Coises

Does anyone have any experience or insight into the situation in which a composer and lyricist collaborate with the music being released under a Creative Commons license (specifically, in this instance, CC-BY 3.0) while the lyricist is a member of a performance rights organization (in this instance, SOCAN) and does not choose to use a CC license? I’m not sure what I want to know about it because... well, it’s what we don’t know we don’t know that’s the danger zone. I understand that no one may distribute a recording of the song or perform the song without the lyricist’s permission (which could be indirectly, through a PRO license). And I realize that no one may make a derivative work that uses those lyrics (though they’re free to re-use the music) without his permission. But... can a member of a performance rights organization waive the requirement for royalties regarding a particular use of a particular work? (I tried to research this today and so far have come up with no clear answer.) He’s given me permission to include the sheet music and my recording of the song on my web site. Is that permission valid, or does SOCAN “take over†regardless of his permission for this exception? For a different example: if an ASCAP member writes a song and posts a recording of it here on Songstuff, can ASCAP still complain if Songstuff doesn’t have an ASCAP license, even though the writer clearly intended for the work to be available here royalty-free?

Imagine you’ve made your choice. Follow that... daydream it... and see where it takes you. When you hit something dramatic, try to capture it in a phrase or two. Don’t explain how you feel! Instead, paint a picture (it doesn’t have to be literally visual, although that often works best) that conveys the feeling by getting the listener to identify with you. That makes the listener do the feeling, which is what you want. Then imagine making the opposite choice, and do the same thing. Together, you might have some raw material for a lyric that conveys the dilemma. Oh... and don’t try to write a hook. Write a lyric, and let the hook make itself known.

I’m just a beginner, so take this with a grain of salt... but I think it’s about keeping your head straight and not trying to wear too many hats at once. Mixing is about pulling all the performances together and getting the song to sound as good as you can. Mastering is about getting the mix to fit into a context — all the songs on one CD to match, all the music in a soundtrack to match, and all of it to match the expectations for the genre — so that when John Q. Public listens to it, it sounds “right.” There is no technological need to separate the two; but for human beings, it helps us focus on the task at hand, which is difficult enough without trying to do both things at once. That said, so far I have mixed/mastered my songs the way you describe because I have no context into which to place them; they’re just a collection of songwriter’s demos on my web site. If I ever want to make a CD of some of them, though, I’m going to have to go back and re-mix them without the master bus effects, then master them so they all sound like they belong on the same disc.

Mean Time Between Failures

Reading the Saffire Pro 24 DSP specs it looks to me as if the same two inputs that are used for microphones are used for instrument (electric guitar) inputs. The other two analog inputs appear to be strictly line level inputs. So be aware that if you’ll have, for example, two electric guitars and a voice going in at once, you’ll either need outboard preamplification or you’ll need to take at least one of the guitars as a line input from a guitar amp that has a line out. I wouldn’t recommend getting a mix board yet. You don’t need one now, and you won’t know if you want one enough to be worth the space it takes up, or the cost, or know what kind of board you would want, until you spend some time in your new studio. I would be sure to search the Internet for information on firewire and audio. It used to be, at least, that some computers’ built-in firewire ports didn’t play at all nicely with some firewire audio boxes. If you have a laptop (so that there is no practical way to add a dedicated firewire card), really be sure to check on experiences with your particular machine.

The utility of a mix board depends very much on how you work. Since you haven’t started yet, you probably don’t know yet how you will want to work. Whatever you’re recording, the ideal is to have as many inputs on your audio interface as there are microphones, plus direct (“DI”) outputs and line-level outputs (possibly minus anything like a MIDI keyboard where you can record the MIDI and bounce the audio back in later) that you will be recording all at once. If you can’t do that (for example, if you’ll have several mics just on the drums, plus a couple guitars, a bassist, lead and multiple backing vocals, all to be recorded at the same time), then a mix board isn’t an option, it’s a requirement. (You do realize that the Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP has two mic level and two line level analog inputs? The rest of the 16 inputs advertised are an optical ADAT (, an S/PDIF (2) and a stereo “loopback” virtual input (2); don’t assume you’ll be able to use the digital inputs for anything unless you already know how that works!) On the other hand, if you will just be overdubbing, so that you’ll never exceed the input capacity of your audio interface at once, a mix board is just a convenience on the recording side. I fall in this category, and I find that a small board (I have a Mackie 802-VLZ3) is quite convenient for monitoring during overdubs, plus general organization and control of my computer output, stage piano output and microphone — it’s just easier to reach over and turn a knob than to find and drag a virtual fader. (Also, my audio interface doesn’t include mic preamps or a headphone amplifier, so I needed those anyway, and my previous solution was aging badly when I got the Mackie.) On the mixdown side, a mix board can’t help much unless you have enough outputs on your audio interface to spit out all the individual tracks simultaneously. Even then, I’m not sure anyone wants to have to “perform the mix” as was necessary in the “old days” — it’s a lot less stressful, though admittedly less spontaneous, to use automation envelopes in your DAW software. My personal advice would be to think about whether you will need to record more than four (given your choice of audio interface) analog inputs at once. If the answer is “yes,” then you need a mix board, period. If the answer is “no,” “probably not” or “at least not right away,” then I’d defer the mixing board — you can always add it later if you need it or if you feel like working all computer is a bit clumsy. If you need one or two more mic preams instead of the line-level inputs, then it’s a bit of a judgement call. It’s cheaper to get mic preamps built into mixing boards (or audio interfaces), but those aren’t going to be as good as outboard preamps. If you need deeper advice on that, someone here (not me — that’s out of my league, so far) can probably give you some tips.

Consider Reaper. The price is quite reasonable ($60 if you qualify for the discounted license, which you probably do), and there is no “online activation” or similar junk to worry about. Apparently the work flow is a little strange to some folks that are used to one of the big name DAWs, but I’ve never found it confusing at all. (I used to have a mixing board and an 8-track analog tape machine, but I never seriously used a Digital Audio Workstation before Reaper.) For percussion, if you need plausibly realistic drum tracks but you aren’t a drummer, consider Jamstix. (However, if you already understand drumming enough to MIDI program exactly what you want and just need a way to get the sounds without recording a live drum set, I think several other well-known percussion plug-ins probably have better sounds. Jamstix is particularly useful for folks like me who don’t really know how a drummer “thinks.”)

Now this sounds interesting: If you haven't used it, it's a service that finally makes music social in a way that works. Basically, you and others go into a "room" which generally has a theme. Up to five people in the room can act as "DJs" and sit at a table in the front. Each of the DJs puts together a queue of songs and when their turn comes around, the next song in their queue plays (usually, it's still a little buggy on that front). Everyone else in the room can hear the song and can vote on whether it's "awesome" or "lame." though I can’t do anything with it... apparently right now it’s only open to folks who have a Facebook friend already on it. The thing about “online radio” is it’s mostly just radio moved to a new delivery path; the real next big things are usually things you just couldn’t have done with the same old thing.

There is at least one substantive difference. Traditional broadcast media were placed under FCC regulation because the broadcast spectrum is limited — only so many FM stations, for example, can exist in a given market without mutual interference. That was the justification for imposing government oversight despite what would appear to be First Amendment issues. While there are laws regarding obscenity, defamation, and so on that apply, for example, to print media, these are not at all on the same level as the rules applied to broadcast media. Copyright and advertising, of course, will still provide leverage for de facto regulation by private interests... which, in my opinion, is frequently much worse in practice than government censorship. But at least the rationale for FCC involvement won’t be there, unless they invent a new one (not at all unlikely these days).

From National Public Radio’s Planet Money: Jonathan Coulton's songs almost never get played on the radio. He doesn't have a contract with a music label. Yet he's a one man counterargument to the idea that musicians can't make money making music. In 2010, Coulton's music brought in about $500,000 in revenue. And since his overhead costs are very low, most of that money went straight to him. Full article plus audio at: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/05/14/136279162/an-internet-rock-star-tells-all Jonathan Coulton's music (play, purchase, lyrics links) : http://www.jonathancoulton.com/store/downloads/ One of the comments to the NPR article made what I think is a great point: Dalin Abilene (Dalin) wrote: JoCo has been a staple of my listening since I first heard Re Your Brains a few years back. He's not just good. He's VERY good. Singing ability, comedy, musically; he's got it all. So, he's also become a bit of a lightning rod for the self production argument. It used to be that the self published or self released were viewed as a bit of a sad sack because they obviously wouldn't get to publish their stuff any other way. Now, that notion can really start being scrapped. Why work so hard to impress a publisher or producer when you could work that hard to impress your prospective fans instead? I figure, your chances are about even, either way. Even with talent, ambition and brains, “making it” in any artistic field has always been a crap-shoot; but it looks like the big game might be breaking up and moving to a different table.

Learning to play classical pieces absolutely will not work against you. Good piano technique and the ability to read music quickly and accurately will be a great advantage as a keyboard player no matter what style and ambition you eventually adopt. The way you start is to practice doing two things your piano teacher probably isn’t teaching you: playing by ear and improvisation. Think of a melody that you know very well — something you could sing by memory — but have never played on the piano. Try to pick it out. As you keep doing that with different melodies, you find that after awhile, once you find the first note or two, you just “know” which keys to play. I’m not sure if they still exist, but 40 years ago when I was learning this, you could find books of current popular music for voice, guitar and “easy piano.” The piano arrangements are usually horrid, but the guitar chords come in really handy — by reading them as you’re playing and listening to what you play, you can begin to understand how chords in popular music work. Whether to study music theory right away really depends on what kind of learner you are. A lot of seminal popular music was written by folks who couldn’t read music at all, let alone tell you what a dominant seventh is! If you’re an intuitive learner, I’d start by trying to play by ear and reading guitar chord diagrams while playing the piano parts... Eventually you should be able to play a song you know from just the words and chords, and then you should start to be able to hear the chords without reading them first. If you’re an A-B-C kind of learner who likes to understand everything before you try much of anything, then start with some theory. Your piano teacher might be willing and able to help. Then, when you feel like you understand major and minor scales, major, minor and seventh chords, and the relationships between scales, chords and keys, start playing by ear. Another exercise that might help you get a handle on how keys work is transposition on sight; e.g., you have sheet music in the key of A, but it’s desired to perform it in C. Try to play that without re-writing it. As you’re getting a handle on playing by ear, you can begin to improvise. This is the skill that will turn into composition. (It might seem backwards, but you’ll improvise halfway decently before you’ll be ready to write. It’s like that you would be able to write a grocery list, or a personal letter, or an entry in your diary, with ease before you’d think about writing a short story.) Again, rest assured that there is nothing you will learn in classical piano training — aside from the contempt that some classical teachers have for popular music — that will be anything but helpful to you. If your teacher is willing and able to instruct you in theory and/or improvisation, that would also be great; and it doesn’t matter if it’s “classical” theory and improvisation. If you become skilled at those, and you love popular music, the transition won’t give you any trouble... you won’t be able to stop yourself!

Imagine a scene... for example: It’s the morning after a one-night stand. The girl is still asleep. You’re looking around the room. You don’t know her, so you don’t know what most of this stuff means to her. Look around for awhile; then stop and concentrate for a moment on how you feel. Now write some lines about what you see, hear, smell, feel. Don’t explain, just observe. For example: Six roses in a bottle and the bottle’s dry, Coloring the darkness of the morning sun. Mary keeps on breathing, but I don’t know why. The winding on the window-shade has come undone. Grandpa in the corner in a silver frame: He’s seen it all before, and man, it’s all the same. The dishes on the radiator, drawing flies, And God, I hate Grandpa’s eyes... I hate Grandpa’s eyes. If that gets you some lines, then try to imagine other scenes that feel the same way, though they have no objective connection to the first scene. Of course, you’ll throw out half of what you get this way and mercilessly edit most of the rest, but the idea is to get raw material... Based on your examples, I don’t think you want meaningless lyrics; I think you want lyrics that have no straightforward objective meaning. Instead, they “mean” how they feel.

Mastering is “whatever it takes” to prepare the best possible master — that is, a source from which copies will be produced — for a given project and a given target media (e.g., pressed CD, CD-R, LPs, DVD for video albums or movies, etc.). You normally mix each track in isolation, on good monitor speakers, trying to get the best sound you can. In mastering, everything has to be brought into a cohesive whole; this involves details like getting the right amount of silence between one track and the next, but also making sure that the tracks sound like they belong together — for example, so the listener isn’t jumping up to change the volume from one track to the next. Mastering also takes the limitations of the media into account, as well as what listeners expect. What follows from that is that if you are going to have a mastering session, you should bring copies of the final mixes without finishing effects like EQ, compression or limiting applied to the full mix (you can always bring one with those effects, too, to demonstrate what you have in mind) — and obviously, keep the full resolution you have: don’t reduce to 16 bits, resample to 44.1k, or dither. I’m pretty sure most mastering engineers aren’t going to want to remix your tracks for you, but they’re set up to apply the polish. The consensus seems to be that professional mastering provides good “bang-for-the-buck” if your object is a professional product. If (like me) you’re an amateur/hobbyist, you do what you can on your own. If (like me, so far), you’re an amateur who is only producing *.mp3 files in isolation and not preparing an “album,” there’s little or no reason to have a “mastering” step that’s separate from the mixing step.1 I’m going to stick my neck out and say that’s just plain wrong. Even if you “master in the mix” (as I suggested above, a bad idea unless you’re an amateur producing only isolated, individual songs), putting non-linear effects (e.g., compression, multi-band compression, limiting) on a mix is not the same as applying the same effects to each part. (Non-level-dependent EQ and reverb are linear, so in principle you can apply those to every part separately and get the same effect as applying them to the mix... if you can keep it all straight, and your computer can handle it!) However, as noted above, ordinarily you should leave compression, limiting and EQ of the final mix for the mastering stage if you will have a mastering stage. (That applies even if you’re mastering yourself using the very same plug-ins you would use in your mix, because it’s only in mastering that you’ll be able to judge the results as they fit into a complete project.) 1But I’m now questioning my own judgment, since I notice that as I go from one song to another on my own site, the levels and sounds don’t match up very well. One day I should probably take everything I have and “master” it all to match, then try to master each new track to the same standard... yeah, that’s gonna happen soon...

If your laptop is running Windows, I don’t think you can beat Reaper for multi-track recording software. The evaluation version is not crippled in any way; aside from a nag screen, you are “on your honor” to buy the software (current price $40 USD) if you keep it after 30 days. To me, that meant I could evaluate it seriously, with “real projects,” knowing that my work wouldn’t be “held hostage” if I decided not to by it. (Yes, I did purchase Reaper.) Aside from that, the other immediate suggestion I have is that your list of equipment doesn’t mention a monitoring system. You can’t produce what you can’t hear! I’d say your first order of business is to save up for a decent set of nearfield monitors. (Hint: headphones are great for finding and editing flaws in your tracks, but — at least, in my experience — it’s impossible to get a good mix using only headphones, regardless of how good they are... in a way, headphones reveal too much detail, so that you can’t tell what will be buried in the mix and what will stick out like a sore thumb when the mix is played on typical room speakers.)

Well, at 21 I suppose you have a few good years left in you... If you really want to write music — not just lyrics — then learn to play an instrument. You don’t have to become good enough to perform (though you never know, you might surprise yourself). Guitar and keyboard are the obvious choices. Guitar has an easier “learning curve”: it takes less time before you can get useful sounds out of it; but keyboard gives you a better feel for how music “works.” If you want to learn keyboard to learn music (as opposed to becoming a performer), you can start with something as simple as a Yamaha Personal keyboard. (If at all possible, though, I recommend going to a local retailer where you can try out the equipment, rather than buying online for this sort of purchase. Also, I’m not recommending that particular instrument — I have no experience with it — I’m just giving an example.) You won’t be taking one these on the road, or into the studio, but you can learn what you need to learn to write songs. To repeat... don’t plan on using a sub-$200 instrument to perform or record; nor would I recommend anything like that for practice for someone who already knows he or she wants to work toward performance. But to get a grip on how music works — and to find out if you might have a flair for performance without putting out a lot of money — one of those little electronic marvels would be perfect. With some study and a little practice, it could definitely help you to write songs.

Without buying anything, here’s a place you can start to get some orientation to practical “music theory” based on the guitar.

This is perhaps an artifact of the “American system.” As I explained in another reply, there is no “license to host a performance of music (in general)” in the United States; there are licenses to perform specific works that fall under copyright. The collection societies gain the legal position to negotiate a license with a venue contingent on music which they represent being played there. The practicalities of the situation, though, mean that even when a venue intends that no music covered by ASCAP, BMI or SESAC will be played there, if it plays any music, it is taking a substantial risk if it does not pay them anyway, even though they are not legally entitled to the payment... unless one of the venue’s performers makes a “mistake.” I have no doubt that my understanding is incomplete. That’s part of why I post something like this here: offering an opinion and then listening to what people say in response is one good way to learn the limits of ones knowledge. I’m not confusing performance rights organizations with record companies, though. I just think the former are treading essentially the same path as the latter: faced with the fear of diminishing significance, they’re grasping at every possible straw to fight for their own relevance, acting as if every petty legal advantage they can press they must press, taking a short-sighted view of what’s monetarily beneficial for (their already most successful and richest) members without regard to how their choices might affect the long-term future of the creation and performance of music... and in doing so, they’re alienating themselves from music fans — without whom all the rest of the music scene would be rather pointless. But it is my fight. We’re all consumers of music; when simple, pleasurable uses of music that are very unlikely to have any significant impact on the commercial value of a work are rendered impractical because of overly complex, overly broad and overly aggressive copyright, we all lose. At least in the United States, as performance rights organizations push harder on small venues that were formerly ignored, the result appears to be that many of the places where the newest performers (and writers) get their start and develop their craft are finding that they can no longer afford to operate as they did. This, again, is an all-around loss. Some little hole-in-the-wall’s open mic night isn’t taking significant revenue away from more sophisticated venues — and, given ASCAP distribution formulas, if they do manage to pay, the revenues won’t go to the artists whose work is being performed, anyway. That open mic is providing a place for new artists to learn, though, and killing that is a loss for everyone. And there’s the fact, as pointed out in earlier replies, that this system renders my choice to license my songs royalty-free essentially meaningless for use in clubs, bars, and so forth — ironically, the only place it probably would count would be if one of my works were performed on a major tour: one of the few public performance cases where I would have preferred (were it practical) to retain the right to collect royalties, as the need to pay them would be unlikely to impose any impediment to the use of my music in that context. It’s also true that everyone loses if capable songwriters have to reduce the time and effort they devote to their craft because they can no longer pay their rent without taking a job sweeping up at the local burger joint. Arguing that copyright, licensing, royalties, etc. have gone too far isn’t the same as arguing that every method by which artists can be paid should be scrapped in its entirety (not that we all agree on the details). Really, though, I see the formation of “sides” as one of the biggest problems. Hollywood and the RIAA, in particular, have been treating the general public as a horde of would-be criminals for decades, and that adversarial stance seems to have spread to the performance rights organizations and to many artists and creators as well. As I read it, that’s been TechDirt’s stance all along: if you see your fans as the enemies from whom you must protect yourself, you have a serious business model problem, and sooner or later, it’s probably going to bite you in the ass. If it’s not too personal, I would be interested in hearing a bit about how your membership in a performance rights organization has worked for you. I imagine it could be instructive.

As far as I can tell, it doesn’t work that way in the United States. From ASCAP’s document “The ASCAP Payment System” (page 8, General Licensees & Special Monetary Awards): Of course, it would be impractical to monitor all performances in bars, clubs, restaurants and the like. ASCAP licenses tens of thousands of music users, such as these, that do not fall into the ASCAP surveys. The monies collected from these establishments goes into a “general” licensing fund and is paid out to members on the basis of feature performances on radio and all surveyed performances on television. ASCAP completely ignores what is actually played in restaurants, bars and other small venues; they take the money collected from those venues and add it to the distributions made on the basis of radio and television airplay. I don’t know if BMI and SESAC do the same. Based on your remarks, I have to guess that this system might be peculiar to the United States.

Under United States copyright law, there is a legal requirement to license a musical work from the copyright holder for any public performance. There is no legal requirement to acquire a license to perform music (generically), as opposed to the licenses required for individual musical works that are under copyright. ASCAP, BMI and SESAC members assign their rights to license public performances, to collect performance royalties and to pursue legal remedies for failure to acquire performance licenses to the performance rights organization they join. In practice, that means most venues — which cannot reasonably expect to verify what persons or organizations hold the rights to each and every song that might be performed there — need licenses from all three organizations. If an artist performs a song written by someone who is not a member of any of those organizations and has not offered a license for such a performance, there is still a violation of copyright law... but since it’s virtually impossible for an individual songwriter to police performances of his or her work personally, no one worries about that; as a practical matter (but not a legal one), if you’re not a member of a performance rights organization, you’re not going to get paid for performances. Apparently, the way liability works in the United States, even when a venue does not directly control which songs are performed, and even if contracts with the performers specify that the performers must not perform any works for which the performer does not have performance rights, the venue is still liable for copyright infringement should an unlicensed performance occur there... and the fines can be staggering. One of the things performance rights organizations do is send observers to venues who don’t pay hoping to catch an unauthorized performance of a song registered with that organization. They only need one to have a case which can be ruinous to a small business owner. So, suppose I play piano Saturday nights at a little restaurant. I tell the owner that I play only my own compositions, so he tells ASCAP, BMI and SESAC he doesn’t need a license. While I’m playing and improvising, I wander off into a melody that I didn’t even realize is an old Burt Bacharach tune, and an ASCAP representative makes note of this. (How he proves it without violating copyright law by making an unauthorized recording of my performance, I don’t know, but I presume they have their ways.) Now this little restaurant faces a $30,000 lawsuit. The combination of the way liability law works, the huge fines allowed by law, and nature of “David and Goliath” lawsuits (usually David runs out of money to keep paying lawyers long before he has his day in court) paves the way for tactics reminiscent of a protection racket. The best I can gather is that for many decades performance rights organizations were more-or-less reasonable; but in the last fifteen years or so, they’ve been getting more and more and more absurd.

See this letter from the Assistant General Counsel to the United States’ Register of Copyrights regarding a similar situation with BMI. In the United States, each performance rights organization is empowered to collect songwriting and publishing royalties on behalf of its members. There is no law that gives them the right to collect royalties for all music — each copyright holder (writer, publisher, arranger, etc.) has the option to enter into a contract with one of these agencies. Their rights are derivative of the copyright holder’s rights. (I think the situation is different in many other countries, and that a single performance rights organization is sometimes given the right to collect all performance royalties defined by statute, with the copyright holders having no choice in the matter — not even the choice to waive their own royalties.) I am not a member of any performance rights organization. Had I not already designated my songs as royalty-free, performance royalties in the United States would be due directly to me. Licenses from performance rights organizations are paid by the venue, not the performers (I believe this is a matter of how the contracts are written, not something required by law); what the waivers must have intended to accomplish was to place any liability for performance royalties on the performers by showing that they had contracted to perform only songs that did not require performance rights organization licenses. That might have stood up in court, but the cost of fighting an ASCAP lawsuit would undoubtedly have been much greater than the cost of paying the extortion license fee. So, yes, a regime in which a musician who isn’t a member of a performance rights organization loses a gig because his employers were intimidated by a performance rights organization does make some of us who think the old way of doing business is overdue to perish a little pissed. In this context, you are correct about my Creative Commons License being pointless — should my songs be performed in public anywhere, ASCAP and BMI will probably still collect and (after their fashion) distribute royalties on these royalty-free works.

Techdirt does have a definite point of view regarding copyright, patent, trademark and similar legal concepts. They make no attempt to present opposing views themselves, though such views appear quite regularly in the comments. I haven’t found them to fabricate, but it’s probably fair to say they are not “objective” in a journalist’s sense. Having read that blog for some years now, I will say that I don’t believe their position is as extreme as it might first appear. They are not opposed to copyright, patent, etc. in principle, but they do believe it has expanded far beyond its appropriate boundaries, whether seen according to the US Constitution (empowering Congress “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”) or in light of economic theory. Techdirt is convinced that copyright and patent have become a means of protecting specific, traditional business models and well-entrenched interests that depend on them in the face of evidence that the extent of these protections goes far beyond what actually promotes creative progress, and in fact actively hampers it. And that’s as much as I’ll try to speak for them... they do that quite loquaciously themselves. In fairness to Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, I believe it is Techdirt’s claim, not theirs, that they “help artists find more ways to take control over their own careers.” Creative Commons is concerned with providing tools that make it easier to grant certain permissions regarding ones own work in a way that can be easily, clearly and immediately understood by others. Of course, Creative Commons licenses can’t give the artist any legal capacities, privileges or rights he or she doesn’t have already. It’s the pragmatic, social aspect — giving a designation that’s recognizable as identifying a “safe to (re-)use” work — that is the contribution Creative Commons hopes to make. (I say “hopes” because I don’t believe it’s yet clear how well this will work — whether Creative Commons licenses will reach the level of usefulness of, say, the GNU General Public License in the free and open source software world. I think there’s a serious possibility that they screwed up by defining too many different licenses.) As far as I know, EFF and Public Knowledge are more concerned with consumers’ rights and general political and civil rights. They’re not against creators (one of the founding members of EFF is John Perry Barlow, probably best known as a lyricist who collaborated with Peter Weir on many Grateful Dead songs), but their focus in not on the specific interests of creators. My reasons for choosing a Creative Commons license are perhaps somewhat “ethical” but mostly pragmatic. I’m not a performer, and I don’t expect to become one; but the sort of songs I write are far more often sung by their authors than by others. When I consider the entire chain of fantastic events that would have to happen for me to ever make enough money from one of my songs to be worth even being concerned about... it’s a lottery ticket. The much more likely thing is that outside of a few friends and folks I run into in places like Songstuff, my music will never be heard at all. So I’m far more concerned with reducing the barriers that might stop someone who performs, makes videos, whatever, from using my music and getting it a little more distribution than I am about the insignificant chance that I might have a golden goose in that pile of chicken-scratches. I considered, more than once, writing my own license; but in addition to the legal pitfalls that undoubtedly exist, coming from the software programming world I have some idea already how troublesome for “downstream” users that can be. In my opinion, no one has yet defined the perfect “free” — in the words of the free software movement, that’s “free as in speech, not (necessarily) free as in beer” — license for software, music or anything else that falls under copyright law. It quickly becomes evident, though, that each different license multiplies the difficulty for new creators trying to build on what has already been accomplished. Whatever I tried to write, if I didn’t just plain screw up the legalities entirely, I’d almost certainly create some inadvertent pitfall that would deter future potential uses of my work. Instead, just a few days ago I relaxed the license on my music and changed it to a simple Creative Commons Attribution License, which should make things very clear for almost anyone who wants to use my work. The difficulties creators (and/or publishers) face in clearing rights can be so daunting that without even considering the costs of licenses and royalties themselves, just the process of obtaining the necessary rights may preclude the use of existing works that fall under copyright for many purposes. In my opinion, that helps no one. Now, should some of my work happen to gain sufficient exposure to bring my songwriting talents to the attention of folks who would have no problem paying to clear rights — something I think is unlikely, but at least more likely because my now unknown work can be freely used — then the next work I do might be released with a few more strings attached... or maybe not. That’s something I will only be able to work out when and if it happens.

from Techdirt:

What I do: 1. Let it be. Just let the verse and refrain really be one long verse (whether you call it a verse or a verse+refrain) in which the last few lines are the same, or nearly the same, in each verse; or break with traditional structure and don’t have a refrain at all. 2. Change the timing or chord structure of one part and see where it leads to develop another — for example, if the refrain moves fairly quickly, try doubling the length of all the notes and see if working with that leads you to a verse. Substitute minor chords for majors and see what happens. Switch around figures like ascending scales, descending scales and jumps. 3. Combine two different tunes that share the same rhythm and general feel. Some examples in my songs: Thru Those Eyes: 1 (last 3 lines of each verse serve as refrain), 3 (instrumental bridge) Heartbeat: 3 (intro, instrumental bridges and the end section are one tune, refrain is another), 2 (verse was derived from refrain) Don’t Get Your Hopes Up: 1 (last 2 lines of verse serve as refrain), 3 (vocal bridge), 2 (instrumental bridge) Meet Me in the Sunset: 1 (no refrain, though the repetition of “Meet me in the sunset” at the beginning of each verse gives continuity), 3 (instrumental bridge) Cinema: 2 (the refrain came first, then I forced myself to play it without the distinctive “out-of-key” chords, which quickly led to the verse) Miss Me for a While: 2 (the refrain came first, then I slowed it down to get the verse started)

I still have no clue what the problem might be. Which player is that? Windows Media Player? Which Windows XP — Home, Professional or Media Center? If you go to one of my pages that has an embedded player, right-click on the player, and select “About,” what does it say is the player, and what version number?

I’m not a hardware expert, so I certainly might be missing something... but I’m wondering why you’re running PC2-5300 (DDR2 667) and not PC2-6400 (DDR2 800) in this board. If you’re getting new RAM (which your initial post implied), I’d suggest moving to the board’s full rated memory speed. And you might not want or need it now, either. I was just pointing out that 32-bit operating systems generally can’t “see” a full 4GB of RAM. That board runs its memory dual channel, though, so you do want to work in matched pairs. I’d be inclined to start by replacing what you have with one pair of 2x1GB DDR2 800 (PC2-6400) sticks (e.g., Kingston KHX6400D2LLK2/2G) and looking at some of the other suggested upgrades before going above 2GB memory or changing to 64-bit; or, if you’re set on eventually going 64-bit and/or to or beyond 4GB with this machine and don’t mind an extra $40, put in a matched pair of 2GB sticks (like Kingston KHX6400D2LLK2/4G) instead. In either case, you move yourself up to PC2-6400 low-latency memory and still leave 2 slots available for future expansion.