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)

Contained within the PDF booklet, you’ll find another essay written by myself. This time about the current state of music industry and music prices. Check Google news, check Digg, check Reddit… everyday is more news about the death of DRM. Somehow I doubt it. The powers that be in the industry want to put a strangle hold on all music-product they sell and will not give that up without a fight. In the meantime, DRM is in fact killing their music-product.

Music listeners’ faith in the industry as a whole is decreasing all the time. At the same time, their awareness of netlabels is increasing. With that increased awareness is an opportunity for a new paradigm in music. If you enjoy what’s happening with netlabels, then please support the netlabels/artists who you’ve come to respect and enjoy. That support will help encourage the new netlabel paradigm and chop down the goliath that is the major music industry. We don’t need their DRM or their over-priced, compressed/lossy music downloads. Music lovers don’t simply want to download music, we want to download reasonably priced music without compression and with complete album art/liner notes.

Check it out at blocSonic.

Just launched is my latest project — blocSonic. My first web project using Ruby on Rails. It took a while for me to become “married” to ROR, there were always things I liked about the platform, but at first there were more things that I didn’t like about it. Of course, one of the primary things I didn’t like is the one thing that I love now — the use of command-line throughout development. It’s not that I didn’t like the command line, I actually did quite a bit. It’s just that I was coming from a background in PHP and it seemed like a lazy shortcut to generate your file structure via scripts. It also seemed to add to the learning-curve which also put me off. So in my early exploration of ROR, I also checked out many PHP frameworks that claimed to do for PHP was Rails does for Ruby. After using these PHP frameworks as compared to ROR, it really was a simple decision. There’s absolutely NO PHP framework out there that works like ROR. I’m now a convert. I’ll find it hard to ever go back to PHP.

My only lingering gripe with ROR is the confusion that sets in when trying to figure out how one should deploy an ROR-based website. The Ruby on Rails team really do need to work on DRY’ing that process up.

Anyway… about my project. blocSonic is starting it’s life as a humble blog. Through blocSonic I’ll be releasing monthly/bi-monthly Creative Commons’ released compilations. Available in FLAC, 320kbs MP3 and 192kbs MP3, the comps will feature some of the best music available for free online via netlabels. 10 tracks deep, I focus on quality over quantity. I also focus on diversity. The premier release features the blues, hip-hop, trip-hop, electronic, rock and electro-pop. Every track is extremely addictive. You don’t believe? Go ahead download it and give it a listen. Every release will also boast artwork available in three formats — eps, pdf and tif. Also thrown in is a PDF booklet with full liner-notes.