10,000 downloads left before my music download release hits 300,000 downloads now. As a bonus, finally capped this particular milestone perfectly:

w00t!

I’ve made some progress on this project and, I gotta say, I’m getting to the point in the project where I either got to roll ahead and go all the way to public or stop now. I’m currently way too excited to see this fail, so barring some sort of unforseen disaster, this will more than likely see the light of day.

I have a few obstacles that I’m pretty sure I can overcome in the next day or so, then it’s finishing off a few last details and a march towards finalization. When the finalization process is under way, I’ll be able to divulge what this project is.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything and I’m certainly not out of the woods yet befor I can go full board on writing, but I did up a quick article anyway just to start to get a feel for news writing again. The article was on the British government being caught for copyright infringement. Just a little something for now before I finally fully ease back in to writing mode.

I was fuming the other day over an embarrassment of a debate on the Lang and O’Leary Exchange on the CBC when discussing ISOHunt. When they brought up the verdict in the US, they had a number of ways of looking at the issue. Rather than discussing sovereignty or legal uses of technology or the copyright debate itself, they both yammered away about how all websites are about “stealing” music.

After watching this disgrace parade through the airwaves, I felt that the two knuckleheads deserved to the slapped. The only thing they said was that people should use iTunes to pay for music and how (paraphrasing) “We live in a capitalist society and that’s just the way things work.”

After flipping the bird to the TV set, I wondered how these people would be so ill-informed - particularly when they have Michael Geist on there every so often discussing the issues facing Canada today. It’s not that the hosts discussed the copyright maximalists side of the debate, it’s that this was the only side of the debate they portrayed.

I seriously hope someone gives one of them a computer, an internet connection or something befor they even think about bringing up the topic again as they offer opinions on something they know nothing about.

Now, it may look like I’m currently not doing a heck of a lot right now, but believe me, I’m pretty much in overdrive right now. Unfortunately, you can’t really see it right now. I’m currently working on a project right now and as I see it getting closer to completion, I’m starting to think that this could actually make it to completion.

If this project goes live, I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to get to some radio work this Summer, but I think this project will be even better. A lot of people said I should have done this a long time ago, but such endeavors take a lot of time to go to launch. Not saying a heck of a lot now because it could always fail (failure is always an option to you Mythbuster fans). I’ve been working on this project for the last couple of months off and on and it requires skills I don’t normally use on a grand scale. To say the least, it’s been quite the learning experience.

Anyway, it’ll hopefully be successfully completed as it would be a big step (and I mean REALLY big step) for me and my presense on the interwebs. Fingers crossed!

If all goes well, in the next month, something should happen, so keep your eyes on this blog for further updates.

The music download release is a step closer to 300,000 downloads with less than 15,000 downloads to go. Right now, it’s definitely on its way there now and the gap is narrowing between where it is at now and the big milestone.

I’m currently really looking forward to working with the music again. It seems like every release now brings in thousands of new downloads, so when I get a chance to work with music again, the numbers will probably get an extra boost to get higher and higher in terms of downloads. This is definitely making me happy.

I recently had a few questions answered recently about some things going on in my personal life enough to the point where the radio show is now a little more likely to make a return for a Summer. To put it in to the best perspective I can, it’s gone from unlikely to distinctly possible. There are a lot of other things I have to overcome first, but it looks like, surprisingly, it’s a bit more likely it’s going to happen.

It’s always been unfortunate that my writing has been forced to be a seasonal thing in the last few years. That part has bugged me a lot, but I’ve also had a need to have a few priorities in front of file-sharing news. While I’m not sure about my radio show making a return, I know there is a possibility that I’ll not only return to writing p2p news, but the seasonal annoyance of only writing on new years and Summer might finally be over. There’s a chance (I can’t garentee it) that I might have worked things out enough that I can write all year starting this Summer. This has been a goal for a while to finally set enough things straight that I can write on a more continual basis. All of this hinges on things playing out right offline. Right now, those chances are about as good as they have ever gotten and I’ve got my fingers crossed that writing all year will become a reality again. Unfortunately, it all hinges on a few other things, but this latest development in my personal life (I won’t be shedding details like that of course ) paves a very promising road to writing all year.

Naturally, this excites me, but I’m always looking at all the possibilities including the possiblities that this will be another year (argh!) of only being able to write in the Summer again. If this doesn’t work out in the end, then it’ll be about 2 more years or so befor the next possibility of this being a reality, but there are a few more variables in play then.

In the mean time, it’s only a few more weeks befor I’ll have the energy to write like I use to. Great news as I see a number of important issues going unreported and I’d like to fill a number of news gaps that have cropped up in my absense on the general news writing scene.

I was recently asked whether or not Soundwave (my radio show which continues to get positive reviews) would return this Summer. I, unfortunately, don’t have an answer for that because this Summer, I have way too many unanswered questions to even think about whether it’s possible to put together a show.

Even if I get back my radio show, I’ve actually started to run in to the problem of finding Canadian CC music again. Now granted, I’ve been able to load the show for three years with sufficient CC licensed material that were made by Canadians, so going through the archive wouldn’t be a big deal, but I still think it cheapens the show to just play the same music on a regular basis as it’s about exploring music, not playing three or four of the same songs over and over again. So my problem would be trying to find a fresh source of music which would require some effort after pretty much exhausting Soundclick, ArtistServer and Newgrounds. I have a few sites I can think of that I can check out to see if they show off the artists locations, but I haven’t looked yet.

But yes, 91 shows with every show containing at least 3-5 Canadian songs - a vast majority of them CC licensed. That’s nothing to sneeze at even though at least 9 of those was a 100% canuck music show in a genre most locals barely even heard of. It’s something I’m pretty proud of next to having over 90 weekly 1 hour shows under my belt.

At this time though, it’s way too early to even have a hint as to whether the show will return this Summer or not. Still, it would be nice to push the number of shows over 100 finally.

I bet some of you were wondering, “He’s almost done with the song, what’s up?”

Well, things kind of got out of hand with the news writing and I was writing lots of stuff even though there was not much work left to do on the song. So today, since homework has been strangely absent all week more or less due to varying reasons, I finally sat down and finished the tune. It’s up on the ridiculously popular eMule content database right now and I’m currently uploading it on to MegaUpload for other users who don’t use eMule to get a direct link. I’ll edit the post once that’s done. I’m currently having problems on the uploading end of things for some reason right now.

Edit: MegaUpload link. Uploaded!

Strangely enough, the song is appropriately named “Kinda Distracted” which suits since I was distracted a number of times trying to complete the thing.

It’s a bit of a chillout tune. It features some well known sound, but you know me, messing with things, I have been modifying tonnes of stuff. I noticed that when you make the kick peak, there’s a certain kind of interesting sound added to the kick (hard to explain in words). So when I started contemplating how else can I modify the sound. While I was doing that, I stumbled across this one way to make the kick sound different while playing with a synth. So I chopped the synth down just for the kicks and it sounded interesting and different - just the way I like it.

There was also a sound I’ve always wanted to tinker with and it has the added bonus of being strictly playing with chord-like sound (something I don’t often incorporate in to songs) so I was able to actually take that knowledge of what different chords sound like and tinker around with that to get something interesting. If you know house, you know who I’m “kinda” parodying.

There’s also different standard DJ effects that DJs play around with. Since I haven’t put much on the master other than compressors tweaked so I have room to play around with in terms of DB of various frequencies, I managed to finally add something that would add some real control on how the song sounded and it was, granted, recycling the Free Filter, but using a different setting so it filters out lower frequencies. The result is the sweep you hear about two thirds the way through the song.

I was also trying to focus on mastering towards the end of the production and I know that the spectralgraph is ideally like a hill (lows really loud while highs nice and soft) and when I started thinking about that, I immediately knew that the highs and mids were a little on the loud side. I turned both down a little manually by figuring out what was the offending instrument and tweaking the velocity of the notes in one case and turning down channel volumes in other cases. I couldn’t touch mixer volumes because there was so much automation that was going on, it would cancel out a lot of my work and make things, well, redundent.

This is also the song that was another attempt at making a nice chillout tune and I like it better than Valley of Dreams. Meant to be a bit of a background tune, but at the same time, make the atmosphere a little lighter.

I’m not real sure I want to make another attempt at a tune like this though. There’s times where it seems to be getting futile during the production process, so I’ll probably stick to more energetic tunes like Phantoms of London. A lot more people seem to like that anyway. I have a few concepts “sketched” out in different project files, so I’ll probably work one of them.