When I blogged about Music XRay being a scam, I seriously did not expect anyone to give two hoots or half a holler ’bout it… but for whatever reason some do and thus, I’ve been forced to wade through various comments and emails about it. And seeing as folks are coming here for that anyway, I though I should extend the literal and also mention that Sonic Bids is also most definitely a scam. This is of course only my opinion and you should judge for yourself but I’ll share a bit of my experience with Sonic Bids.

I book bands for a popular music festival in a major dairy producing state and every year, SonicBids contacts me looking for us to use their service to accept band submissions. The first year they contacted us, though I had read the bad reviews, I decided to have a look for myself so I signed up my band to test it out. The spam started immediately and was unrelenting. Now this should be all you really need to know as no legit business would spam folks and is an excellent indication of the kind of company you’re dealing with. Still, I spent a bit of time checking out SonicBids.

I was really being too nice to them… but it’s not all their fault, they’re only enabling the scam; promoters are allowing the scam. Let me cut to the chase: legit promoters don’t charge bands to submit themselves for a gig. Period.

But on top of that, the site just sucks. I mean, as a promoter, I couldn’t easily search through the bands on their site and find ones I’d be interested in hiring. Searching for genre was worthless, no good way to search by location, keywords didn’t return reasonable results, etc…. So I couldn’t and wouldn’t use their site to find an artist. Which makes it necessary to let the bands find me… which just happens to support their paradigm.

The icing on the cake was when the SonicBids recruiter called again (and they will hound you forever; they still call every year) and explained that “the submission process can be a revenue stream”. I told him we wouldn’t be using their service and cited the reasons above.

Long story only slightly longer: technology has made it easier than ever for musicians to market themselves (for free even) and promoters to find the bands that will make their events a success. If SonicBids actually cared about helping bands and promoters connect, they could use technology towards that goal but instead they used it to reinvent payola.

Today, as I was hauling yet another “Shopper Stopper” (a junk-snail-mail newspaper in Madison, WI) to the recycle bin, I decided to take a look at and see if there was a way to stop their delivery. None was listed, so I turned to Google…

To stop delivery, just call Madison Newspapers’ customer service number at 608-252-6363, select option 5, and ask them to stop it. Should stop in 1-2 weeks. Thanks Google…

In the news this week is that Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion. If this deal goes through, two things will happen. 1. It totally won’t matter. 2. Microsoft will have just bought their own defeat to Google in the “online wars” (for the sake of the argument, please just pretend there is an online war). Here’s the bare-bones story…

Yahoo limps along and stays afloat because they have folks over there making pretty good decisions on what to do. They have their bases covered: search; mail; chat; news; calendar; groups; etc…. Yahoo’s problem is they totally suck at execution. Everything they’ve built or revamped in the last few years has sucked big time. They are fragile and teetering on their own demise.

Now along comes Microsoft with their secret-bunkers full of cash, looking to buy themselves some online big-boy pants. Luckily (and by luckily, I mean unfortunately), they suck at both decisions and execution, and they have proven they understand the internets about as well as George Bush understands… well… seemingly anything. Slightly long story, slightly longer… when Microsoft starts making and executing decisions for Yahoo, Yahoo will die.

Of course everyone gets it… this deal makes a TON of sense for Microsoft, especially if they were competent. Which they are not. So while we’ll have a ton of marginally interesting stories, detailing the changes (and ensuing failures) Microsoft will be making to Yahoo. And allowing folks the opportunity to pick apart each decision ad nauseum. We will all yawn and click for the sports page.

Final score, Google: Win; Microsoft: Not-Win.

Bluegrass is known for it’s hot pickers, playing faster than ears can hear. It can make learning tunes a bit difficult. Luckily, we no longer have to ruin our records and needles, or stretch out our cassette tapes with endless rewinds. If you have iTunes on your computer, then you already have a great tool for slowing down music… AND video! It’s a little known fact… but Apple’s free QuickTime Player (installed along with iTunes) is great for slowing down your favorite audio and/or video clips. It even allows you to change the pitch so you don’t have to retune your instrument! Here’s how to do it:

1. Choose an audio or video file and open it in QuickTime Player (mp3s, wav, aif, mov, mp4, etc…)
2. In QuickTime, choose cmd-k (Mac) or ctrl-k (PC) to open the A/V Controls (or from the Windows menu)
3. Adjust the speed and/or pitch to your liking

If you don’t already have QuickTime, you can download it for free for your Mac or PC from Apple’s website. In addition, QuickTime Pro ($30 upgrade) allows you to easily set in and out points, loop edit files and more.

Also, if you have Windows Media files, download and install the free Flip4Mac’s WMP Plugin for QuickTime which then allows QuickTime to playback and slow down WMP files. And if you want to be able to open almost anything (AVI, DIVX, FLV, etc…), install Parian too!

Update!
If you’re running Snow Leopard, you have the new QuickTime X which does not have the slow down features discussed here (do feel free to join me in lobbying Apple to add these to the new player!). You can still install a compatable version of QuickTime 7 from your Snow Leopard install disc thusly:

1. Insert your Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Install DVD.
2. Open the Optional Installs folder and double-click “Optional Installs.mpkg”.
3. Select the QuickTime 7 option and click Continue.
4. QuickTime Player 7 will be installed in your Utilities folder.

It’s been a year since I have gone shopping for a new website host. I found a lot of new ones and some good tools that helped in the search. I also got a chance to preview some of the different tools used by different hosts and wanted to share my experiences.

These are the three most popular tools used by hosting companies to manage their users and servers. Although they are not all the same, they do offer much of the same services. They are also what you, the user, can use to administer your site and it’s services. In addition, these apps are used to setup user accounts on the server itself and each has there own styles and security measures. Here’s a quick rundown…
(more…)

AppleScript is a scripting language for Mac users that allows you to automate actions and applications. It is similar to other scripting languages like Perl and PHP but currently only runs on the Mac OS. What makes Applescript especially interesting is it’s ability to control many of the Mac’s applications that include support for AppleScript (eg. PhotoShop, QuickTime, The Finder, etc…). In addition, OS X has introduced Applescript Studio which is an IDE for Applescript and allows one to build fantastic Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) using another Apple development tool called Interface Builder. Together, these tools allow you to build complete stand-alone applications quickly and easily.

The bad news about AppleScript is that it’s syntax is rather confusing. It was written to read like spoken English and although this may help new users, it can be very difficult to adjust to for a programmer coming from another language. Most other scripting languages have many syntax similarities and are usually based upon C but this is not the case with AppleScript. Using the classic Apple mantra of “think different”, the writers of AppleScript decided to create a completely different syntax that is very arguably easier to learn.

For this reason, I will attempt to draw comparisons to Applescript from the viewpoint of a PHP developer. These comparisons should also be useful to developers using other languages (eg. Perl, Python) but I use PHP here because it is most familiar to me.
(more…)

I’ve been working on some object oriented PHP code and since this is a very confusing topic, I thought I would share a quick overview about PHP, OOP and classes…
(more…)

What is streaming?

Streaming is one of those buzz words that many use but few understand. Plainly, it is the “live” or “just in time” delivery of data over a network (internet/web) and is mostly associated with audio and video media. The confusion comes from people misunderstanding the difference between “downloading” a file and “streaming” a file. Let’s see if I can help clarify…
(more…)