This week we chat with Bjorgvin Benediktsson about his new startup Crowd Audio and their indiegogo campaign.
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Two shows in one week, kick ass! Way to make a comeback and say STFU all the listeners who thought you were pod-fading. I think a few people out there were about ready to start a grief support group. Glad your stress is subsiding and thanks for all the hard work you put into the show.
I heard that mention on Audio Nowcast and got a great laugh hearing your reactions. Those guys are pretty awesome but it certainly seemed like they leaned out of their tower to spit in your general direction just then. Then again, the comment did come from their resident cynic. I have been catching up on their back episodes and had just heard the one where Ryan was a guest…then I listened to the latest show, and now this. Quite the saga.
Speaking of back episodes, sign me up for a diploma now that you two can see the light of day once again. I caught up on you guys first :).
Great surprise this week with the second show, thanks, made my day. Just wondering what everyone’s general thoughts are on spec creative like Crowd Audio is promoting. I am a graphic designer of 25 years and my industry greatly frowns upon doing spec creative, where you give away your intellectual capital with the potential of not getting paid for it. I understand the argument for the design industry because it diminishes it’s value. Now for music, I have no skin in the game and am just curious as to what all you gurus think? Btw Jon, thanks for connecting me with James.
Great question. I think it all comes down to where you’re at in the industry. If you’re just starting out it’s a great place to hone your skills and get clients. We’re working on integrating a one on one system so that you can retain your clients and work with them after you’ve won competitions as well.
I also think there’s a subtle difference between creating art from scratch and mixing music that’s technically someone else’s artistic capital.
Great point
So do you think 99 Designs has diminished the value of the graphic industry? I’d love to hear your thoughts on that because we think it’s allowed designers to get work and businesses to get higher quality designs.
I do think 99 designs has de-valued design. Here is a good article on the topic:
http://www.aiga.org/whats-the-harm-in-crowdsourcing/
That was a good article, although highly biased and slanted towards one end.
I’ve used 99 Designs and thought it was a good experience. Whenever I’ve used professional designers I’ve always been frustrated with their terms and how they approach the project, ultimately ending up with something I sort of liked but was annoyed with the whole process so I wouldn’t have used the designer again.
seems that many designers (and audio engineers) distrust their clients, and forget that artistic or not, they work in a service industry.
Jon – check out Fuzz Measure for measuring rooms and producing graphs to analyse the resultant impulse response. The full version costs money but I think the demo will do everything you need!
I heard that and had to point it out..its better to be shit on then to have no one even know that they are shitting on you…Bad press is good press in this situation…People have to realize what value this show has, and it has so much…People who are learning, are a specific group..The good thing about it is that those who want to learn, are trying to learn, and trying to get better, you dont just become CLA over night….Some people seem to forget that it takes years to practice a craft before you become great…
Jon, I have not been able to get REW to work on my MAC either..I belive right now, its PC only..dont quote me on it…but its never worked for me on my Tower…
Yep, REW not working on my mac as well
I have Room EQ Wizard working fine on my old Macbook running OS 10.5.8
I have Room EQ Wizard working fine on my older Macbook running OS 10.5.8…
Just a little heads up.
I went to Iceland this summer, where Björgvin is from.
This is what I saw: http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/364/cache/namafjall-iceland_36471_990x742.jpg?01AD=3unR-RNYyJCVtxxOBy7taboe3ZqXTLeNSQmehm-eiO0SF0CCUODriug&01RI=1C0E03AC4327831&01NA=na
Guys… I really wouldn’t trust anybody who is obviously from Mordor.
Volcanos, boiling sulphur pits, steam rising up from what anywhere else would just be a plain grass field… And what the heck is up with whale safaris where the whales don’t show up…???
Haha!
That’s by Mývatn isn’t it? By Katla and “Víti” (Víti means Hell btw…)
It’s a magical place hahah.
And I’m sorry about the whales not showing up. I went up to Húsavík on a whale safari and saw a few humpbacks. We were too early in the season for Blue Whales though, they’re supposed to be magnificent. And scary since they’re a bazillion times bigger than the boat you’re on lol.
Ah, can’t remember where it was or the name to be honest. Embarrassing… 🙂 My only defense is that we went the whole way round in 11 days, and it was just one incredible experience after another every day. It’s called Hell’s kitchen in English, if that helps :-).
Yeah, no whales, but they gave us another ticket for free. We didn’t have time for it though, so that’ll be next time. Definitely going back there, it’s the most magnificent place I’ve been – so incredibly beautiful and impressive nature. And good food too! 🙂
…And by good food I’m not referring to the fermented shark, by the way. That was an interesting experience. No animal should taste like cheese and have texture like an eraser.
A bit disappointed that the svarti daudi tasted exactly like our Danish snaps, though…
Haha, yeah the food is good if you stay away from the rotten stuff!
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SUP!!! Id like to add a little to the backup conversation. Time Machine really works well for the day to day things. Such as, I lost that picture of your mom and my goat, oh goto time machine and get it. But, for a total backup solution its only 1/3 of what you need. I look at it like this.
Time Machine for daily retrieval. Crash Plan (crash plan.com) is 15 bucks a month and its unlimited computers and space. So thats my offsite backup. It won’t do a complete instant restore but it will keep everything offsite.
The last is Carbon Copy Cloner http://www.bombich.com. This makes a direct bootable image of your system. So, Ryan, you mentioned that you will do a full load (bahaha Load) of your system on 2 drives and thats awesome but CCC will do that for you, saving you alot of time. And its instantly bootable. This would be an alternative for Jon and the iMac. You cant open an iMac at all IMHO. They have temperature sensors that break when opened. I have 2 useless iMacs because of that. CCC is 39 bucks. Totally worth the cost vs sitting there for hours as stuff installs. You can make several copies and take one over to a friends house and leave it for offsite storage. Or if your computer goes all microsoft on you in the middle of a session. You just grab the external CCcopy and boot via USB/Firewire etc. Hopefully you saved your session on a external drive and you are back up and running.
I never listened to Audio Nowcast and now I never will. What a douche. Keep up the great work guys.
Great show. Bjorgvin I love the crowd audio concept, if nothing else it’s something new, and new ideas are always good to have floating around. As an engineer that is thankfully getting plenty paid work at the moment, I’m still going to contribute a portion of the money I’m due for a project this week to the cause…I’m from a relatively small unpopulated area of Ireland, realistically there’s a very limited supply of bands to record/mix here, so as it is I compose music, do online work and other stuff to diversify from a traditional, get them in,get them out studio concept. I’ll definitely hope to pick a project to compete at on crowd audio sometime soon, its an interesting way to maybe find new types of artists to work with or just generally spread the net. I agree with the point that mixing isn’t exactly like creating something from scratch, though it does require a lot of creative work. In my mixing/recording w ork, I pride myself with spending time to get to know the artists likes/dislikes and will do rivisions to really nail down the exact sound they want, but unfortunately that doesn’t happen everywhere for every artist with every engineer, so this is an interesting way to avoid an artist/engineer mismatch. However, while its interesting that artists can kind of shop around if their not sure what direction they want to go with the mix, this could be a bit dangerous too, it could end up going down the fix it in the mix route in a way in terms of creative vision.
On a separate note, hats off to those guys in that other podcast for making a living from audio when they won’t even bother getting decent broadcast quality audio on their own podcast. HRS till I die! …. I smell a turf war!
Thanks for your feedback!
Yeah, we’re always aware of the issues and how we can change them to make the relationships between musician and engineer better.
Thanks in advance for your donation!
Well, I just made the jump to a new daw. Reaper is great and deep, but I never connected with it. I tried the Studio1 demo over the course of the last two or three weeks, and I really liked the work flow and some of the features I had the opportunity to work with. In the end, I went for Logic Pro X, on a kind of a hunch.
MAN…. Boy… Woman, girl, hamster… What a joy it is to work in!
The first thing that hit me is simply the visual side of things. I know that is not really related to productivity or anything, but to me it makes a big difference. I’m creating my music in my DAW, and if I’m staring at a screen during the whole process, I need it to pleasing to look at so it doesn’t distract me.
Second, the way it is laid out and the basic workflow just plain works for me. I miss some functionality of both reaper and studio one, but that’s only really relevant when mixing (which I haven’t done in logic yet).
Third, all the instruments! I make mostly pretty simple rock songs, but logic makes me want to screw around with stuff. I have hooked up my midi keyboard for the first time in ages. Not five hours ago I put down a great sounding hammond organ part on the song I’m making which totally kicks up the song’s intensity. If I had been working in reaper I never would have done that. In a nutshell, to me at least, Logic is just extremely inspiring to work in. Granted, we’re still on our honeymoon, but I don’t see how I could NOT love the program going forward. If I come to find there are some workflow issues when mixing or the like, I’ll just export to reaper to do that kind of work.
Oh, how could I forget…
Four: “Drummer tracks”. It may seem gimmicky at first – like glorified garageband. But hell… This may be my favourite feature of them all. I play guitar, can lay down a decent bass and vocal, even do some basic keyboard stuff (if I’m allowed to correct it later in midi), but drums simply are no fun to program with a mouse or even a keyboard. I contemplated buying an e-drum kit. No more. Now I can just conjure up drum tracks based on the settings i specify for each section. If I don’t like it, I tell him to play something different and he comes up with a alternative. I can even tell him to follow any other track in the project. Plus he keeps time and doesn’t steal my girlfriend. You usually need to book session players to get that kind of professionalism.
In short, Logic for me has been nothing short of amazing so far. It won’t be for everyone, but at the price (200 bucks) it may be worth checking out if you write your own music and find yourself not completely happy with your current daw.
Now if this doesn’t bring Jesse back on the show I don’t know what will…
Heading over to AudioCast.. I dont think they block people from commenting or delete their comments.. been a long road but farewell
I just went back and reread this. Crap.. it was a joke. I was being facetious… Those guys at CrapCast are idiots. Why bust on another podcast? oh wait.. they bust on you because you are a threat..
Hi Ryan, as a guitar player, I figured that you might appreciate the technique shown in this video. You don’t even need to….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGoDjBEzHdA
…strum the damn thing.
Hi Jon and Ryan,
I don’t have a home studio at this point, but I am a musician. After hearing your discussion regarding backups I felt a suggestion was in order. I have a small business and use Active Image for backing up our server. This is great software that I feel is a relative bargain. Active Image creates an image of your hard drive rather than just backing up files. The benefit to this (as you may be aware) is that when you restore the image to a hard drive (new or used) the computer is back to the same exact point it was when the image was written – software, settings, files – everything! It also doesn’t take six hours to restore. I have done test restorations in an hour or less. Thanks again for all of your efforts – I really enjoy the show! Ciao, Mark
This is windows only i believe