Announcing netBloc Vol. 2: DRM killed the music-product machine!
blocSonic — mGee @ 7:18 pm
blocSonic is proud to bring you another compilation featuring ten exceptional tracks from the world of netlabel music. netBloc Volume 2 features rock, calypso, trip-hop, hip-hop, reggae and electronic.
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.
Announcing blocSonic!
Programming, blocSonic — mGee @ 8:02 am
Happy new year everyone! It’s been an extremely long time since my last post, but with the new year I’m back with an announcement.
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.
Hi again
Programming — mGee @ 4:08 pm
Design stuff
It’s been a while since I posted something here. So I thought I’d write a little about what I’ve been up to since February. No rant this time. Just some thoughts about the projects I’ve been working on and the technologies I’ve been learning about.
Well, first off, let me say that on the design side of things… I’ve been keeping busy with CD designs for Slamjamz. Three more projects have been completed and another two will be in the works, beginning next month. You can read more about it at nvzion.com.
Code, code everywhere I see code!
On the side, I’ve also been keeping myself occupied with a couple things. One is considering recoding nvzion from the ground up using a framework. Although whenever I attempt to use one the new PHP frameworks, there’s just so much to learn, that it’s more of a slow down than it is a way of speeding up development. Also, many of the frameworks have interesting features, but each of them lack at least a couple things that would make them truly useful. I’ve tried out Zend, Code Igniter, CakePHP, Symfony and countless others, but none of them have everything that I’m looking for. I came VERY close to settling with code igniter and even began to code a new version of nvzion with it. Though when it came to creating custom ‘helper’ classes. Weird bugs started to creep in and some files had access to them, while others couldn’t access them. I eventually threw in the towel.
It’s gotten so that I’m actually succumbing to the hype surrounding Ruby on Rails and learning a bit about it. So far, it’s quite amazing what can be done with Rails. The ActiveRecord features alone, make me drool. There’s a bit of relearning needed for it’s strange syntax and I’m not completely in love with Ruby’s lack of {brackets} usage. Though overall, Ruby on Rails is looking very promising. It also has a large devoted community which is actively adding third-party libraries to increase Rails’ functionality. The only other thing that kept me from delving into Raildom, were the lack of decent hosts. Though now, Dreamhost has a sweet deal and it supports PHP4, PHP5 and Ruby on Rails. When ready, I’ll be utilizing them for all my hosting needs.
Next up, I’ve been learning to program compiled applications with the intention of eventually developing some very useful apps for OSX. I have four ideas to start with, which I won’t elaborate on until I have something to show. I wouldn’t want to jinx them ;)
I began my OSX programming education at the most immediately obvious place, after searching the web as a guide on where to begin. That place was Objective-C. Although I was very comfortable with object-oriented programming with PHP, I found I wasn’t quite ready for Objective-C and the MVC (Model-View-Controller) paradigm. I first stepped back to learn C++ in hopes that it would help me understand Objective-C better. I got a couple books to learn that and they helped clarify things, but never really made me comfortable with the language. So then after reading in the C++ books that it would be helpful to get a firm grasp of C, I began to do just that. Of course, not all books are created equal and not everyone learns the same. I went through a few different C books before finally finding one that opened me up and really helped me to finally understand some key concepts such as binary operations and pointers. So far, so good. Things are looking up and I believe that I’m about ready to go back to Objective-C. I’ve reviewed the MVC pattern all the while and even played around with it while experimenting the PHP frameworks which all utilize some form of MVC. I finally ‘get it’!
These various projects and studies have all fed each other and thanks to sticking with everything, all the pieces are falling into place.
So keep an eye here or here, and maybe in late 2007 you’ll find an app you’ve been waiting for all your life… or perhaps one that you didn’t know you were waiting for.