You’ve probably heard about the spat between YouTube/Google and the Performing Rights Society (PRS). The PRS have launched a new site - fairplayforcreators.com - which aims to highlight the issues of online earnings. Pete Waterman is quoted as receiving a massive £11 for over 100 million views of ‘Never going to give you up’, while poor old Mark Kelly from Marillion only made 0.6p from 10 million views of his band’s videos. In the meantime, Google continues to make revenue from advertising on the very same pages as these videos. Gone are the days when videos were promotional tools to encourage album or single sales - those sales are through the floor. In the newly-emerging music business these digital channels will all take-on new significance as potential income streams for artists. If music video has value to Google in driving ad revenue then it is a resource that should be rewarded fairly. Without seeing the figures it is difficult to determine what that rate should be, but given some of the headline figures we’re hearing you can’t help but feel that at present music makers are getting a raw deal. If you’re involved in creating music, make sure your voice is heard.
Archive for the ‘PC’ Category
PRS fights back
Thursday, March 26th, 2009Cubase 5 revealed
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
Cubase 5
Yup, it’s time to decide how brave you’re feeling and to maybe climb onto that upgrade ladder once again. Cubase 5 is coming with a load of new features designed to separate you from your beer money. In a nutshell, here are some of the highlights:
- Loopmash - a plug-in multi-track loop mixer / combiner thingie.
- Groove Agent One - a built in drum-machine / sample trigger.
- Beat Designer - a step-based rhythm programming tool.
- VariAudio - offline (in the wave editor) vocal tuning a la Autotune / Melodyne with time-stretching tools. Looks cool!
- PitchCorrect - a realtime pitch-correction plug-in.
- REVerence - a built-in convolution reverb plug-in complete with over 70 impulses. Nice.
- Better automation and midi controller data handling.
- VST Expression - tools to ease the pain of working with sample libraries with multiple articulations.
- 64 bit compatibility for Vista, lifting the 2GB limit!
- Total Export - track export selection options. Should be great for creating stems.
In all it looks like a fairly significant update, and it seems the tie-up with Yamaha has certainly yielded some fruit in the area of effects processing. Of course history tells us you’re a brave person to dive-in with a first release, but give it a few months (ok, maybe a few more than that) for the bugs to be ironed out and it may be an attractive upgrade. That attractiveness will probably depend on whether you already own plug-ins that do the job of many of the new features, or if you’re a ‘beats and loops’ kinda guy/gal (I’m not). You can check out a video of Cubase 5 in action from NAMM 2009 at AudioFanzine.
Update: Cubase 5 will cost £544.13 new, or £180.77 as an upgrade from Cubase 4 or, bafflingly, Cubase SX3. As a reasonably recent Cubase 4 owner that feels like a bit of a raw deal. Details in the Steinberg shop, or get it for cheaper at Dolphin.
What’s filling-up my hard drive?
Friday, November 14th, 2008
If you’ve ever wondered just why your hard drive is so full, you may find this free hard disk analysis tool useful. Windirstat is an open source (free, as in beer) PC application which will analyse your disk and report back with a very handy graphical representation of just what is sitting on your drive. Use it to identify old stuff you can clear-out, and marvel at the gargantuan proportions of some of today’s sample libraries!