U-Myx news

A number of new releases and announcements from U-Myx:
- They've announced a content alliance with EMI that should see more new EMI artists releasing in U-Myx format. It'll be interesting to see what comes of this: EMI artists include The Chemical Brothers, Moby and New Zealand's Salmonella Dub, as well as (through their Positiva label) Deep Dish and Axwell.

They also have a huge back catalogue - presumably we could se some of that being remixed into U-Myx format.

- Air's new single Mer du Japon (which means Sea of Japan in French if you haven't guessed) is out now.

- and so is The Bomb from New York Pony Club.

New year, new stuff

Happy New Year to everyone!

I haven't posted for a while - basically I was away in the US early December, and then it was Xmas. NZ pretty much shuts down this time of year, given that we get our Christmas and summer holidays both at the same time...

While I was away, U-Myx extended their site to offer streaming audio - you can now create a mix and put a streaming version of it on your site, Myspace page or whatever.

This is cool for a couple of reasons:
- it saves maxing out your filespace (not to mention bandwidth) quota on your web pages.
- it avoids copyright problems - the original content all stays with U-Myx - it's just the remix overlay that gets published.

They've got this enabled now for Yoko Ono's track "Talking to the universe", which is also a free! download - so if you object to her voice, you can remove it and make an instrumental!!

Faithless

Yourspins have added the Faithless track "Bombs", from the album To All New Arrivals. The track features vocals from Harry Collier (of Kubb).

Should be fun to remix. I've had a part complete hardtrance edit of "We Come 1" on the go for ages (now if I had the parts for that!).

Guardian coverage

The Guardian had an article by Chris Salmon the other week giving U-Myx some coverage.

Like he says "how much better that last song would sound if only you could add some dirty synths and a kicking breakbeat". One can always resort to old fashioned techniques with filters and stereo separation to start remixing a conventionally recorded song - but it's a lot easier with remix ready music to start with.

U-Myx tops downloads for Depeche Mode

U-Myx topped the digital format downloads for Depeche Mode's new single "Martyr" last week.

The single itself made number 13 (in the UK) - I wonder who's buying remixable music formats? Are many DJs making mixes and playing them out? It would be interesting to know.

ChoonML toolkit released

The first alpha version of the ChoonML toolkit has been released.

ChoonML is an open source alternative format for remixable music. Being open source, full details of the spec are on the site as well as source code for a conversion library.

A converter for Adobe Audition files is already available. Further converters are promised and they encourage software developers to use the toolkit to build in support for the format.

Where is Umixit going?

I was looking at the Umixit site. There doesn't seem to be that much going on in terms of new music being released on that format.

I tried to order a few CDs from Webster Hall, but they wanted USD40 for international shipping - which is a bit over the top (I'd want to be ordering a whole box of CDs to justify that sort of shipping cost - Amazon charge about USD10 to ship from the UK to NZ). I might just grab some when I'm next in the US.

A pity, since the idea of a Cakewalk based system looks promising.