Sure, many issues around intellectual property are gray. But contributor Jo Ardalan has a disturbing story: what happens when a fundraising album gets pirated? Did illegal file sharing users know what they were doing — is there a need for a donation mechanism for these services — or is it really this bad? Apologies if this is old news – catching up during travel – but a question well worth considering. -Ed.

We all know piracy forces labels, artists and developers to incur a huge cost. Recently, however, illegal file-sharing cost a bundle for the fundraising efforts aimed to raise money for reconstructing parts of Italy after a recent and devastating April quake. Universal Music and Italian pop artists collaborated on a track entitled “Domani 21/4/09″ that sells digitally for 2 Euros and will later be sold in stores for 5 Euros. According to Variety, the track has been downloaded illegally 2 million times.

Caterina Caselli, who produced the track for free says that this project is (translated from Italian) “sort of ‘mission impossible’: in one project between eighty artists and musicians doing almost everything in one day. All have dealt with air travel at their own expense, technicians and porters have worked for free, as do the catering…Universal does not gain anything.”

Artists inovled are Jovanotti, Ligabue, Zucchero and Elisa and many others.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118003748.html?categoryid=19&cs=1
http://discomania2.myblog.it/archive/2009/05/09/domani-21-4-09-con-jovanotti-e-altri-60-artisti-serve-a-racc.html [Italian]

Play this track:

Your pocket is bulging with power.

Wait… okay, that sounded really wrong.

Anyway, the mobile software revolution continues. There’s so much stuff out there that it can actually be hard to track. Here’s a round-up to help you navigate everything that’s going on this week.

And even if you can’t stand another word about the iPhone, consider this: the explosion of iPhone software, more than just a fad, illustrates what happens when you give developers tools to make multimedia capabilities easier, then provide a distribution outlet. I don’t love everything about the iTunes approach, but those are lessons that could easily be learned in desktop and mobile development alike. The iPhone platform, if nothing else, is surprisingly uncompromising in the sound and visual interaction departments, especially for a mobile platform. And even desktop platforms could benefit from this kind of distribution mechanism (see also: Steam for games).

Also, we do have some of the first signs that the iPhone won’t be alone for long – new functionality on Google’s Android could take that platform in new directions. See my next story, Android/Linux/open source fans.

Disclaimer: don’t worry. I’m not giving up on desktop apps. Relax. In fact, even now as I look across these applications, while there are lots of cool ideas, it’s still clear this is a nascent area. The experience is nowhere near as rich as you get on the desktop. But it’s nonetheless worth exploring some of the ideas before we return to our (more powerful) desktop applications for music.

Musical activists are opposing a Japanese nuclear reprocessing plant. What’s in it for you: free musical downloads opposing contamination by nuclear radiation. (Any pro-radiation readers will have to look elsewhere.) Nuclear reprocessing is a way of reclaiming spent nuclear fuels. Sounds great, right — recycling and whatnot? Unfortunately, there are serious risks involved. The plant, Rokkasho-mura reprocessing plant in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, is under fire because:

1. Just two weeks into testing, after the plant opened last year, radioactive water containing plutonium and uranium spilled inside the plant.
2. According to a recent report, this particular plant has a design flaw that makes it susceptible to Japan’s frequent earthquakes — and the plant maker is alleged to have kept this flaw secret for eleven years.
3. Reprocessing in general has been criticized for increasing the risk of global nuclear terrorism.
4. Using nuclear energy as a power source poses numerous risks throughout the fuel cycle both in terms of the environment and terror targets.
5. Personally, they had me at the radioactive water.

Stop Rokkasho.org: Hear [Music downloads]
Via the good peoples of Synthtopia

Music with political agendas has been controversial among readers of this site. But when high-profile musicians like Ryuichi Sakamoto are organizing musical protests, and the likes of Kraftwerk contribute songs, there’s no question these events have an impact.

Second Life is one of those things I might try out one of these days, except that I’m quite busy with my first, second, third, and fourth lives at the moment. I’m surprised that while Tom at Music thing catches on to music gear sales in the virtual community, he misses out on all the synths. Search “synth” on the SLBoutique, and you’ll find lots of classic gear rendered in 3D form. Seen recently:

Conbrio Synth
Yamaha DX1
Roland JX10
TimewARP 2600 (a unique virtual version of a virtual version of a real synth – yikes!)

All of these come from SL user Hardmoon Systems. (Hardmoon, are you out there on CDM by any chance?)

Tom also points in an update to the virtual studio featured last year on the Second Life blog SLOG. Now the bad news: a lot of this gear is entirely virtual. It’s just 3D eye candy, a la the Sims, with the disturbing requirement of having to actually pay real money for it. (Money for a non-functional 3D virtual mock-up of a virtual synth? What?) At best, you’ll get an animation of someone playing the synth.

Naturally, this gets my gears turning. While SLOG can only dream of General MIDI integration (oh … boy … wouldn’t that … be fun), I’m thinking about a virtual 3D world that can transmit and receive OSC data and simple audio streams. Second Life can at least do the audio end, but 3D worlds that allow you to control real music sources while in the virtual space could add more dimension. Search CDM for Quake and Unreal and you’ll see some other examples. Second Life, as much as the kids today may love it, may not be the best environment for that.

Second Life is becoming a major international community for music, and Ableton’s David Cross wondered in an email to me the other day if perhaps this would extend from communities of listeners to user groups and communities of music makers. The synths might all be eye candy, but there are free spaces with concerts and chances to experience music — a lot more interesting, as far as net music, than staring at a QuickTime stream. That’s made me wonder, for those of you who do have time for a Second Life, has anyone found interesting communities or resources in SL? Or is it really just hype, and there’s a better alternative virtual community? Let us know.

Elsewhere:
Music gear for sale in Second Life [Music thing]
Wired Magazine jumps on the SL bandwagon

Gaming environments like Quake and Unreal have become easy interactive 3D development environments. Modify the game maps and objects, and you can make the visual realm in these games whatever you want. But for digital musicians imagining a 3D environment for creating music and sound, they’re limited.

Enter the latest project from fijuu2 creator Julian Oliver, together with Steven Pickles. They wanted powerful synthesis capabilities, which is something you’re unlikely ever to get in a game like Quake III. So, they found a way to send network data from Quake into the free software Pd, using Pd’s netsend object to send UDP packets containing control data from the game. In other words, instead of using a MIDI controller, you can make the game your control instrument. netsend is in Max/MSP, too, so this should work for Max, as well.

You’ll need two machines for this to work right, but the objects are freely available from Julian and Steven; follow the download link on the project page:

q3apd

I’ve been following progress on Julian’s blog; it’s a good read. For more on the work, here’s our friend Chris at Pixelsumo:

q3apd (Quake-Pure Data)

. . . and to see it in action, Julian posts a video:

q3apd in gorgeous OGG video glory

For Pd fans, Steven has a goodie of his own: an abstraction that fakes poly~ from Max/MSP inside Pd, plus some other objects.

Given the ready availability of map editors and such (at least if you have access to Windows), I expect you’ll see more projects like this. We’ve seen work before, certainly, that creates art inside the game engines, but by linking to real synthesis libraries you can do more than just mix pre-rendered sound sources. Speaking of which, any other readers experimenting with game engines? Let us know. And feel free to share in our gaming forum.