blocSonic and Nine Inch Nails projects
Music, Video, blocSonic, nvzion — Tags: blocSonic, creative commons, flac, industrial, military, mp3, music video, netbloc, nine inch nails, php, remix, rock, united states — mGee @ 11:34 am
Over the past couple months I’ve been using my spare time to port my site blocSonic.com from Ruby On Rails to PHP in order to help loading time and site stability. I’m still in the process of porting the administrative back-end. Probably another month will be required to complete that. After a short break, I’m resuming the release of monthly collections of free net audio gems. Currently you can find 13 releases at blocSonic.com and 2 more are in the works. They should be released within the next couple weeks.
Besides blocSonic projects, I’ve been keeping myself busy with Nine Inch Nails related creations. First, I’ve been taking part in the Nine Inch Nails “Ghosts Film Festival”. Below is my video ‘EMPIRE’ which features three “Ghosts” tracks. Please go to the youtube page and vote for it. If you’d like to download it in HD quality, you can do so via the vimeo page.
EMPIRE (Featuring music from Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Ghosts I-IV’) from Michael Gregoire on Vimeo.
Secondly, I’ve been participating in NIN’s remix project and produced a remix of their most recent single “Discipline”. You can listen and vote here. If you enjoy it, download it via the links below in your preferred format:
192kbs MP3 format:
Nine Inch Nails - Discipline (Borderline Obsessive Compulsive Remix)
320kbs MP3 format:
Nine Inch Nails - Discipline (Borderline Obsessive Compulsive Remix)
Lossless FLAC format:
Nine Inch Nails - Discipline (Borderline Obsessive Compulsive Remix)
Cocoa, Dynamic Flash and AJAX
Programming, nvzion — mGee @ 12:36 pm
Well, it’s been quite a while since my last post and there’s been a lot going on. I’ve been going forward with learning OS X application programming and there’s one thing that bugs me about it. The mac programming community is seriously lacking in resources. There are maybe 4 introductory books about Cocoa programming and only one of those are current. The remaining of them were written prior to OS X Panther and as such, leave a lot to be desired when you are using Xcode to develop. The online resources seem to have stopped growing since about 2001. Where are all the so-called experts in the field and why aren’t the existing books updated more often? Possibly because Apple pumps out OSs like Hershey pumps out Kisses? Could be… but it makes it very hard for newbies to learn. I’m pigheaded though and don’t get deterred easily. I picked up Hillegass’ excellent book “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” and have learned a hell of a lot so far. Now, I’m waiting for Hillegass’ second book to arrive in the mail, so I can continue. “Advanced Mac OS X Programming” continues where the previous and other books leave off. If interested, the books can be found at Big Nerd Ranch.
Aside from that complaint though, developing applications for OS X looks like a good choice. I have a strong suspicion that Apple’s market share in the PC market is going to explode once the intel-based OS is formally released. I think this will happen because I suspect Apple will finally sell its OS separately, allowing users to install OS X on normal PC boxes. I know, I know, Apple has officially stated that they’ll never do such a thing. “Apple is a hardware company… blah blah blah”. I don’t buy it. Apple also was not a music company, it is now becoming one on a certain level. They also would “never sell a video iPod”. Again, their public statement regarding the latter was a contradiction of what has actually happened. Let’s face it, Apple makes announcements and public statements to throw the public off the scent of the real story. You can’t honestly think that a corporation isn’t looking to expand it’s market share and are satisfied remaining where they are without any growth? If they package up the OS and allow it to be installed on every PC in the world, that will be one hell of an incentive for millions of PC users to switch. One of the biggest reasons, some users haven’t switched is due to cost restrictions. Apple’s hardware is expensive, especially for a long-time PC user who is used to being able to taylor-build their own systems cheaply. So yeah, OS X looks very promising and I look forward to finally begin work on the application ideas I have in mind.
Aside from learning to program apps, I’ve finally learned to develop Flash apps which are dynamically loaded via php/mysql. It’s not all that difficult, only a bit confusing initially since you essentially need to keep track of php and actionscript code. I’ve also played around learning AJAX which works in a very similar way to dynamic flash content. I picked up sitepoint.com’s “DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design” to learn the latter. The book does a good job of detailing the use of Javascript and HTTPRequest to asyncronously load html content. You can find it at Sitepoint.com.
As for design projects, a couple things have been released in the past couple months and I’m currently working on three which I’ll announce in the coming month or two. As always, you can visit nvzion for complete project info.
Public Enemy - Power to the People…
nvzion — mGee @ 1:51 pm
…and the Beats! Coming up this week on August 2nd, is the release of the first official Public Enemy greatest hits collection. Once again, Nvzion worked with the Hip-Hop pioneers to deliver the package design.
With this album design, we attempted to deliver something a bit subtle that helps to give an air of importance and stature to it, which these hip-hop pioneers most certainly deserve for their first proper hits collection.
The collection is being released and distributed by Universal’s Def Jam label, the hip-hop label which not only helped bring PE to the world, but also saw it’s own popularity soar along with the popularity of PE.
Whether you’re a long time fan or new to Public Enemy’s music, this is the collection to get. Other Public Enemy collections were nothing more than label releases which didn’t represent the vision of the group itself.
Along with the release of this album, nvzion has found itself at another stepping stone. This is the first album in what is sure to be a long line of album designs for a major label. Check your Best Buy, Circuit City and Target flyers to see this nvzion design. Also check out my allmusic.com (you will need to login to see the full credit listing) page.
Check out the album here.