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go1dfish

  • Co-Founder/Software Architect of ArtisTech
  • Computer Guru
  • Guitar Apprentice

Enjoys technology, open software, red meat and music gear.

Abhors paperwork, political corruption, beans and restrictive file formats

By far the worst musician on TuneTrack, but nothing sucks more than software that goes unused by it's developers, so deal with it.

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News and Updates

TuneTrack Releases Debut

Posted Sept. 9, 2009 at 1 a.m. to go1dfish Public | Comment

Today we are debuting TuneTrack's new release experience across the site.

This post goes a bit into the history and thought process behind what we've built, but before you read on, click the image above to open up "You Give" by Emily Richards.  Emily is giving away this album completely free (and lossless), and it makes a great example of a Full-Featured TuneTrack Release.

At ArtisTech, we've long thought that one of the biggest issues with digital music (vs. traditional mediums) is the comparative lack of metadata.  Very few services even include basic credits beyond Artist/Album/Title and virtually no-one sells tracks with lyrics embedded.  There really is no excuse for this, every popular compressed audio format, espescially MP3 has support for embedded meta-data, but many vendors still neglect to populate these tags.

Artwork is another area where digital music pales in comparison to it's predecessors (especially vinyl)  Some retailers have made attempts to improve this situation with higher resolution artwork, and in some cases PDF artbooks, but it's still quite rare to get more than a front cover.

With these deficiencies in mind late last year we began working on an artist-focussed system of managing website content, releases and meta-data.  The idea being that, as it becomes easier, and more worthwhile for artists to add Lyrics and Liner Notes; it also becomes easier for fans to find what they love.

The introduction of TuneTrack's new Release system is the first time the fruits of this labor can be enjoyed by listeners.

Lyrics and Credits for a song on TuneTrack are automatically included the Release Player, and individual track pages such as this one.   But most importantly, lyrics and liner notes are written to the MP3, OGG and FLAC files available for download from TuneTrack.  Likewise, album artwork is offered in the widely supported (DRM Free of course) PDF format, but like Lyrics TuneTrack takes the additional step of presenting full artwork on the web alongside the music.

We've heard iTunes and the Majors may be working on one or more new album formats that incorporate some similar elements, but they are likely to be proprietary with delayed or even outright denial of access to Indie artists.   In contrast, TuneTrack leverages existing standards to deliver high quality content across a broad range of devices rather than reinventing the wheel to perpetuate single vendor/device lock-in.

Thanks for listening to my ramblings once more.  Here are some more releases to check out:

Reflections on Living Room Live III: Day One

Posted June 27, 2009 at 6:27 p.m. to go1dfish Public | 3 Responses

Last weekend marked Emily Richards' first touring Living Room Live concert, and also the first concert hosted by ArtisTech requiring significant travel. It was a very busy yet enjoyable trip. I feel like I have only just recently fully recovered.

I ended up writing much more than I had anticipated, so I'm going to break this up into a few different posts.

Day One: Flight and Arrival

ArtisTech's newest investor, Mike Doerr provided flight for Emily Richards, Jason Brock and Myself to Salt Lake City from San Diego through Mike's venture: Air2Air Corporation.

Mike flew us there himself, in a beautiful twin engine Seneca aircraft. This was my first experience with private flight and smaller aircraft, and I was thoroughly impressed all around. Much less hassle than your standard commercial flight, we literally drove to the plane and hopped in.

I had the pleasure of riding shotgun throughout our flight, watching the dash and trying to recall each instruments function with help from Mike, and the memories of a childhood spent playing Sierra ProPilot, MS Flight Simulator and Falcon 4.0.

When Mike informed us that we could plug 1/8" inch audio into the plane's sound system, we instantly whipped out John Jones' latest mastering of his upcoming album, "Black and White". Sounded as good as ever, and even held surprises for those of us who have heard previous versions.

After arriving in Utah, we spent some time eating, visiting friends, and gathering supplies before heading to what was to be our base-camp for the weekend (Emily's Mom's House). Although everyone knew we had to leave the house by 0730 local-time the next morning, we still ended up computing, playing guitar and shooting hoops til 0100 or so.

To be continued...

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