Tag Archives: band

Posting Your Music Samples

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I’ve shown you how to share files with individuals via YouSendIt. I’ve also talked about using Dropbox and Carbonite to share files among your own devices. But suppose you want to share (legal original) music or sound files to a group of people, e.g., your band, or with the general public?

If you have your own website you can stream MP3s from there – but that could quickly use up your monthly data transfer allotment if the tracks are popular or large. If you are selling the tracks you could set up a Bandcamp account and post them there.

But if these are files like band practice recordings, rough drafts, non-music audio samples, etc. you may prefer to use SoundCloud.

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Minimize Options For Misconnecting Stage Gear

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Unless your band is performing at a very high-level venue, you are usually lucky to get a brief line check – you jump on stage, plug into the sound system for the first time at the start of your set, and the sound person give you a thumbs-up that he has a signal from you – before you start to play, let alone a full sound check.

So if you don’t get that thumbs-up, your band starts losing time from your set while you and the engineer try to figure out the problem in your signal chain! While you can’t always prevent an issue caused by sudden gear failure, you can avoid issues caused by misconnections…

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Tip/Warning: Long File Names in Bandcamp (and Other Zipped Downloads)

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I recently purchased a new album as a zipped download from the site Bandcamp.com to my Windows PC at work (because the network connection there has a much bigger “pipe” than at home). The zipped file contained eight MP3 files which when extracted should have gone into a folder with the name of the band and the album title.

I clicked to “extract all’ the files, and the program did so… until it reached the eighth and final track. At that point it failed and gave me the error message:

I tried again and got the same error, “Path too long”. After some research I determined what was wrong and how to work around it, plus told the band – they fixed it so that other buyers will not have this problem:

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Friday Faves 10-26-12

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Note: this may be the last Friday Faves until December. I’ve signed on to do NaNoWriMo this year, which means my writing energies will be occupied with laying down a 50.000-word novel between November 1-30! Through the magic of pre-scheduled posting there WILL continue to be a weekly article each Wednesday.

New Music: my friends Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys recently composed and played live a soundtrack to the classic silent film Metropolis. Fortunately it was recorded, and you may now download it for pay-what-you-will on Bandcamp – I’m thinking it will make a great NaNoWriMo soundtrack too!

 

Kickstarter Trends

Besides the ubiquitous band-making-an-album, I’ve noticed a few trends lately in Kickstarter projects:

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