECHNIK
• DJ Kolt Siewerts
• DJ TRICK
• DnBPodcast.com
• Generic™ – MySpace Blog
• http://www.tanith.org
• john b robot drum & bass diary
• Kidz Rage !
• miosis in darkness
• misanthrop – MySpace Blog
• Multiple Extase
• Nathan is such a dreamboat
  
• Nicon – MySpace Blog
• Phace – MySpace Blog
• Phlow
• Polarity SuperPapper on SuprGlu
• redwerkz
• Rusher – MySpace Blog
• Subtone – MySpace Blog
• swens blog
• TeeBee – MySpace Blog
• WLCM TU TH NXT LVL™

(Please not that some of the above are in English, some in German.) Actually, most blogs listed above are updated way to little (esp. the MySpace ones, haha – seems that is just another syndrome of the mostly superficial blabla on there). By using the RSS/reader approach, they still are in my focus, which I surely had given up checking for if I had to travel them by myself.

The next level
So what’s next? I’m still waiting for a convenient way in which forums provide personalized search results as RSS feeds. This would give me the opportunity to stay updated on several topics without having to re-check the posts all by myself again and again.
Another issue are podcasts, which are blog posts in audio format, like radio shows you can download and listen to whenever you like (opposed to having to stick to some schedule).
As you’ve come that far, which are the DnB/music related feeds you’re reading?

…absynth4, battery3, massive, fm8

our parents told us to safe some money for life……sorry mum: vst goes first.

That looks like a hot winter.

http://www.native-instruments.com