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Finally got around to adding a radial email address finder to my Mappy Email Signup app. Mappy Email lets visitors/fans select their locations on a map and save their email addresses. So you can contact them only when you’re in the area (which is more polite). It’s basically an open source Eventful.com that doesn’t hang all your contacts up in a third party.

The new version finally has a page (/admin/) where you can specify a radius (in kilometers), click the map and see all the email addresses that are within that area. So you can paste them into whatever mailing list app you’re using.

Reaper 3 came out a little while ago and I’ve mentioned that I’m experimenting with switching to it from Cubase. So far I can’t imagine going back to Cubase. Some of the things I like:

• It’s fast and small. While the 4.4MB installer file size is great, it’s the responsiveness and quick loading time that are truly awesome. Cubase feels bloated and slow after using Reaper, as do most DAWs.
• Powerful. The amount of features in it are ridiculous. You may have to hunt for the options, but 99% of the time it’s there.
• I haven’t had it crash on me yet.
• It’s fully customizable. I feel like I can trick it out as much as I want. From themes to keyboard shortcuts to actions, you can make it your own.
• Frequent useful updates. Unlike Cubase’s usual “launch buggy, gradually patch those bugs and save any useful new features for the next version you have to pay for” you actually get an amazing amount of updates and improvements.
• An active community and approachable developers. Reasonable or good ideas get implemented quickly, developers are responsive in the forums, lots of people were helpful when I was flailing around in “I’m used to Cubase!” land.
• It plays nice with dual monitors. HOORAY.
• Quick search of VST plugins.
• I don’t feel locked in. Project files are in plain text, you can export your stuff easily. You can move your preferences around easily.

Some things I don’t like so much:

• There are so many options that new (and/or less tech-savvy) users will likely feel overwhelmed hunting down the right checkboxes to get the behavior they expect. It’s awesome that it’s so customizable, but I’d love to see them pick some more universal up-front options and move a lot of the tweaks to a Firefox about:config style interface or just an .ini file.
• A lot of the comping/audio behavior doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The logic behind which items play and which don’t when they overlay each other on the same track still confuses me, so I try and avoid it. Comping generally works but lacks the precision of Cubase or Logic.
• Unlike versions 1 and 2, Reaper 3 doesn’t have my song Making Me Nervous as the default project. :( :(

Anyway, it’s been good and I recommend trying it out. There’s an un-crippled evaluation version so you’ve got nothing to lose.

I bugged the author of (delicious/flickr style) file tagging software TaggedFrog to add support for audio file previews and v1.0.1 has it. (Make sure you grab and install Croak on the download page.)

I’m also told if you need mp3 support to download the irrKlang library and place the irrKlang.NET2.0.dll file in the root folder of your TaggedFrog installation. It’ll automatically enable mp3s in TaggedFrog. (It’s not included due to licensing issues.)

This is a pretty great solution for Windows musicians looking for something similar to Audiofinder for the Mac. Thanks Andrei!

One of the best tech things I saw at Zap Your PRAM was this TinEye Music app for the iPhone. You take a photo of album art with the iPhone and TinEye identifies the album and looks it up in iTunes.

I was totally skeptical so we tried it out on my CD, taking this fairly crappy photo:

And bam:

I was impressed. Image search/recognition tech usually works great inside a pre-defined catalog of images but tends to fail in the wild.

Later on I got a demo of the newest version of the iPhone app and it worked just as well but also had Allmusic, Youtube and Wikipedia links for me. Crazy neat. Thanks to Suzanne for showing it to me!

Sample Tagger is exactly what I want for sample organization. Only problem? Loading and saving doesn’t work (works on some files, not on others). I’m frustratedly staring at C# tutorials now and thinking about all the time I could waste making my own. Ugh.

One exhaustive search and some tireless tagging later, my sample library dreams are mostly realized. The winner? MediaMonkey 3.0 beta. Voila:

MediaMonkey 3 adds support for multiple genres and a “track browser” similar to the one I like in foobar. It doesn’t work exactly as I want — I’d like to have two genre columns and be able to select, say “drums” and “kick” and have it exclusively display samples that are tagged “drums” AND “kick”. But it doesn’t — it shows any that are tagged drums OR any that are tagged kick. But doing keyword or keyword -> album is still a great improvement over simple directory hierarchies.

It’s also really helpful rating samples that I use frequently. MediaMonkey 3 also supports multiple libraries, all the file formats under the sun, drag and drop to Ableton Live works good and it’s totally free, woooo.

And here for your benefit are the results of my many media player experiences trying to find the right sample organization client:

foobar2000 v0.9.5 – Just… complicated. Need foo_custominfo to handle WAV format genre metadata. Then that data doesn’t work in the facets view, etc, etc. I’m sure some foobar hacker could make it do what I want, but I don’t have the time or energy.

musikCube – Has facet view, does drag and drop, doesn’t do multiple genres.

Winamp – Sort of does what I want with enough wrestling — though the interface is a little retarded in the mind. But it won’t do sample drag and drop to Ableton Live, so you’re out.

wxMusic – Crashed reading in my media library and gave me lots of warnings that it couldn’t read certain WAV files.

mp3rat – mp3rat only does MP3s I guess. Imagine that.

I just saved you a lot of thankless work. Enjoy!

With completing all recording and sequencing on my next album and me regaining my enthusiasm for making new music, a complete sample library reset is in order. I’m a sample hoarder but my current setup (30-40 gigs of loops and samples in d:\music\samples\ subdirectories) has always been awful. The hierarchy’s all wrong and it sucks to browse. For a long time I’ve wanted a del.icio.us tagging style sample browser but I understand it’s a limited market.

But lately I’ve been using the latest beta of foobar2000 for my mp3 listening and organization. One thing I totally love about it is the facet view:

You can enter a search query or click in any of the panels (you can choose what tag you want each facet to be based on) and it narrows down the other panels based on your selection or search query. It’s really fantastic and makes it easy to explore your collection.

So a light bulb went off last night: this is exactly what I want for my samples! With some help from the foobar2000 forums I set up another copy of foobar and had it index my sample directories. Big problem: foobar saves all the metadata to the actual audio files — .WAV files don’t support genre metadata. Boned.

I’ve been scrabbling around trying to make foobar do what I want with various plugins but it’s a pain in the ass. Now I’m on to trying other media players…