Speaking of games, you can expect game production to start to attract the attention of musicians and web publishers. Whereas a few short years ago, targeting musicians might mean dangling rock club gigs or album sales, now a lot of those same music makers want to break into gaming, too.

Kongregate is a bit like public access, only on steroids and for games. The idea is this: get indie game makers in one place contributing games, then get lots of people playing those games, then support the system with ad revenue shared with the game makers. The model has grown rapidly, with millions of users and over 15,000 original games.

The newest project from Kongregate looks to connect artistic talent on projects, including musicians, composers, and sound designers wanting to work on game projects. The Collabs section will see artists and sound and music creators uploading their work to find collaborators. Initially, there’s a contest on, with competition for attention, cash, and studio prizes.

http://www.kongregate.com/collabs

The competition aside, this could be the beginning of a successful community for collaboration in the indie Flash gaming world. Assets are often uploaded under a Creative Commons license, and I see one of the top sounds draws on samples from Freesound.org. While career success is an obvious goal, the contributors so far appear to see sharing as a way to get there – in stark contrast to the model in the mainstream, big-business game industry. Quality is, of course, variable, but ask anyone in the game industry how to become successful and the answer is always make as much as you can. Getting work out there, even primitive, can be part of a learning process. So I’m eager to see what transpires as these kinds of communities grow.

There is an invariable comparison to Deviant Art – and you’ll see they’ve already begun to invade.

Oh yeah, and I quite like these glassy tendrils, rendered in Cinema 4D. Image (CC) Chaodeath. Now, make that run real-time. Or, erm, imagine those are virtual renderings of artists … collaborating.

To kick off your weekend listening with a full album of delicious IDM, our friend Quantazelle / Liz McLean Knight offers up a compilation from her label subVariant. While big-name artists have gotten lots of publicity for doing free or pay-what-you-will albums, oddly a smaller group of them have chosen a Creative Commons license. subVariant does do that with a noncommercial / no derivative license – a bit restrictive, in that it doesn’t allow remixes, but perhaps a decent start.

And licensing aside, this is a lovely, clever compilation of tracks.

Interestingly, the physical object did sell out on eBay. When it comes to enthusiastic fans, it seems digital isn’t reducing the value of tangible objects – it may be doing just the opposite. (Adding still more irony, the tongue-and-cheek name for the album was “Coaster,” just what CDs have supposedly become.)

My label’s latest glitchy techno / IDM compilation is now a free digital download: SubvaritraxTM [Liz Revision Blog]

Product page / download links on fractalspin (warning: autoplays)

I quite like this album, released in the heady days of 2005 – there are some lovely, delicate tracks on there. The price is right, though, so grab it (registration required) and let us know what you think. If you torrent it, which you can under the CC license, feel free to post a link.

Description:

fugwhump has uploaded a fantastic free kit of drum sounds, built with a Eurorack modular synth. It’s licensed as Creative Commons, so you can use it free. ccMixter even includes features for linking your own work (remixes, podcasts, videos, webpages, albums), in case you do decide to use it. It’s nice, fat, raw sounding stuff. There are a few loops – mostly useful for previewing – and nine single-shot samples. Enjoy!

Analog Kit Lite by fugwhump [ccMixer]

Found via Jacob Joaquin’s Twitter.

What are your favorite finds from ccMixter (or other Creative Commons samples sources)? Sample packs you’ve uploaded? Ones you’ve enjoyed using in your own work? Let us know in comments and we’ll do a round-up soon.

You hear plenty of chatter about the powers of OpenSoundControl, the open, high-res, network-savvy control protocol for music and visuals. But standards are no good without implementation — and some implementations just aren’t very good. Now, users, you can go have a sandwich or whatever, but developers, pay attention. (And users, enjoy that sandwich in the knowledge that someone somewhere is giving you better toys to play with soon!)

Our friend Ray, co-developer of live visual app VDMX, has put up a Cocoa, Mac-based framework for OSC. While it’s all in Objective-C (natch), it wouldn’t be too hard to port a similar framework to other open-source languages and platforms. Ray is working on a kind of best-practices OSC implementation. Worth a peek — and if you’re a Cocoa dev, of course, even better.

Described thusly:

VVOSC is an Objective-c framework for assembling, sending, and receiving OSC (Open Sound Control) messages on OS X. A
simple sample application which sends and receives OSC messages is also included.

more information on OSC:
http://opensoundcontrol.org/

VVOSC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

vvosc [Code+Examples]

Cocoa fans, they’ve also whipped up an Objective-C framework for MIDI:

VMIDI is an Objective-c framework which simplifies working with MIDI in OS X. A sample application capable of sending and receiving MIDI built from the framework is included.

vvmidi

(Insert here: “Daddy? Tell me more stories about MIDI and how you used to use values from 0 to 127 back in the day!”)

“vvosc” is likely to cause confusion with the Windows-only vvvv — which is also visual, also wonderful, and also supports OSC — but hopefully you can sort that out.

Now that I have your attention, developers, I’m curious: got questions about OSC? Challenges with implementation on different operating systems and in different frameworks? What are the best implementations you’ve seen in common environments like C++, Java, and Python?

SoundCloud, the music and sound sharing service we saw launch this month has added a very important feature: support for different licenses. When you upload tracks, you can elect to protect your work with a conventional copyright or opt instead for a Creative Commons license. That’s an important feature I’d like to see all these services support. The one thing Creative Commons and conventional copyright advocates agree on is that being explicit about what rights you want to your work is essential.

Naturally, this means not only that you can upload works, but that SoundCloud could soon become a rich repository for CC-licensed work to use as video soundtracks or sample, in the way that Flickr’s CC search has fired up lots of (legal) image use. We have heard some dissatisfaction from readers about SoundCloud’s pricing scheme, but this announcement means SoundCloud remains one to watch — even if you’re not personally uploading to it.

SoundCloud also came up with a unique idea: they created a drop box for CC-licensed works which they played at a party.

You can read about the new licenses and other news tidbits on the SoundCloud blog:
Introducing SoundCloud Creative Commons Support