MoCCA

Since I've asked everyone if they are going, I might as well ask here too. The Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art in New York City has an "art" festival once a year, this year on June 10th and 11th, featuring more comic book artists than you can shake a stick at. In my brain, it's just a comic book convention, all the artists who manage to get tables attempt to sell you comic books, and people wander around looking at comics, and it's in a cool old building....

My sister will be a panelist at this convention. I don't know what that means. She didn't either when I asked her.

So anyway, for more info,
http://www.moccany.org/artfest-main.html

The beauty of computers

I take a lot of pictures with my digital camera. Many of them come out blurry, or of dubious quality, and many of them I get asked to delete. I generally refuse to delete them all, because I like all my pictures of my friends. I will acknowledge to being a bad photographer, but I work on the "Take as many as possible, you'll get at least one good one" theory of photography, and a digital camera makes this possible.

However I've been searching through my image archive with a different idea. I was playing with ImageMagick, and turned one "why don't you delete that? I'm not even looking at the camera" picture into an art project.

More on music

So much to say, so few brain cells to hold all the thoughts I had inside. It's been a traumatic past few days. Death in the extended family (a close friend's mother died). Trauma with the loved one. Terrible cold such that I asked my roomates to check my pulse in the middle of the night.

Skipping all the petty details, my brain is thinking about how the web radio link I listed last week (Digitally Imported) wasn't working, so I went off to find a new radio station of similar music. Well I did (RauteMusik.fm), and everytime a DJ comes on, it's all in German, and compared to di.fm, it's a lot of commercials. On the other hand it's fun to not quite hear all the same songs over and over again (hey I like DJ Doboy but let someone else share the internet, okay?).

New blog

Now I've done it. In my travels to find links to musician approved free downloads, I've compiled my collection into a shiny new blog. I hope that it can become some kind of useful resource and that people will help me find new music.

Random tidbit I've learned: blogger.com does not have a freemusic.blogspot.com, yet they won't let me use that.

Where to find music?

I've gotten to the point where I don't buy music. I don't want CD's, why should I want more physical objects cluttering up my space? I'm not sure that I want to spend all sorts of money on iTunes or other downloadable music stores either.

But, in the interest of not exclusively haunting the murkier corners of the internet in search of questionable mp3s, I'd like to download music from people who want me to download their music. When Metallica gives press releases bemoaning people not to download their music, that's fine, I don't have to listen to it.

I know they exist. But they aren't exactly easy to find. Searching google for free mp3s brings you to many commercial links.

So in the interest of others searching for music that doesn't charge money, I'm making a list here of links that are music that people would be happy if you downloaded.

Jamendo is a record label, where all the songs are available for free download. Mostly French, but lots of wierd stuff. Can download full albums via BitTorrent, and also can listen to streaming mp3s.

Krayola Records is mostly noise, which I'm not big into, but you might be. All mp3s.

The Khavi Collective (alternate interface), is a collection of Creative Commons shared music. I haven't looked too far into these songs, but it looks promising.

Loca Records has a flash heavy, script heavy website, but if you can navigate that, you can get to the mp3s. Personally it's the type of thing that would send me back to the p2p sites.

Probably not what you are looking for, and probably not 100% legal, but I want to mention Singing Science Records. Sing these songs to all your friends and you might get wierd looks, but it's fun!

I almost forgot to mention Planet Persia. An expat community website for Iranians in Germany, they have quite a good download section of Persian DJs, many remixing reggaeton of all things. I like the music a lot. Website only available in German, and recently started requiring registration to be able to download music. I have not got my registration working yet. :( May not be 100% legal with all these remixes going on.

iRate is a program everyone should check out. It's a little slow and chunky, but what it does is download some music and you have to rate the songs. After you rate some songs, it will download more songs based on what you like, compared with what others like. While the rating system seemed to do nothing for me, it has a database of songs that are all happy to be downloaded. My favourite feature in this program is a menu item that says "Download more music". It doesn't ask you what music to download, it just goes off and downloads more music.

A downside of iRate are that it doesn't play nice with other mp3 players, so you have to leave the mp3s in the place where it knows where to find them. There is a big notice indicating that the author won't make it a plugin for iTunes or Winamp.

And my personal nitpick, it found very little music I liked. :(

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Now another option I want to mention is streaming mp3s. Like iRate, it's nice in that it introduces you to new music without asking questions. Unlike the options listed above, it can expose you to music chained by the RIAA (I'm not quite a purist about this issue to care). Although it's nice to have tons of music without sucking up your hard disk, sometimes it's hard to go back to find a song you like. You can find a million streaming mp3 sites on the internet; I'm going to mention a few of my favourites.

The first one I'm going to mention is another record label. Magnatune used to have their full catalog available via BitTorrent, but it seems now it is only available as streaming mp3.

I like KMUD, but I'm biased, I used to be a DJ there. Variable Name Dave is fun to listen to, as is Georgia (does a Jazz/Ambient show), as is the EuroBureau with Simon Frech.

I also like WERS. This radio station plays what is considered kids music from pretty much 9AM to 3PM EST everyday. It is the only radio station that I know of that regularly plays "Manamanah", "The HampsterDance Song", and "My name is Cheech and I am the school bus driver" just about every day.

I occasionally like to listen to the DNA lounge webcast. Haven't lately. The DNA lounge is a project of Jamie Zawinski, who is probably more famous for his work on Netscape and xscreensaver.

What I really listen to when everyone has left work except me, or when the house is all empty, is Digitally Imported. Specifically, I go down to the button that says "EuroDance", and when it loads in my mp3 player, it claims to be "The Finest Cheese on the net!" and I rave about the office to this fine cheese. Very fun. There are commercials on this, but they are much rarer than most radio stations, and I think it's worth it.

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If I find more stuff, I'll post it here. Please post any good stuff you've found in the comments. I'm going to keep it perfectly legal, unless there is something particularly interesting.