blog @ stevendunston.com

Jamendo has been on a roll lately, expanding their offerings to artists and building services around the core of quality Creative Commons music that they have established.

With their professional music licensing, Jamendo is taking unsigned, Creative Commons artists into new markets.

Just in the last couple of months, my music has been used in a video in Vancouver BC, a film in Sweden, aboard French High Speed Rail, and now comes loaded on the latest mp3 player from Archos.

The icing on the cake is that one of my tracks, Move A Little Closer, is currently one of the top 5 tracks in sales on Jamendo Pro. I don’t know exactly what that means yet in terms of dollars, but Jamendo promises to pay 50% of revenue directly back to the artists. Not bad for music that I planned to give away.

Not sure how they found me, probably through Jamendo. But it’s very cool to have my song included with the open source competitive karaoke sensation that is Ultrastar Deluxe. For those who are unfamiliar with it, it’s a free program that tracks your voice as you sing along with songs, and then gives you a score based on how well you follow the original.

This is the perfect example of why I release my music under a Creative Commons license. They even have a link to my Jamendo album on their front page. Sweet.

Ah well, real life intrudes on art. I had big plans for recording in 2007, but it never quite happened. Excuses and circumstances included the mundane (the theft of mics, hard drives and software from my studio) and the tragic (the untimely death of my good friend and frequent collaborator, James Sabin).

I have been throwing myself into web design lately. Like music, it provides a certain amount of creative satisfaction. Unlike music, it provides a steady paycheck.

In November, I bought a new MacBook, which allows me to run Windows (for the necessary website proofing in IE7) and Ubuntu along with OSX. I have been exploring the burgeoning Mac open source software community, and here are some of my current favorites. While I have been enjoying the obvious choices on every Mac open source list (Firefox, VLC, Handbrake, Transmission, Cyberduck), I’ll focus on some you may not have heard of.

Cog: the anti iTunes

Cog doesn’t have an online store, track ratings, CoverFlow, or most of iTunes other slick touches. So why do I keep coming back to Cog? Simple things. First of all, it plays nearly every audio format, including ogg and flac files, which are increasingly a part of my music collection. Second, it doesn’t try to manage my music collection or hijack my optical drive. It just plays the tracks I ask it to play. Third, it Audio Scrobbles, and I’m enjoying tracking my listens on Last.FM.

Bean: the Anti Word Processor

Bean doesn’t merge your mailing labels, sync with your spreadsheets and calendar, or manage your footnotes and bibliography. It just does what I want a word processor to do about 90% of the time when I open one. It just takes dictation from my fingers, and allows me to apply simple formatting, then save it in a tiny, standardized file format. Was that really so hard?

Disk Inventory X: Find that Cruft that’s filling up your hard drive

Apparently there is no such thing as too much hard drive space. While I made do with a couple of floppy disks in high school, now I have terabytes of drives around the house, and they always seem to be full. Disk Inventory X scans your drive, and gives you a visual representation of the acreage each folder and file takes up on your disk drive. Genius.

I’m a huge fan of open software and free ideas. Ever since Windows XP launched, with its authorization schemes, I’ve been on a migration path away from Microsoft. And yet, while I use a Mac laptop and Linux on my desktop for web development, I still use Windows XP along with Cakewalk SONAR for all of my recording and sound design.

There are two primary reasons I have persisted in the proprietary world of Windows and Cakewalk. The first reason is that I have invested in a lot of Windows-only hardware. And the second reason is that open source audio tools have lagged behind their proprietary counterparts in terms of features and friendliness. But those reasons no longer suffice.

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