Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

As I mention in the post below, I haven’t made updates to this page in quite some time and I just noticed that the last song I posted an update about is not the last song I’ve posted most recently.  In fact a lot has happened since then.  To keep things tidy, here is a SoundCloud player with all my currently published tracks in it:

A few notes about the most recent additions:

• Sleepy Daemons:  Added just before the new year, this track started as a non-percussive ambient, creepy thing.  Out of the blue I decided to add a lot of fast drums to it and things just popped to life.  Not sure where it will go next but I’m waiting for auditions for vocals to come in.
• Untitled Doodle/Ringtone:  I did everything in it but wouldn’t consider it finished just yet.  It features my first guitar performance recording and some cool effects processing.
• The Hare:  Again, 100% self-produced.  This one primarily features a new filter effects found in Reason 6 called The Alligator, an effect that’s more formally referred to as a “trance gate”.
• Delirium:  This started as a simple piano melody, which I put through the Alligator.  I then added a somewhat hiphop drum loop which I played with using a roll-echo effect to ramp the echo on and off.  This was eventually replaced with live drums, performed by r00m237.  Vocals came in by complete surprise thanks to a lady in California who goes by the name Deanna (thank you!).
• Document 22:  This features flute by Matt Unger and some guitars by Matt Christensen.

All my music is available for free under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.  You are free to download, share, remix and use this music for non-commercial purposes.

My uncles’ brother-in-law contacted me a couple weeks ago and asked if I might be up for trying to write some background music to go along with a magic show he will be performing at the Rialto Theater in Loveland, Colorado tonight.

You can read more about the show by clicking here.

After hours of drinking stimulants and skipping sleep, this is the result, weighing in at roughly 13 minutes in length.  It is actually a combination of a new song with an old one that I originally wrote while living in Iraq during the later half of 2009.  It is a long song so you might wanna go to the restroom before you hit play.  Feel free to download the WAV of this song for top notch quality.

Magic Show by David Steinlage

I’ve officially “released” this song and don’t have much planned in the way of making changes to it.  If I did, I’ll release it under a new title.  Using the player below, you can download the high quality WAV file of this song for free.  Enjoy!

Side Scroller by David Steinlage

Preamble:   The techniques described in this guide are intended for educational purposes and should not be used to bypass copyright restrictions or download copyrighted material without consent from the respective owners/licensees.  In the below example I use a track by Nine Inch Nails for this demonstration for two reasons:

1.  I already own this album (in fact I own every Nine Inch Nails album; I’m what you would call a “loyal fan“).
2.  The album was published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.  This means I could give you a copy of the song because I purchased it.  Look out for musicians who publish their works under licenses like this.

So let’s get to using this Youtube Downloader thingy!

First, download the software from Download.com by clicking here.

Run/Open the file once you have downloaded it to install the software.  Once installed, you’ll have a new shortcut in your Start Menu.  This is what the program looks like when it’s running:

Leave this window up and go visit Youtube.  Find a video you like and then copy the URL from the address bar at the top…..

…into the first box in Youtube Downloader, like this:

Now click Download.

Once the video is downloaded you can convert it to an MP3 by changing the selector at the top from “Download a video…” to “Convert or play a video…”, like this:

Now all you have to do is click the Browse button to search for the file you just downloaded, and change the “Convert Video to:” box to read MP3, like this:

Now click Convert.  It will ask you about quality settings (and of course it’s best to just leave it on “Best Quality” and click okay).  That’s pretty much it.  A conversion process will happen, taking perhaps 30 seconds,  and you’ll be given an MP3 file that you can play on pretty much any portable audio player out there.  It’s up to you if you want to delete the original video file.

A word about piracy/file-sharing

Piracy/file-sharing can be a very polarizing topic to talk about, especially when the conversation occurs between professional musicians who make their living off writing music.  On one side of the fence you’ve got your Lars Ulrich and Gene Simmons who see piracy of their music as a direct threat to music sales and thus their paycheck.  On the other side of the fence you have bands like Radiohead and musicians like Trent Reznor who see the sharing of their music as a marketing platform that can increase band exposure, increase their fan base, and subsequently increase their physical merchandise and ticket sales.  Both sides are entitled to their opinions but I lean towards the latter group when thinking about this stuff.

Along the lines of music piracy is software piracy.  There is a software developer who goes by the name Notch who created a computer game called Minecraft by himself that has earned him nearly one million dollars in under a year, and it was still in the Alpha stage when it hit that impressive number.  He has a very keen insight into piracy and I would like to suggest you check out his blog post about the topic if you have the time.  It mostly boils down to distinguishing (or debating) the difference between the loss of potential revenue versus actual revenue lost, determining a fair way to measure the differences.

In marketing there is a strategy known as “loss-leader” and pirated music could be thought of as a loss-leader for a musician who has additional products to offer, like vinyl, or limited “deluxe edition” packages, not to mention concert tickets and who knows what else (one of my favorite musicians offers up everything from autographed cover art by Strom Thorgenson to 5 hour long studio workshops with the band and their very own equipment).  Then there’s new, up-and-coming musicians who don’t yet have anything better to hope for than a chance to be listened to and are willing to let people preview their entire collection in the hopes of turning them into a loyal fan who will go buy all their albums and other merchandise someday down the road.

Shameless plug: Check out my Kompoz profile to listen/download/pirate my music.

I had a major streak of creative energy after lifting weights earlier today and made this in about 5 hours time.  It’s a work in progress.  It’s easily in there with the Psytrance genre.  Enjoy!

Some of you might know me to be a bit of a Linux geek who is a sucker for the open-source philosophy and culture.  It sure is a beautiful thing in the world of computers; using software that’s free of charge and free to modify because a bunch of people decided to give it away to the public and do whatever they want with it.   This has worked out VERY well for Linux since it began, with bored programmers using the Internet as a global workbench to approach and tinker with any software they wanted and the best results would come to the surface as a new standard, often with no money changing hands.

It’s difficult for most people to imagine doing something like this because we don’t know a thing about computer source code.  We sort of have a foggy idea about it and could boil it down to “a list of instructions for a computer to follow” and add that those instructions can be edited and improved upon by anyone.  Any description more complex than that and it starts to sound like Greek… but for this post, it’s good enough.

Now  imagine you took this model of open-participation and applied it to music production, doing it all on the Internet.  You’re a musician, you play an instrument or have a singing talent and want to find other musicians who share your musical taste.  This is difficult to do in the real world, especially if you’re stuck in Kansas like me.  Sure, it’s easy to find a Kareoke machine on any given night if you look hard enough but finding good, original, local musicians is hard.  So the next best thing is to go online and (in a way that’s reminiscent of posting personal ads looking for a significant other) post your own creations/recordings to be judged by others… perhaps even loved by others, modified by others, built upon by others until eventually the little tune or melody you started with turns into a fleshed out composition that sounds very professional.

This is exactly the kind of situation I’ve found myself in during the last 3 weeks after I did some searching on google for “online music collaboration” and discovered Kompoz.com and indabamusic.com.

I signed up for both at the same time and uploaded the same music (three songs of my own) to both sites.  All I had to do after that was sit back and wait for others to possibly like my music and wish to add something to it, or not.  Over on Kompoz, in a matter of just 2 or 3 hours, a fellow from Latvia named Nikitt had uploaded a new guitar track to one of my songs on Kompoz.  Within a few days after that I was getting emails from people wanting to perform lyrics to the track.    A few days later, another astonishing guitar track was added by a dude from Florida who calls himself Grumpy.  And in all this time, none of the tracks I uploaded to Indaba got even a hint of attention or interest from anybody.  So either they think my music sucks over at that website or (more likely) the user interface for indaba is a mess that makes it difficult for bored musicians to find new projects.  So  maybe Indaba would work for you but it certainly didn’t work for me.

But enough about Indaba failing me.  Kompoz on the other hand has really bolstered my dream of writing a lot of good music.  It’s just so much easier to be able to upload something and for someone else to come along and add an idea to it.  It really is a lot of fun; I would tell my fiance Kristin that it’s like Christmas every day because you never know what you’re going to get.  This happens in part because some of the people who use the site live on the other side of the planet and leave stuff online while you’re asleep and when you wake up you might be surprised to find new recordings uploaded or at least some productive comments.

So this is what I’ve been doing with some of my spare time lately and just wanted to share.  You can check out my Kompoz profile and projects by clicking here.  If you happen to be a musician I encourage you to join Kompoz.com with a free membership, but if you’re serious about music production it pays to get a premium membership for $50 a year so you can exchange high quality WAV files and even publish music for commercial release and get royalties out of it.

I have my M-Audio and Yamaha keyboards hooked up and ready for me to bang out some tunes yet haven’t brought myself to move forward on previous tracks I’ve started work on.  However, I have stumbled across some really neat music someone else made.  I discovered it while watching this video of an ant-shaped robot:

After sifting through the comments for another video by the same robot-building guru I found out that the song in this video is called “Parks On Fire” by Trifonic.

I’ve just purchased their deluxe digital copy of two of their CDs for 8 dollars.  You can stream/preview the whole thing with this little jukebox I’ve embedded here.  If you enjoy it, show your support for an independent musical group and buy their album!

Hey there, ladies and gentleman! I’ve made some great progress on a song I recently posted a sliver up about a month ago (and have since deleted because it is now an obsolete sample)  Back then all I had laid down were tracks for the drums and the lead flute.  A LOT more has gone into it since then.  Though it is not yet finished, I thought I’d give you a newer extended sample.

Click to download “Flow” by David Steinlage (Extended sample)

“Flow” by David Steinlage is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available via the author. www.davestechsupport.com/contact.html.

Recently I purchased a refurbished (and cheap) MP3 player from my favorite gadget retailer TigerDirect.com;  a Sansa e250V2 (or so the back of the unit itself says).  The device itself only stores 2GB of data but comes with an expansion slot that can accept MicroSD flash memory cards, so I purchased an extra 4GB chip on the side.

Unfortunately, I have come to learn that when you get a refurb, it’s possible the manufacturer has replaced the case on the outside with one that has a slightly different model number.  Long story short, I had found that this was actually an e200v1 (or perhaps an e250v1) and its firmware doesn’t support flash memory cards that are SDHC (e.g., anything over 2GB in size).  Even if I had upgraded to the latest version of the firmware available for this player, it still wouldn’t have fixed the problem.

Now for the good news:  While I was digging around for a fix, I came across an open-source software project called Rockbox.  Rockbox is a replacement firmware that will run on several types of MP3 players, and one of the features I was hoping to gain by installing it was support for SDHC cards.  What I got was a hell of a lot more than I expected.

For starts, this OS loads FAST.  Not only that but it came with a bunch of extra applications, visual themes, and GAMES!  Yeah baby!  I couldn’t believe it when I loaded up a variant of id Software’s DOOM on my cheap $30 MP3 player.  There’s no other way to say it but Rockbox is one really awesome piece of software and I’m really happy I found it!  THANK YOU ROCKBOX!

I bought a new keyboard recently and have been spending a good amount of time every day working on some new music.  It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for about 10 years now and am now confident about being able to do it quickly and make it sound good.

Anyway, the latest track is called Ridin’ The Ditch Witch (click on the link to download the MP3; 256 kbps CBR).  I would call it classic rock music with just a dash of psy-trance.  Check it out, enjoy and please leave compliments if you like it.

“Ridin’ The Ditch Witch” by David Steinlage is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.davestechsupport.com/contact.html.