The Download Munkey : A Link A Day ;)

Juno Records, one of my favourite online record stores for electronic music, has finally made its entire back catalogue searchable. Previously, users could only search for out of stock records and CDs released in the previous one or two years.

With the newly opened back catalogue, I can now preview and positively identify tracks of older releases that I hear in downloaded mixes as well as complete my wishlist of the classic tracks in genres like drum & bass that I’ve only recently began to listen to. Unforunately, some of these tracks are only available on permanently out-of-print vinyl athough some tracks still have digital downloads

Most online record stores use streaming audio for preview but Juno Records allows users to directly download MP3 or WMA samples before previewing, which is perfect for users with slower connections or for offline preview.

Thanks to its pleasing and extremely user-friendly interface as well as its efficient search feature, I use it regularly together with Last.fm and Discogs to discover and identify electronic music tracks. I have downloaded MP3 samples of most of the tracks on my wishlist so it’s easy for me to decide what to buy when I save enough

Although their prices are very competitive, their shipping charges for vinyl to SG are slightly higher than the other online record stores like SoulSeduction and Chemical Records that I have shopped before. The CDs (including shipping) are usually cheaper than HMV at Heeren though.

Some of my favourite tracks from a few years back with links to 1 min samples at Juno Records . Take a listen, you may find something nice in the following lists

Progressive
Cass & Slide - Opera (Phantoms Mix)
Way Out West - Mindcircus
Gus Gus - Believe

Drum & Bass
Uncut - Fallin’ (Total Science Dub)
LTJ Bukem - Suspended Space
LTJ Bukem - Watercolours
4 Hero - 9 by 9 (Remix)
Technozoide - Esfera
Big Bud - Indian Summer

House
Laurent Garnier - Greed (Fabric Lig Remix)
Ken Ishii - Iceblink (Beat The Strings Attack Mix)
Cricco Castelli - Buena Vista (Audio Drive’s Formula 1 Remix)
Alan Barratt - The End (The Witch Doctor Remix)
Green Velvet - Flash (Danny Tenaglia’s Nitrous Oxide mix)

Techno
Jay Denham - Smoker’s Delight
Redhead vs Alexander Koning - Redhead vs Alexander Koning (Redhead Remix)
Richard Bartz - Subway
Technasia - Evergreen III
Gary Martin - Cosa Cougat (Original Mix)
E-Dancer - Pump The Move

Haven’t been listening to breaks and breakbeat stuff for a while but here’s some of my old favourites.

Breaks
Fatboy Slim - Retox (Freq Nasty Remix)
BLIM - Dust
Leftfield - Afrika Shox

Breakbeat
Keith Tucker - Alien Radio
Chaos - Afrogermanic
Dopplereffekt - Speak & Spell

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Resident Advisor Podcasts
Orange Mixer - Make Your Own Electronic Music
Best Practice 1.01 - Speed up or Slow down Audio
Ken Ishii - Extra MV

Australian-based electronic music site Resident Advisor offers high quality recordings of exclusive mixes as free weekly podcasts. (registration is required). There are currently 76 podcasts in total with this week’s mix by Michael Fakesch from the now defunct Funkstörung.

Each podcast is a mix by producers from the house/techhouse/minimal genres ranging from the more established producers like Joris Voorn (RA.062) and Adam Beyer (RA.030) to names I haven’t heard of, like Panoramabar resident Prosumer (RA.070) who did an excellent deep house mix last month.

The older mixes were usually one hour long but recent mixes by producers like Prins Thomas (RA.074) spanned 2 hours 15 minutes(!) and Chloé (RA.073), Sven Weisemann (RA.075) both did ninety minute mixes.

Excellent stuff if you’re into more slower paced mixes of house and minimal techno that’s all the rage in the electronic scene now. I find these mixes either too bleepy or too ambient for me so I’m sifting through the different tracks in each mix to sniff out more memorable tracks like the atmospheric Richard Davis - Bring Me Closer [240 Volts]. Many of the recent mixes also contain tracklists which makes identifying the interesting tracks much easier.

Only the 4 latest podcasts are downloadable so check the site every week or subscribe to the ResidentAdvisor newsletter. I missed out podcasts RA.031 to RA.061 because I didn’t realize that they changed the download policy to restrict downloads to the 4 latest podcasts

UPDATE 18 June 2008 : Some of the older podcasts can be found at archive.org.

Download podcasts @ ResidentAdvisor (iTunes not required as direct download links are provided).

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Orange Mixer
Mutt & Davis James Promo DnB Mix
High Resolution Fabric CD Coverart

© Axis Records

Recently found a three min excerpt of the video footage recorded from the Exhibitionist Mix (Feb 2004) by American DJ Jeff Mills aka The Wizard on three turntables.

Tracks played in this video:
Jeff Mills - AX-009F (Segment 3)
Jeff Mills - Condor To Mallorca
Oliver Ho - Organic Synthetic

© Axis Records

The full video for the Exhibitionist Mix, along with 3 other mixes on the Exhibitionist DVD can be bought from Jeff Mills’s Axis Records online shop for 22 USD + 10 USD shipping (for Asia). After watching this short clip, I really feel like getting this DVD The footage for three of the four mixes can be viewed from three angles - front, top and side as well as slowed down or zoomed

There’s also a audio CD edition of the Exhibitionist Mix with 45 tracks as opposed to 32 tracks on the DVD available for 16 USD from the Axis Records store.

I downloaded a copy of this video for offline viewing with the excellent donationware SDP Downloader which handles downloading of streaming WMV very well.

© SDP Multimedia

All you have to do is View Source on a page containing an embedded Windows Media Player and search for .asx or .wmv, determine the full URL for the asx/wmv file and paste that URL into SDP Downloader to start downloading. Finding the asx/wmv link may be very tedious since some websites hide the link to the actual files in Javascript files or dynamically generate the links on the fly.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
MediaCoder audio/video transcoder
Ken Ishii Extra MV
Technics SL-DZ1200 Video Demo
Ots CD Scratch 1200 virtual turntables (freeware)

Read this on the Friends of EML blog next week and have been playing with this nifty little Flash application for the whole of last week

Orange Mixer allows you to arrange preloaded samples into tracks (max 16 samples per mix) and then apply effects to each individual track like fading and panning (switch to Advanced mode, add points and drag - a bit like drawing and tweaking Bezier curves in drawing applications). Each mix can consist of up to 20 bars which means a song can be up to close to 7 minutes for hip-hop or close to 4 minutes for drum n’ bass.

The included audio samples comprise drum, bass, percussion, music (piano, guitar), sfx, some really hair-raising vocals as well of some of the Chemical Brothers’ bleepy electro stuff.

Electro (above) and drum n’ bass (below) mixes

Here’s my 1 minute long efforts - dnb and electro - hack jobs done in a few minutes which shows how easy it is to create your own stuff from the included samples even for a amateur like me Try my 30 seconds funky house mix too

Before you dismiss this as an application for electronic music only, here’s an absolutely cringe-worthy rock mix to show the possibilities of making non-electronic music - click here for a truly awful experience

The above samples were recorded into .WAV and then converted to MP3 with Audacity. You can also save your mix online and finalize it as MP3 although I find the former process more convenient.

Pros

• Free! Free! Free! Registration is required though.
• Very easy to use.
• Preloaded with audio samples from multiple genres, all samples in the particular being at the same tempo to eliminate the need to adjust the BPM for each sample

Cons

• Unable to load own samples makes it a little boring after a while as there will always be samples that you won’t like and will never use which limits you to reusing the same few samples after making a few mixes:(
• Cannot mix and match samples from different genres due to different BPM for samples of each genre.
• Playback cannot commence from the middle of a bar, only from the start of a bar.
• For an application made in the UK, there’s no breaks samples. WTF!!

Then again, you can’t really fault the application for the cons when it’s such a user-friendly application with such a low learning curve (plus it’s free too!!)

Play the Orange Mixer.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
BestPractice - Speed up or slowdown audio
Technics SL-DZ1200 Video Demo
Rebirth RB-338

UPDATE (15 Aug 2008) : For a quicker and less painless way of converting YouTube videos try www.flv2mp3.com. Super as described below is still a very useful tool to convert media files between multiple formats.

YouTube is a pretty nice site to find and listen to songs that you can’t buy from shops like the excellent Canon Rock arranged by Jerry C and performed by Jeong-Hyun Lim aka funtwo a couple of years back. Being the usual slowcoach, I only discovered it a few weeks ago

It’s all fine when you have internet access to listen to songs like these, but what if you want to listen to them on an MP3 player on the way to work?

Convert them to MP3s of course Here’s how:

1. In YouTube, copy the URL link on the video page.

   

2. Go to www.videodl.org, paste the link we copied in step 1 and click Get It!

   

3. Wait for a while and a Download Link will appear. If the page does not display the Download Link, refresh the page and click on the Get It! link again.

   

4. Right click and choose Save Target As … to save the file somewhere you can remember because this YouTube file contains the MP3 that we want. Remember to rename it as xxx.flv.
5. Download eRightSoft’s Super transcoder (Windows only). Look for a link labelled Download and Use and scroll all the way to the bottom on the next page to download the 25+ MB installer.
6. After installing Super, start it and you should see a screen like the one below.

   

7. The settings should be as follows:
   • Select MP3 from the dropdown list for the Output Container
   • * VERY IMPORTANT * - ensure that DirectShow Encode is NOT checked. Flash video which is the format that YouTube uses to store video, cannot be decoded by DirectShow, that’s why this has to be off.
   • At the blue Audio section, the default settings are set to 44100 Khz, 128 kbps, Stereo ala CD quality audio. You can change these settings but remember that the output quality is dependent on the original audio source in the YouTube video.

8. Right click anywhere in Super to display the menu and click on Output File Saving Management to select the output directory for your brand new MP3.

   

9. To extract the audio in our YouTube video to MP3s, right click again to display the menu, click on Add Multimedia Files and select the YouTube video we saved in step 4.
10. Click on Encode (Active Files) at the bottom and enjoy!

BTW, correct me if I’m wrong but ripping copyrighted songs from YouTube is considered illegal in most places. Use the above info at your own discretion

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
BestPractice 1.01 - Speed Up or Slow Down Audio
MediaCoder - Alternative Media Transcoder
Downloading Movie Trailers from Apple Trailers (I)
Downloading Movie Trailers from Apple Trailers (II)