burrokeet

I think their current culture is toxic for both. Their hardware is polished but IMHO has prioritized form over function at an extreme level, and seems to be developed in complete isolation from the user base.

+1 for the slack add - christopher [at] tunecrew [dot] com

Thanks - well I can still use all the performance bumps from the add-ons even if I stay in 10.7, but I'll let you know how it goes with 10.8 to start with.

This is one of the reasons people purchase the Mac Pro, so you can stick cards in them (audio, video, data capture, networking, RAID, etc.)

The Mac Pro is a beast - I am still running a first gen MacPro1,1 - it's got an IDE drive installed in the second optical bay, four 3.5 SATA drives in the main bays and 2 2.5 SATA drives connected to the extra SATA connectors hidden under the front fan. At various times it has a hardware RAID card, extra FW+USB card, extra video card, video capture card, etc. I'm just about to grab a pair of 4 core xeons, extra ram, a Radeon hd5770 and some SSD drives - flash it to a MacPro2,1 and I can run Mavericks on it, with a Geekbench of about 10k. US$400 for the upgrades not including the SSDs.

I think Apple has really dropped the ball with the new Mac Pro - it is like the Cube, it looks cool but the Mac Pro is not a machine that requires form over function - people buy them to upgrade them, swap things in and out, stick them in racks, etc. Thunderbolt is not a replacement for pro use expandability - it just means a lot more cost + a lot more (very expensive) cables + a performance hit.

A good excuse for Apple to discontinue the Pro line eventually though - "hey we made this great new machine, but nobody bought it, so sorry"

Does this mean you have chosen not to work with labels (indie or otherwise) or just that the majority of takeup has been from unsigned artists?

A couple interesting places:

DJ Tech Tools forums (a lot of stuff about controllerism and related hacking topics) - http://forums.djtechtools.com/

Create Digital Music - http://www.createdigitalmusic.com/

That's very interesting- I really like the buy/sell aspect for projects instead of just the usual "find a cofounder" thing.

First comment, however, is I don't see search anywhere- do you have to login to get this?

They signed with a label because of the advance first and foremost.

70 cents * # of downloads is how lots of artists make money nowadays.

I don't think many people are going to sign a legal agreement and then purposely claim other people's songs. The legal and financial liability from that is huge and much more direct.

You are incorrect - a music "track" consists of two separate copyright - one is the copyright in the sound recording (the audio that you hear), the other is the copyright in the underlying composition embodied in the sound recording (in other words the lyrics, the arrangement, the composition of the music).

There is no compulsory license for sound recordings in any territory for downloads or interactive streaming. You have to explicit permission from the copyright owner to make the recording available for download or interactive streaming, i.e. you can choose when to listen to it.

There is a compulsory license in most territories for the composition side, under certain specific conditions, in which an entity like Grooveshark would obtain a mechanical license for the composition from the copyright holder of the composition (usually music publishers) in advance of its public availability, and then account and pay royalties for its use. This requires Grooveshark to know the songwriters, publishers, and splits of each work, which is not something that comes from the user uploads. It may be the case that their terms of use pass this responsibility to the uploader.

In short, however, you need sets of permission (sound recording and composition) to legally distribute music for download or interactive streaming.

By "directly assigned" I mean the case where Grooveshark and a third party rightsholder (record label, artist, etc.) have a deal in place covering the respective track.

Here's a suggestion to help artists - for every track downloaded which is not directly assigned to a copyright holder, put an amount equal to the industry average for US DPDs, say 70 cents, into escrow, along with 9.1 cents for the US mechanical license, and hold it there for three years or until the copyright holders come calling for it. In addition, supply the copyright holders with the specific details of the uploader. That would help artists.

You might be curious to know that the Burger King in Half Way Tree (a major crossroads in Kingston for those who don't know) had something like the largest grossing grand opening of any BK in the world when they opened on New Year's Eve in 1988. Funny place Jamaica - Pepsi, Blackberry and Burger King instead of Coke, iPhone and McDonalds.

I was referring to using something like Amazon services for rendering

Except that you would have to pipe giga/terabytes of data to/from the cloud - that is why lots of in house rendering and catalogue systems use Fibre Channel and similar technologies - one of the bottlenecks is I/O from the workstation

Audio professionals editing large surround sessions with lots of plugins and lots of tracks for one (plus you need 3-4 or more PCIe slots to stick Pro Tools or similar DSP cards in). These need as much horsepower as you can throw at them.

Video professionals doing rendering or compositing, ditto.

Not to mention the video cards available, plus being able to throw four full size drives directly on the SATA bus.

Instead of Beluga, how about launching a nice tool that with one click lets content owners remove all of their unlicensed content from Grooveshark, block all of it from being re-uploaded ever again, and send us a cheque for any revenues earned when it was there.

no mostly Java with smatterings of C, Perl, PHP, Python + Obj C

Kingston, Jamaica also, and the Caribbean is NOT South America

Nick Parlante is a GREAT instructor!

cool class even though I failed my EE qual session with Prof Widom :)

maybe the best candidate would be the one who hacked into their blog and and added a few thousand votes to their own post...

having said that, i'm not sure i would want to do business with a company with a hackable backend at all...

oh i like that idea a lot!

I have prey installed in stand-alone mode, but instead of having it check for a url, i just have cron running it every 30 minutes and emailing the photo and screenshot and other info to a gmail account i made. I figure if it gets stolen, I might not have time (or remember) to turn on the url before its too late.

I also have the firmware pw set (Macbook Pro) - not sure how easy this it to circumvent - if you can't circumvent it then you can't reformat that easily.

full fare economy will mean fully refundable and changeable with no fees etc. discounted business/first class will be just like discounted economy - not refundable, and not changeable w/o fees - the latter can definitely be cheaper if you don't mind the constraints.

I understand that, but they can still do Pro as well w/o hurting their bottom line - plus IMHO there are LOTS of implicit and indirect benefits to Apple overall by having the Pro community still being Apple evangelists.

On the other side of it, if they are not really going to do Pro, then just don't do it all and stop mucking around and pretending - sell off the line to someone who can handle it properly - what they did by EOLing Shake was terrible terrible terrible

Apple has the resources to own a big piece of the pro media market too - Mac Pros, Final Cut Pro, Color, Shake, Final Cut Server, Logic, XSan, OS X Server, etc. - they keep systematically destroying these for some reason.

I think Apple's corporate culture and ego, however, doesn't lend itself at all to this market - this market requires communication and feedback between developers and end-users, and roadmaps of upgrades and bug fixes and features, all things that Apple doesn't do for the most part.

All in all it is a shame in any event - I had a friend who runs a video editing department with 20 editors, and they literally just completed a very large Final Cut Server install a few weeks before FCPX (not Final Cut Server compatible) and the very sudden EOL of Final Cut Server. Of course it will work fine for a while, until hardware/OS render it obsolete/incompatible, but what about bug fixes, support, etc?

you pay them zero, but from the point of view of TuneCore it costs money to store and deliver your content, account to you, run a website, etc.

eMusic has a fairly low payout compared to other services offering DPDs (digital phonographic downloads aka an mp3 file) - in the range of 10 to 30 cents a track depending on a number of circumstances. On the other hand, they generally do good volume (often number 3 after iTunes and Amazon) and you can look at not distributing on eMusic as an opportunity cost - i.e., persons have paid already for a subscription on eMusic, so they are unlikely to take additional money and buy your music elsewhere if it is not available on eMusic.

eMusic's real fail is that there are one of the very few DSP (internet music retailers) that only account quarterly... almost everyone else is monthly.

the compulsory rate in the US right now is 9.1 cents for songs up to 5 minutes in length, and 24 cents for ringtones.

syncs right now go from free to maybe 50k, unless it is a massive song (thing the Beatles) in a massive campaign or feature. the average network tv sync right now is prob around 5 grand all-in, meaning 2.5k goes to the owner of the sound recording copyright (the label or artist) and 2.5k goes to the owner of the composition (the songwriter(s) or publisher(s)).

Music publishers can take anywhere from 10% (for an admin deal) to 50% (for a co-publishing deal). Bigger percentages involve advances (recoupable payments against future royalties), but also much longer terms (5-10+ years).

Songwriters don't get publishing deals unless their songs are being performed or sold, and there are lots and lots of indie publishers out there, along with the majors as you mention.

In many territories outside of the US, artists and master recording copyright owners do get paid for public performance - in the UK for example PPL is one society that pays some of these rightsholders for public performance.