I haven’t been “blogging” here as much as I’d originally intended. Which is OK I guess, since I really don’t have all that much to talk about.

I haven’t been doing as much other work on my computer as I thought I would, either. This includes such things as learning real programming and working on my website. Nor have I written all that much music over the summer… and I certainly haven’t completed anything old. This is less ok, but I guess this is a case where the absence of a good thing does not imply the presence of a bad thing… did that make any sense?

I know some people make webcomics to keep themselves busy (or potentially to make money?), but I have no talent or patience for drawing, especially on any kind of a regular schedule. So I’m thinking of doing something else.

I was thinking of, every week or so, making a ~30-second musical clip. Maybe a complete “song,” maybe a piece of a piece, maybe stuff mixed together. I could do that, I know I could, especially with probably a couple hours’ worth of old material to fall back on. There are however, two problems with this as a means of keeping me busy: lack of motivation, and lack of a “good” way to store the music files online.

There’s little point discussing the first problem, as the only thing you can really do about it is pester me, which works positively only maybe half the time (reacting very negatively the other half). The second problem is more addressable.

Music has an odd place online. There are lots of free places for hosting pictures, or hosting moving pictures with music, but none that I’ve found for just music. Unless you count Myspace, which is a dark hole of a place which I have thus far avoided (and intend to continue avoiding for a little while longer). My own private web-server would be ideal, if it weren’t for the $$$ factor (server costs money, and right now I have none). I have some space on my IIT website, but not very much. I could go maybe a month or two without running out of space; afterwords I’m S.O.L. Thus far, when I’ve wanted to post something audible in the Interweb, I’ve been putting my mp3 recordings on my googlepages account and having a media player on my IIT webpage retrieve them. This is haphazard at best, and if I started adding music-blogs weekly, I’d run into size constraints fairly soon (also they’re taking Google pages down soon, replacing it with Google Sites, and I am not sure about Google Sites’ policy on hosted files).

However, all hope is not yet lost. I’ve come up with two possible longer-term solutions.

The first of these is to make all my music as MIDI files, which I’ve found to be less than 0.5% of the size of the mp3 file generated for the same piece. It probably compares favorably to mp3’s of microphone-recorded music, too. The problem is in the quality. A lot of MIDI sequencers I’ve encountered, especially the kind built into browser plugins (Windows Media Player, MPlayer, etc), don’t sound very good. It’s the “sound fonts” they use, I suppose. Finale (my music composition software) comes with some rather good “sound fonts” which it uses to play musical scores you’ve entered, as well as to export to mp3 or wav audio. In addition, since there are so many different MIDI sequencers and media-player browser plugins out there, I wouldn’t be surprised if 5 different people could go to my music and hear 5 different things (a “unique experience” is not, in this case, a good thing).

MIDI files also don’t allow me as much flexibility. Say I want to record me playing guitar. It’s not possible to go from my recording to a similar-sounding MIDI^[1]. It’s also ridiculously time-consuming to enter it as musical score, which would be my best alternative.

That’s why I would likely, at least for now, go with my second option: record the music however I want, and match it with a picture (photo, drawn, computer-generated, whatever), and upload it to one of the various video-hosting websites out there. I know Youtube is very good about letting you embed videos hosted on their site on your own site; Google Videos probably is too. I suppose, if I wanted to limit it to my Facebook friends, I could use Facebook video instead, but I’m not sure.

This would also help me in other ways, I suppose. It would protect my copyrights and such from the rather casual infringement currently possible (the media player I use has “download this mp3″ as a right-click option). Flash video doesn’t download so easily, and usually you wouldn’t want to keep it as a sound record either (since it is generally of lower-than-good quality).

I haven’t ever, actually, uploaded any videos to the Blagoweb. I know, I’m a terrible nerd, I should be take out and phased or something. Get over it? I don’t have a good video recording device of my own, and while I’m decent at it, I don’t feel like making photo slideshows for the whole world to see (I’ve done several for smaller audiences, though, which came out pretty well).

Anyway, I think that’s what I’m going to do. I’m planning on starting it next week Sunday (Sunday, August 16, 2009), and I suppose you can legitimately complain if I haven’t started working on it by this coming Wednesday.

Over and out

a2020vision

1. although there are some super-sweet guitars out there that output directly to MIDI. Not necessarily practical for live music, but just what I’d want for this… expensive though.