dangerouslyawesome

I'm Alex Hillman, the co-founder of IndyHall and a guy who makes things better in Sunny Philadelphia.

I work on Beanstalk, Postmark, and DynamicWear.

I think technology is cool, but people are infinitely cooler.

Y.A.S.W.

You guessed it, that stands for Yet Another Social Website. I stumbled across a very promising social website today, http://www.splicemusic.com/. Splice is doing a number of very cool things. First off, it’s providing a nice pile of sounds and samples…next, its providing a pretty slick multi track mixing console, a-la fruity loops (or a severly dumbed-down version of garage band). Then, once you’ve used all of these toys to mix up a sweet track, it ties in a social networking community for sharing and swapping new tracks. What’s the twist?

Creative Commons.

From their FAQ page: Most amazing things were built For the sake of creativity, we think it's important to share. This is why Splice encourages and fully supports Creative Commons licensing. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share. All sounds on this site are protected with an Attribution Creative Commons license. This means that other people can use your sounds - but only if they give you credit. If you would like to read more about how this works, we recommend checking out The Creative Commons FAQ.

Sweet! So the guys at Splice know what’s going on. Not only do they give you everything licensed under CC, but they give you all kinds of cool tools for providing your own materials….both audio upload, and a recorder (mic or line in) built into the flash interface. Pretty hot.

Oh did i mention this is all 100% FREE?

Sure, Splice has that snazzy “beta” nomer on it. But what web 2.0 (read “social” website) product wouldnt? This one really deserves it…there’s a solid base of samples to play with, a good pile of users to swap with already…the only real “beta” thing about it is some of the more rich features, which are to come according to their documentation, haven’t been fully tested yet.

This has a ton of potential, and I’ll definately be keeping my eye on it.

cause you start out stealing songs, then you're robbing liquor stores, and selling crack, and running over school kids with your car

I fully support weird al and his new track, ‘Don’t download this song”. More importantly, I support his decision to fuel the irony of his track by making it a free download from myspace. The song, to the tune of an 80′s “we are the world” style song (no direct parody, just a thematic parody) is cleverly written, and echoes tones of the South Park Episode in which bands, including Metallica, join stan and his band in a strike against playing until people agree to stop downloading their music for free. Their motivation? To make sure that rock stars don’t have to live their lives in “semi-luxury”. Al puts another spin on the track as well, but I wont spoil the fun for you. Enjoy, and pre-order your copy of “Straight Outta Lynwood” now.

Dance-Rock resurgence

After a quick trip to the Jersey shore last night/today to party a bit with some friends, I did some quick catchup with my room-mate Jay. We haven’t had an whole lot of time to chat since he got back from London last week, so part of our conversation was some media syntonization. I got him into our new movies being hosted on my Mac Mini media center…he reciprocated with some new tunes. Jay’s a music industry major at Drexel, and since he has an incredible passion for good music (and a collection of tracks thats pretty mind blowing). Two new albums found their way onto my iPod tonight:

Rock Kills Kid Men, Women, & Children

Both of these bands are part of a relatively recent genre recreation, which we like to call “dance rock”. Original members of this genre include bands like Depeche Mode and more upbeat tunes from The Cure. More recently bringing the genre some massive attention would be The Killers, whose album Hot Fuss always makes me want to get drunk on wine and dance around in my underwear. Not that I do, but thats the kind of fun that I visualize along with their songs. Anyway, Rock Kills Kid reminds me a lot of The Killers. Their album Are You Nervous? is very fun, fast, and listenable. Men, Women, & Children do something different with the genre…there’s still alot of twangy fast guitar riffs, but some of their sounds remind me more of recent favorite of mine, Panic! at the Disco (whom I’m going to see next weekend at Festival Pier in Philadelphia).

I really like having Jay back in town for a lot of reasons, but his musical recommendations to keep my listening habits fresh (and in turn, helping me continue to seem cool) rank near the top of the list of things he’s good for .