Eclectic Meme: emcRadio

Okay, I'm a johnny-come-lately to SoundCloud, I'll admit. I don't normally search out things like this because, well, I have my own co-lo box with a fat-ass pipe and tons of storage. But I do like to take advantage of the social aspect of Web 2.0 shit like Flickr and Vimeo, so I thought I'd take SoundCloud out for a spin today and see what's what. I uploaded four Micronaut tracks that I hadn't, as yet, done anything with, for experiment's sake. Tentatively, I'll give SoundCloud a thumbs-up for now. Here are my thoughts on the service:

Things I Like:

1. Very slick Web 2.0 interface. I was joking with my wife that you could gauge how Web 2.0 a company was by how large the fonts they used on their site were. SoundCloud uses extremely large fonts. But the interface is Grade A for this type of service, and since I'm gonna continually compare it to Flickr and Vimeo, I'll do so now. It beats both of them hands down, both in verbosity, and in control.

2. The uploading/tagging tool was actually designed by someone that knows at least a thing or two about music, from a content creator perspective. (I can detect the hand of Eric Wahlforss in this portion of things, I'm guessing.) The vast majority of hosting sites of this nature kind of assume you're Deputy Dumbass when it comes to tagging and such, but SoundCloud's uploader has specific sections that someone like me would need, which I really appreciate. The copyright area, although it doesn't have the specific CC license I use for my material, gives enough options that I can get a reasonable analog going.

3. The hooks for selling the track are very slick. I personally have never used Digital Tunes, which is their service of choice. It's a little Euro-centric for an apple-pie-eating gun-toting sheep-fucking fat-ass American like myself. (I am only one of those things, as it happens, but you take my point.) But the extremely cool thing is that they give you a spot to put a link to any other store in place of that, in the correct assumption that you may not use Digital Tunes. This is a nice touch.

4. The player, as you can plainly see above, is top fucking notch. It has everything you need and nothing you don't. I assume you've seen the single track player all over the place. The above embedded one is the playlist player. Nice shit, and well done.

5. The conversion from whatever you uploaded is quite good. I uploaded my tracks as 44.1/24 WAV files, and the embedded 128K MP3s actually don't sound half bad at all. And you can have an option for the user to download the original file, which is nice.

Things I Don't Like:

1. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. The speed of the site is too slow, in all respects. I think we can safely assume that they're not hosting off S3, which they should be. Perhaps it was because I chose to do all this on a Saturday, but everything was tediously slow. You'll no doubt have noticed how long it took to load the tracks for the player. Or maybe you didn't and they magically bought bandwidth. (EDIT: The second I clicked "save" on this blog post, their whole site went down. I imagine it'll come up someday, but this serves as a nice quod erat faciendum of my point.)

2. You have to upload a new piece of artwork for each song. This is silly. You should be able to choose from existing artwork. I had to upload that same picture four times. But then again, perhaps making new artwork for each track is what I should be doing while waiting for the hideously slow uploads?

3. Even the cheapest of the three "pro" options are quite expensive, at least compared to similar options from other sites, like, just e.g., Vimeo and Flickr. I would discuss the expense in detail, but this brings me to...

4. Crashy-ass site. Every time, and I do mean every time I look at the "pro" options page, Safari crashes. Since this whole thing was obviously made by Mac users, and they even use Safari in their video demos of the service, perhaps it's just me. But I doubt it. Other pages crashed Safari as well. This is quite annoying, as you may imagine. This is actually the second time I've written this post in its entirety, because like some kind of ass-tard, I went to check the prices for the "pro" shit to comment on #3 above in detail, and Safari took iteration one to its grave.

5. As a return to the subject, the "pro" shit is too expensive compared to similar services, and there's no need for three levels. That's just ridiculous. One level, at EU9.00 or so a month, would be fine.

So, any pros or cons I've missed from experienced SoundCloud users? What's the best way to get the most from the service to make the "Pro" level purchase worthwhile?

In other news, Rough Rider Pro is nearing completion. We spent the majority of the week (or at least the parts of it where I had electricity) chasing an annoying bug in the Mac version of VSTGUI, which led to some drawing Issues. (You never know what you're gonna find in that kit. It's full of surprises.) That fixed, we have the VST versions completely done, and Adam is working on the AU port as I type this. Beta testing early next week and presets, then it'll be out the door, and we can get back to work on BigSeq2.

Speaking of BigSeq, CDM and ChromeDecay teamed up to do an iPod Touch/iPhone-controlling-Live tutorial, and they used BigSeq as the effect of choice; it actually works fairly well in this sort of context. I even learned a couple things, and I designed the damn effect. Go figure. You can watch it here.

In any event, as a return to the subject, I expect my electricity/internet to be intermittent at best this weekend, so if you wrote me any time after, say, Thursday morning, don't go 'round expecting a big fat reply. It's not easy to answer email on an iPhone with anything but short declarative sentences. On the bright side, I can get my Hemmingway on, so there's that.

EDIT: I take that back. Adam was apparently snorting espresso all day or something. The AU of RRP is done. So full beta on Monday. Yay.

Hallo!
I am going to buy your hole Plugins!!!
There are nothing comparable for this Price!!!

My only problem is,i don´t no about your vst3 support!!!!

Are you going to support it?Please,need fast response!!

I hope you will do it!!!

This is just wall-to-wall Win, on so many different levels. Conveniently, it came this morning, so it just made the cut. Needless to say, I told him our usual spiel on VST3, which is "we'll support it when we don't have any other choice," essentially.

And in other bests...

Best Little Hardware Thingie Of 2008: I think the Mopho wins hands down in this category, really no question of that. A well-made piece of kit that sounds good for a reasonable price. How could that not be the Best Thing Ever?

Best New Album I Bought In 2008: This is a subjective category if ever there was one. I'm gonna go with "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!" This is the only time that Jim DeRogatis and I will ever agree on anything, ever. That miserable fuck got one right for once.

Best Live Music I Saw In 2008: I think I'm gonna give it to the Oregon Symphony for their performance of Carmina Burana, which was off the fucking hook. I didn't see a lot of live music in '08 (unless you count on TV, which I don't) and almost all of it was symphonic. I had to miss the Tom Waits tour because of my damn family reunion; I have the NPR podcast of the Atlanta show, so I'll say the best live music I heard in 2008 was that.

Biggest Music Industry "FAIL" of 2008: I think I'm gonna have to go ahead and go with VST3. Either that or Kanye's absolutely tragic Not-O-Tuned "performance" on SNL. (If you're a sucker for human tragedy and the like, you can absorb it here.)

Biggest Music Industry "WIN" of 2008: Well, shit. I can't think of one off the top of my head. Can I say Bettye Lavette's performance of "Love Reign O'er Me" at the Kennedy Center Honors last night? Jesus, that was shit-hot. And everybody is like "who?" (That's a pun, just in case you weren't paying attention.) This is one of those moments when an unknown becomes a Known, and it's kind of cool to see. You can see the whole Who tribute here. Keep the sound down until Joss Stone gets off the stage. Seriously. It'll just make you mad.

I think that's about it for 2008. Did I miss anything?