Milieu

Note: I thought I’d do something a little bit different for my 200th post, so here’s some free advertising for the online music stores I really love.

I discuss a lot of free music here, whether it be covered by a creative commons license or merely placed in the public domain. That’s not to say I don’t buy a lot of music, I buy more than ever. Of course, the decline of independent record stores means most people go as far as HMV and Virgin to buy their music. Luckily, the Internet has provided independent stores with a way to survive. And while I say survive, I actually mean kick ass.

Boomkat

Boomkat, based in Manchester, have been running for seven years now. I’ve been using them online for over two years, and they’ve never let me down. I’ve bought some really diverse stuff off them, and they source some of the most interesting contemporary music and electronica you can find in the UK. They recently started stocking the Buddha Machine and wrote a great editorial on it. In fact, their editorials get better every time. The latest is coverage of Fonal Records, written by Adam Park, in which he interviews Sami Sänpäkkilä and Paavoharju.

Boomkat have a flash-based preview jukebox, which you can leave on repeat with any tracks you find on the site. Only 2-3 tracks are generally accessible from any one release, but they’re high quality previews.

Juno

Juno are a dance music specialist who are based in London. They only show what’s in stock, so you don’t find something rare and get excited before noticing they don’t have it. It’s a policy that might work for you, although I suspect it confuses new users when they find something they want apparently doesn’t exist. Juno offers DJ specific material, collections of samples and breaks, as well as digital downloads:

You can buy downloads either on their own, or as part of a vinyl or CD order. The digital part of your order will be available to download as soon as you have completed the checkout process, and your vinyl or CDs will be despatched by mail within 24 hours.

Juno allow you to preview quite a lengthy slice of any track.

Bleep.com and Warpmart

Bleep.com is one of the best ways of filling up your new iPod: the tracks are cheap, high quality (they even specify how they encoded them), and they have no DRM! You’re free to copy tracks you buy to your iPod, phone, car, whatever you want.

Warpmart is Warp’s online CD/vinyl/t-shirt/DVD store. I’ve always found them to be quick, and you really need to keep an eye on their newsletter because they occasionally have exclusive pre-release deals for Warp artists. I’ve got a few nice extras with Boards of Canada releases off Warpmart.

BeatPick

BeatPick is the most unique site of the bunch, with creative commons music available for purchase. They want you to use their music for your non-commercial projects, and there’s no DRM. They’re trying to do digital music distribution in a fair way, and succeeding. I recently wrote areview of BeatPick which profiles them in more detail.

More?

Leave a comment if you have an independent music specialist you love, I’d love to hear about more!

1. Mastering

Generally, tracks should be mastered so they have consistent levels with respect to each other. Normalising to 0db is definitely not advised: some players or burning software may think the audio has clipped, or they may even boost the sound slightly and cause it to clip (iTunes can do this under certain circumstances when Sound Check is on).

I’ve never heard of netlabels mastering material. In my experience they release what’s given to them. I really think the larger labels should consider finding a generous soul to master tracks for them.

If you have to master your own work, start with a good audio editor, filters, equalizers and compressors. There’s a lot of free software and open source software to help you, as well as cheap commercial software that does a good job. If you’re using a Mac, Apple give you some basic AudioUnits which you can use as well.

Here’s some free and cheap tools I recommend:

DSP Quattro - a cheap, easy to use audio editor.

Audacity - an open source audio editor.

The Blockfish compressor - this can actually work well for creating subtle saturation in your mixes, it’s also a very easy to use compressor and it’s free.

Here are some articles to get you started:

Computer Music Magazine’s article on mastering.

Bob Katz has papers online, and is generally considered an authoritative figure on the subject.

2. Presentation

ID3 tags are something that is inherently important to the medium. If your tags are messy and inconsistent this may actually cause people to listen to your music less, as it gets lost in their collection and becomes hard to find. Keep genres sensible and the album and artist name consistent.

There’s no denying people like covers. Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of labels using beautiful photographic covers to compliment their work. If you have to prepare a cover yourself, keep it simple. Some kind people make CDs for their friends to share your work, so consider putting URLs on the covers and make everything legible.

3. Don’t forget your audience

Your audience is playing music on their computers, portable players or burning it to CD. Make their lives easier by keeping tracks sensible lengths and not using hidden tracks. You may want to consider breaking up your 60 minute ambient drone into movements, this makes it easier to download and has several other benefits for iPod users, although I understand if you don’t wish to do this.

Hidden tracks: a huge gap of silence then the band running about drunk in Dublin throwing up. This will only serve to annoy people who are listening to playlists of 10,000 songs. Suddenly, during the commute, they realise they’ve been listening to silence for 5 minutes thanks to your ‘amusing’ hidden track. This just doesn’t work unless you actually want to annoy people, or perhaps pull a John Cage.

Remember, the most popular portable music player is the iPod, which loads parts of songs in memory off the disk. The iPod’s cache, and battery, generally works best with smaller tracks. See this Apple tech note for more information.

4. Formats

Releasing different versions of your music to suit people with less bandwidth is useful, but people get confused with too many options, and most don’t care about your esoteric copyleft encoded format. If you’re going to offer Ogg, FLAC or any other non-MP3 format, make sure you describe what this format is and what it will play on. Conversely, a lot of open source software advocates are highly aware of the availability of free content and the plight of sites like archive.org, so providing them with formats like Ogg that suit their niche may be beneficial.