Here I am again. Unfortunately not much has happened meanwhile, since a little accident kept me from doing something valuable since mid of last week. But now the show goes on with full force. I am currently working at a new website project, called "Alion Free Music Base". This site will be, and I am completely serious at this, the biggest listing of free downloadable music on the web. Currently I am still working at the framework and try to find some artists who will be the first in the listing. But allthough the site is completely free of charge, just a few artists seem to be interested in free promotion. Well, all things start small... BUT while we are at it: If you are a musician with some free downloadable music online, just mail me: alionsonny@alionsonny.com if you are interested to be listed on my new site. Ok, what else? Nothing :D Now I am off to create something I can really write about something here...
Well, Sonny is somehow on holliday now. The beloved girl is away for 2 weeks to visited some relatives and I have still to work at my dayjob. Still I spend the time left rather with being lazy, gaming etc. instead of doing anything creative. Well, and also the communication with you out there is on hold currently. And because of this, don't be puzzled if mails etc. are not answered very fast.
Still I am not completely uncreative. Currently I record some tracks with livedrumming using my Roland Handsonic 10. I just discovered some cool features of this thing. Ever played Sitar on drumpads, using the touchsensitivity for stringbending? *LOL* Pure fun! The guitar is used very often currently too.
Ok, I plan the following: The first week my girl is away I'll spend with things I like and by the way drink a lot too :D The second week will be hardcore creative work.
And now I'm off, opening a bottle of red wine and dive into the world of Fallout 3 to kill some monsters...
Several reasons and a curiosity if I can do it lead me to try creating a 50's/60's-style radio using 3D graphic. The image above is the result of my first try and I think I have done it quite well. As an example I used a photo of an old radio found on the web. If there's an expert for old radios reading this: Don't try to figure out what was the original model on the photo. You'll most likely fail, because I used the photo as a very raw guideline. If you take a close enough look at the picture you will surely notice some flaws. I'll fix this once I have time to do it. It think it is good like that for now.
Well, I think I'll never blog regularly. This seems to be somewhat automatic: I open a blog and after two or three entries, I don't want to write in it anymore. Ok, this is not completely right, but I do not really have somthing every day which is important enough to blog it.
This post is also rather a "I have to blog something sometimes"-entry, because there's not really much to tell today. Hamburg is cold and grey and somehow this has an impact on my mood. Because of this, there's currently not much happening in the creative way.
But it is not that way, that nothing happened. Of cause I try to keep all my music- and videopages on the web updated. But because of the fact that I discover new sites all the time, and sign up there, it is nearly mission impossible to keep them all updated. Additionally videouploads strangely allways occupy the whole internet connection, not only the upstream, which makes it nearly impossible to use the web while a video upload is in progress. Because of this, I do not really like to upload videos and I usually keep only the best and important sites, such as Vimeo.com ,updated. Rather stupid sites (my opinion), such as MyVideo stay in a not so up to date state most of the time. So, why do I find MyVideo stupid? Well, a look at the sites title speaks volumes "Funny videos, video clips and commercials". Aaargh! This calls for all those mobile phone videos, stolen TV-Clips and stupid waving-videos I hate from the heart. The total oposite of sites like Vimeo.com where you can find mostly creative and original videos. Or Dailymotion.com where creativity is rewarded with a special userstatus, enhanced presence and more space per video. Talking of space: 100 MB max file size per video also calls for those types of videos I hate and is not really to date. This is why my latest video in HD is not there. All I said about MyVideo is also true for another site, which put its own value down by declaring itself a site for "funny clips" Clipfish. They also offer just 100 MB and compress the videos to death. I just can imagine one reason why those sites still exist on the market: The Funnyfunny-effect of the stupid consumer age. Well they are both in good partnership with the "beloved" TV-broadcasters. Still I uploaded a video at MyVideo, because up to now I had just 3 videos uploaded there and a bit more of distribution is never a wrong thing.
I uploaded also a bit more of my music at MP3.de. A good thing at this site is, that they offer a unlimited number of uploadable songs. I do not upload songs anymore to sites that offer less than space for 10 songs, because I hate that "delete a song to upload a new one" game. I prefer it, if my listeners find all my songs at one place instead of having to collect them from various sites. Sometimes I ask myself, how those sites with limitations stay on the market while there are countless sites which offer unlimited uploads. I prefer those. Very heavy in restricting the max uploadable songs for free accounts is myownmusic.de with a maximum of 2 uploadable songs for the free accounts. This is inacceptable for me, because I do not make any cash with my music myself. This is why I do not upload anything anymore to this site.
Back to MP3.de: The site is quite good, even though the techstuff does not allways work as expected. And some things are realy getting on my nerves:
for each song, even if it is part of an album, the complete details must be filled in manually, plus a picture must be uploaded. It would be more comfortable, if one could say that this is an album of one artist and all the data, except for the songtitle are the same.
without downloading a song, the listener can just listen to a small snippet. There's no possibility to preview the complete song or to stream it online.
each song must be uploaded seperately. There's no way to upload a complete album. This is unneccessarly complicated.
each song is reviewed manually by the site staff. This takes about 2-3 days. Most of the time the complete 3 days.
Well, these are the reasons why not all of my released 4 albums are available there, like at LastFM where everything works much more smooth and easy. Somehow MP3.de could use a bit of modernization. Everything comes not just a bit oldfashioned. But there is an important PLUS at this site: The support is phantastic and really friendly. In our days in which real support is a rare thing, this is outstanding! Just a few minutes ago I finnished uploading the last songs of the second album. Once the songs have passed the staff review, I can start uploading the third album.
I made a new discovery amongst the MP3 upload sites: Populizer.com! This site seems to be not so well known yet, but this may change. The site looks and works more than well. The tech side is perfect, the design is good. I could not find any limitation on uploadable songs so far, but I just uploaded one song for now.
A possibility to create albums would be nice but does not yet exist. But this site is rather new on the market so this may be a future feature. They have a real outstanding support. I made a little mistake with the tagging of the song which I could not correct because of sitespecific issues. So I wrote a mail to the support and got an answer in BELOW 5 MINUTES! This never happened in all my time on the web before.
Well, not much more to report for now. Currently I am working at an idea for the webradio on the site of my friend Duncan of Reggaefriends.com. This site is currently quite small but it will surely grow. Aside from that I must get something creative done for myself or I get a crisis *LOL*
Today it is time again for a bit of complaining about stuff that doesn't work. Because today I wanted to update afew of my pages across the web, which I did not update for a time. Amongst them my Videopage at Web.de. Well I could not remember that I ever signed up there. But szill 3 of my older videos were there. So I thought that I upload some newer today. No big thing... so I thought... BUT: As I tried to log in, none of my standard passwords worked. No problem: Then I let the site send me my password via mail... so I thought... I did as advised on the apropriate page and entered my mailaddress in the appropriate editfield. Result: A message that told me, that I entered something the site did not recognize. So I tried the same with my older standard mailaddress. Result: The same. Well there was also written, that one can do this using the username. HAH! That could not go wrong, because my username is the same all across the web: alionsonny. Result: This website also did not know my username! Well, I clicked my way to the support to find out, that the dropdown menu for the service to support did not contain an option for the video upload service. Great! Well, I chosed "other" and as suboption again "other". But what happened now? I must log in to write to the support. AAARGH! I CANNOT DO THIS WITHOUT LOGIN DATA!!! I took a deep breath and went to the impressum. Oh, there a infoaddress. I'll mail it simply. Said and done: I wrote a nice support question mail and sent it. Seconds later I got a automated reply which said, that they cannot answer my question via mail and I should contact the support using one of the support pages which only work if one is logged in. BUT there is a nice telephone number also there which costs loads of cash which I can call. Ahh, this is IT! Well, so the videopage stay in the state it is and the account stays a zombie account. So many video upload pages out there with working support. Bye Web.de!
