Several things:

1) muxtape is kind of addicting.  I’ve crafted another muxtape for your listening pleasure.  It is nothing like the other one: nyquildotorg.muxtape.com.  In addition, I’ve also used muxtape to share with the world one of my favorite out-of-print albums:  nakednaked.muxtape.com.

2) speaking of muxtape, my greasemonkey script to download and/or stream muxtapes is better than ever.  Now you can easily copy/paste the filename for easier renaming without disrupting what’s playing.

3) speaking of greasemonkey scripts, I just whipped one up that makes the total price of an item (including shipping) very apparent at a glance when searching for products on NewEgg.com.  This was a request from Alexa, and I think it came out rather nicely.  Greasemonkey is awesome.

Defined tags for this entry: greasemonkey, music, muxtapes

Having just been introduced to the dubious legality of muxtape.com, I decided to see if I could make it a bit more useful.  I’ve been meaning to play around with greasemonkey again since it’d been a couple years since I had, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

I found a script at userscripts.org that generates ‘download’ links for each of the songs on any muxtape page, then added to it the ability to generate an m3u (playlist file) which you can click to stream all the songs in your audio player of choice.  No more having to leave a browser page open just to listen to muxtapes.  No more having Flash take down your browser.  Awesome.

If you’d like to add this functionality to your muxtape experience, simply install Greasemonkey (or whatever IE/Opera plugin does the same thing) and head over and install muxtape downloader / m3u enabler from UserScripts.org.

If you’ve not seen muxtape before, head on over and listen to my first attempt at online mixtapery:  nyquildotorg.muxtape.com

(Is there any interest in enabling ‘podcast’ functionality to your muxtapes, allowing people to subscribe to them in iTunes/whatever and have them auto-download?)

Defined tags for this entry: firefox, geeky, greasemonkey, m3u, mp3, music, muxtape

A few days ago Emalyse posted a little sonic doodle she had made, reminding me that I had been meaning to try to record some of the sonic doodling the Nintendo DS game Elektroplankton allows you to create. The thing that’s fun about the game is that you just sort of click around on things and it effortlessly turns those clicks into “music.” Most of the different modes have pretty unsatisfactory results, but my favorite works rather well. It consists of a grid full off arrows and 4 different plankton that each make their own sets of noises as they follow the arrows. By changing the direction of the arrows you can cause them to go into different loops, drastically changing the “song” that it makes.

Here’s a few minutes of me playing around: doodin’ on my Nintendo DS [mp3 file].

Defined tags for this entry: geeky, music, Nintendo DS

Ever stumble across something that paints someone you respect in an entirely new light? That happened to me today.

Here’s what I saw: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS7CZIJVxFY.

That (awesome) video shows how Maynard James Keenan incorporated a Fibonacci sequence into the TOOL song (and album) Lateralus, using the spiral it defines to to add meaning to the song (and his philosophy). It blew my mind. Now I wonder just what else Maynard has nestled into the music I love…

Defined tags for this entry: found online, music, TOOL

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at creating electronic music on my computer for years, but, having made the decision over 10 years ago to limit myself to free open-source software (including operating systems), there hasn’t really been many tools to suit my very limited knowledge in this area. There are apparently several really good tracker/sequencer applications available, but I’m apparently too stupid and non-musical to operate them.

This morning I decided once and for all that I was going to try to make something vaguely resembling music, and that I was going to do it entirely with Audacity. The following (really shabby) “composition” is made entirely from the first 11 seconds of the Guns and Roses song Sweet Child of Mine, mangled and manipulated with a whole slew of Audacity plugins. Audacity is a lot clunkier than I’d like, meaning it’s pretty difficult to get tracks lined up perfectly, so there’s a lot of trainwrecking here and there, but I’m relatively pleased with it as a first attempt. I do realize that this is just several looping samples over top each other, and that I’m not really “composing” anything here; I’m mainly just trying to get the feel for Audacity and working with multiple tracks.

Only My Child (2:24 mp3)

Defined tags for this entry: music, remix

[still can’t type properly. sorry]

i’ve been a fairly regular listener of radioparadise for several years. i really like hearing all sorts of songs ive eithr never heard before, or just not in a long time. the thing i like best is that they play songs from new albums that arent singles. while commercial radio beats each single to a pulp, radioparadise keeps things fresh.

anyway, in the last few weeks ive heard this song several times:

Ok Go – Maybe, This Time

it reminded me of another song so much that i actually thouht it /was/ that other song each time it came on. i just couldnt for the life of me figure out what song i thougt it was. i went around humming it for days, eventually deciding it was an old song by the tea party. i imediately set about systematically goiing through all my cds trying to find it. i coul;ndt find it. i began to think i was crazy.

then i downloaded the tea party discography and tried again, finally finding it after lots of listening:

The Tea Party – Angels

i wish i had the skills to mash these up because aside from a slight tempo difference, these seem really similar to me. the guitar riff, the drum beat, even going into the chorus seems as if you could just interchange the vocals.

is it just me?

Defined tags for this entry: mashup, music, ok go, plagiarism?, song similarities, the tea party