Start Date: 04/28/2008.  I decided to make use of all the samples I was chopping up.  And since my birthday is tomorrow, I decided to make a b-day song.  Yeah I started this project on 4/28, but I completely redid everything 5/6.  I just reused the same FL Studio project.  So it’s mostly jazz and some big band courtesy of:

• Benny Goodman
• The Birdlanders
• Ella Fitzgerald & Joe Pass
• Assembler
• DJ Snyder (Beats)
• Antony Raijekov

Date: 4/26/2008. I was looking through my hard drive and found a couple jazz songs that I wanted to sample from.

• Benny Goodman - The Lamp Is Low
• Benny Goodman - If I Had You
• Ella Fitzgerald & Joe Pass -My Old Flame

For everything else, I used the standard Reason SoundBank. It comes together really well. First thing you hear is “The music seems to be so reminiscent.” Then it goes into the old ’20s type of music. Enjoy.

Start date: 3/16/2008. I made a website for the folks at Nalej.  There’s this flash intro that I have up on there where I used the song Flutter by Bonobo.  Well that’s copyrighted, so I decided to make my own song using samples from ccMixter.

System -> Administration -> Software Sources

Under the Ubuntu Software Tab, tick all the check boxes

Under the Third-Party Software Tab click Add and enter in:

deb http://www.geexbox.org/debian/ unstable main

Close out of it, it’ll ask you to reload, do it.

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager

Search for ushare and install it and all its depedencies

Open up a terminal

sudo nano /etc/ushare.conf

Make sure you change the interface if it’s not eth0. Set your share folder under USHARE_DIR. For some reason ushare won’t scan more than one folder, so share one folder and put symbolic links to your other folders in that. Change ENABLE_XBOX (the var) to USHARE_ENABLE_XBOX and set the value to ‘yes’. Feel free to customize anything else, if you want to change the port or name. Save and exit.

Now we’re gonna test if ushare is working.

In the same terminal,

sudo ushare

It should show the number of videos you have in the folder you listed under USHARE_DIR. If anything weird happens at this point, try any of the following:

Add a new route, for example:

sudo route -net add 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev eth0

Make sure you forward the port you specified in the config if your router doesn’t support UPnP or you have it disabled.

Check to see that the interface in the config is correct.

Example output:

Interface eth0 is down.
Recheck uShare's configuration and try again !
uShare (version 1.1a), a lightweight UPnP A/V and DLNA Media Server.
Benjamin Zores (C) 2005-2007, for GeeXboX Team.
See http://ushare.geexbox.org/ for updates.
Listening on telnet port 1337
Initializing UPnP subsystem ...
Starting in XboX 360 compliant profile ...
UPnP MediaServer listening on 192.168.2.97:49152
Sending UPnP advertisement for device ...
Listening for control point connections ...
Building Metadata List ...
Looking for files in content directory : /home/joseph/Videos
Found 315 files and subdirectories.

Note: Ignore if you see Interface is down. It still worked for me.

Now, CTRL-C out of the process. We’re gonna run the daemon.

In the same terminal,

/etc/init.d/ushare restart

Now turn on your XBOX,

System -> Network Settings -> Test Media Connection

Let’s test if your XBOX is connected properly. If it fails under PC Selected or PC Connection, open up a terminal and type in,

sudo /etc/init.d/ushare restart

Test again. If it fails again, enter the command above one more time. If everything is set up correctly then you should only have to do this twice.

Now that it’s working correctly,

Media -> Videos

uShare should be an available source (press X if you’re not at the source selection screen). Select it and test out a video.

If you run into any problems at this point like a message saying the content is unplayable, try restarting uShare using the method above or try restarting your XBOX.

Good luck!

Start date: 5/5/2007. I had this DnB track that I had on my computer that was “so-so.” It will always be a work in progress since I kinda suck at making DnB. So I attempted to make another iteration of it. A down mixed and synthy version. Hope you like.

Start date: 9/25/2007.  Instead of sampling from copyright materials, I decided to take a stab at sampling from stuff under the Create Commons license.  The upside is I don’t have to worry about someone hounding me down.  I also get access to cool acapellas.  BUT, my range is severely limited.  Vocals are from the start and end of All I Do by 4nsic.  Samples come from You Are The You by Ehren Starks and from The Freesound Project (I forgot which user I d/l’d from).

Start date: 7/24/2007. This is my ode to illegal substances. I did this is FL Studio, all original instruments. Trying to aim at something minimal. Rap by 4nsic.

Start date: 7/15/2007. So, I wanted to try putting an acapella over a track, so I updated the 7/15/07 track and found some vocals over at ccMixter. The vocals are from a track called Life of Luxury by J.Lang. I would post it up there, but the samples I used aren’t under cc. So the way I redid 070715, was using FL Studio’s peak controller with Mute2. That’s why it sounds chopped up. Then I added some reverb so it doesn’t sound too choppy.

Start date: 9/18/2007.  ccMixter.org is a website that allows people like me to grab samples for free (under the creative commons license).  Today I grabbed the instrumental sources from this song called Ana by Vieux Farka Touré.  All samples are from this except for a hihat from FL Studio’s sample pack.  It’s not finished, but I thought it’d be cool to share what I have so far… enjoy.

Start date: 8/14/2007. This was sitting on my ftp for awhile. I forgot where I sampled it from. I tried playing around with Reason’s samplers and loop points and loop types. I think I’ll add in some some strings or synth later.