Category: Created

Audio, video, or otherwise consumable.

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Benny Benassi vs. Dave Winer

If you stay current on my del.icio.us links (they’re in the sidebar), you’ll have seen the latest comedic turn in the weblogs.com debacle – waxy.org is hosting a remix contest of Dave’s audio post.

Having been bitten by the remix bug a long time ago (and the recent acquisition of DJ Shadow‘s In Tune And On Time, which has live footage of Pushin’ Buttons Live), I broke out Traktor DJ Studio and browsed my library for the appropriate song to mash Dave Winer into.

Lately I had been listening to the Benny Benassi album more and more; I had originally blocked it from my consciousness as I found the single “Satisfaction” to be irritating as hell. But as I ended up listening to other tracks – particularly “Time” and “Get Loose” – I noticed that there’s some decent electro house underneath the silly vocal samples. I enjoyed the songs with the least robotic voicing the best.
So when my vision landed on “I’m Sorry”, I realized a number of birds could be killed with one mashup stone. Not only was it a good song for layering samples over, and not only was there some significance to the existing vocal sample (a number of people are up in arms that Dave has not said he was sorry), but I could potentially remove the part of the vocal sample that irritated me (the full vocal sample is: “Are you sleeping? Ohhhh. I’m sorry.”, and with the exception of the last two words, I never liked it.)

So between last night and this morning, I mashed and redubbed and banged my head into the desk repeatedly until I had a workable dance track. I worked together a few jokey sample combinations (“Formats and protocols…are a DEADLY combination.” and a couple using the I’m Sorry sample), and I avoided using the “People love to jump up and down” sample, because this isn’t really a jump-up-and-down track. Some trimming and minor tweaking in Cacophony, and an encoding in iTunes, and voila. Or maybe I should say bing!

You can grab it from waxy.org, or locally on vjarmy.com. I’m pretty happy with it, although it would probably be perfect if I had a proper sampling and arranging program like Peak.

Comments happily taken.

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Created

So, Are We Poppers?

Every since I put up VJ Army (the ranking site), I’ve received a lot of requests for a Pop’n Music ranking site.

(For those who only follow Bemani to the extent that I mention it here: Pop’n Music, or PNM, is a very colorful and musically-diverse game pretty similar to Beatmania, only with 9 buttons and no turntable. The music comes in every genre available. If you’ve seen Lost In Translation and remember the scene in the arcade with the kid bouncing around in the arcade in front of a weird machine and slapping colored buttons, that’s Pop’n.)

I am happy to announce that I am officially beginning work tonight on the Pop’n ranking site I have alluded to for many months. I have not received a controller yet (as was listed as a condition), but I’m partnering with a well known controller maker to get the site moving. Draw your own conclusions.

Some notes for now for what you can expect:

  • It will be using much of the same code base as VJ Army, as it’s pretty solid and easily adapted to Pop’n.
  • It will cover the home games for the PS2 only.
  • The Pop’n ranking site does not have a snappy name yet. It will be decided later.
  • I’m going to be playing up the graphical nature of Pop’n, and it’ll be a bit more eye-pleasing.
  • Ranking will primarily be done by score out of 100,000, but if you have a note count, you can put it in – it won’t necessarily do anything, but there we go.
  • Users will be able to set in their profiles what type of controller they’re using (Dual Shock 2/Small Official/ASC) and it’ll be denoted next to their scores. Won’t do anything, just noted.
  • I am not accepting beta testers at this time because I really have nothing to show at the moment. Don’t ask.
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Digital Xeni Jardin folk art: Call for entries, Exhibits A-C

Boingboing contributor Xeni Jardin has been going on a bit of a bender lately. What began as a somewhat interesting exercise, the “Digital SARS folk art” exhibit showcased some curious images dealing with the world’s current disease meme.

Continue reading “Digital Xeni Jardin folk art: Call for entries, Exhibits A-C”