Slashdot

My story was posted, announcing the new name of OpenBeos. I am honored to have submitted the name that made it.

I think this marks the first day of OpenBeos becoming more than a 'clone' of BeOS, and secures its position as a viable OS choice for the future.

Congratulations to everyone, because this will have some positive wide-ranging effects on computing for all! Long live Haiku!

Awhile back, Slashdot had a request for interview questions for Bill Evans in a story called, "Ask a Music Producer". For reasons unknown (I'd guess he was just too busy), he never responded to the interview. He did, however, send lil' ol' me an email answering my questions. I've meant to post this for awhile, but for reasons unknown (I must have been too busy :), I haven't. Here it is in all its brief glory. My questions are italicized.

I don't think I'll get to your question in the interview, but I wanted to answer them.

As a producer, I'm guessing you use p2p to nab some songs that may be in the back or your head and that you would like to duplicate the 'feel' of aspects of a certain producer's style. How has p2p affected your production style? Has it helped solidify ideas, or bogged you down with distractions?

You're exactly right, and it has helped. I plan to get satellite radio, which will probably be a better system for me.

I am currently in the process of removing my music from buymusic.com , who acquired it and is selling it illegally.[me: see a previous Journal Entry for details] What resources do independent artists have when fighting against the very industry that professes to protect musicians? Is copyright infrigement a one way street leading straight to the bank for large companies?

You raise an interesting point about the (little-mentioned) copyright infringement by large record companies who illegally sell works and/or don't pay the artist. It's something I deal with more than infrequently.

As for resources, I would start with ASCAP or BMI (whichever you belong to). There may be additional legal services for musicians, but I'm afraid I don't know about them -- hopefully one of the above organizations will know more.

We're fortunate in that we have our lawyers for dealing with these issues, but are far from 100% successful even when the record company is clearly in the wrong.

Keep me updated on your situation and I'll try to help.

As a publicist, do you see distribution via p2p as a growing trend for your more/less established artists?

I'm not sure what you mean by growing (for me or the industry?). I've been using P2P to market my artists for several years now. I think it's critical, and for me there is no relative importance in regard to an artist's established market presence.

I notice that the link to Neil's site only provides small samples of music.

LOL. Yeah, I know. I just started with Neal last week. That will all change.

Do you encourage making entire songs available at low bitrate samples? Does p2p make this a moot point?

I can't make a specific, across-the-board recommendation. As a base line, though, all my artists release one song from each CD as an extra-high quality audio file -- for free download and distribution. Depending on the artist, where we are in the album promotion cycle (and other factors) there may be more released.

I'm not a fan of low bit-rate stuff because I don't see a strong value for the consumer. But that's just my opinion, and I certainly don't think there's a right or wrong. That's just my own style.

Bill

-- Bill Evans
Media Relations
Numavox Records
Web: www.numavox.com

It feels good to scoop the Slashdot eds... :)

Well, here I am with an update on what's up - You may have seen this story that I'm reprinting here.

I just happened to see a post [slashdot.org] earlier on /. mentioning this. I happened to look up my old band, The Lovejoys (from Mpls, MN - all others on the net are newer fakes :P )

My record is on there [buymusic.com] It is also on CD NOW [amazon.com] but that was during the contract and all cool with us. I don't have the contract (another member of the band has it) and I don't remember what it says. I haven't spoken to the other guys yet, but I'm pretty sure that contract ran out awhile ago.

Every song you buy off of buymusic.com is not paying the artists, that's for sure. And I don't know how Orchard [theorchard.com] could even have copies to sell, we sent it to them to distribute; they aren't manufacturers.

We paid for that record out of pocket, and still have a zillion. :( If you like the samples here [amazon.com], let me know and I'll get you a CD. We still have boxes of the album, since the band went down right after releasing it. Ah, the sad stories of Minneapolis...

It seems as though people dig the CD, so I am sending them out for $5, plus mailing. If you would like one, email me or visit theschmoejoes.com.(I'm in the process of setting it up, so if you're in a hurry ;), email away. I am also looking into CDBaby for selling these things - anyone out there have first-hand experience?

I also would like to announce "Internet Crack" of the first order.

Pixeltees.com. This is a great website (runs on Linux, heh) that lets you make your own t-shirt designs ala cafepress.com. The 'catch' if you will, is that you have 128x128 pixels (big ol' Atari 2600 pixels) to work with. This makes coming up with a design a little tougher. Needless to say, I have been spending/wasting lots of time making designs with the little shockwave 'paint' program. There is a 'moderation' system of sorts; you can run through the 10,000 plus shirts and rate them 1 to 5, and sort by ratings and keywords.

If you find a shirt you like, you can send 15 bucks to pixeltees, and they will send it off to you.

The nifty thing is that after 6 shirts, the artist starts to earn money (1 to 2 dollars). There is no way anyone will get rich off of this scheme, but it is more than most musicians get per CD with a label deal.

I would be shirking my duty as a t-shirt whore if I didn't link to my store.

Help me, O /.ers! I have been looking for months(year) for the windows(95/98) software for the Northgate Omnikey Keyboard.

FTP searches have come up with nothing except OS/2 drivers and the DOS software - the windows software is nowhere that I can find :( and as we may all know, Northgate has been 6 feet under for years.

As I have a *pile* of these keyboards, the software would come in rather handy, especially since I had it at one time and know the nifty things it can do.

Help me /.ers, you're my only hope - and there could be a Omnikey in your future ;)

I thought I'd bring /.ers up to date on some exciting things going on with BeOS. Yellowtab's CTO Bernd Korz will will demostrate Zeta, YellowTAB's nextgen BeOS in Tokyo, Japan on April 19th. Blueeyed OS has a snazzy new website and is ready to release a 120 meg demo cd of their Knoppix Linux-kernel based BeOS. However, they need someone to host it. Any brave users out there? Perhaps BitTorrent could help, as with the recent RH9 ISO distribution. Finally, OpenBeOS has been busy behind the scenes, with steady code releases. If you'd like to try BeOS on for size, you can download it here or the MAX edition with additional drivers and software.