AWS’ weird AI-powered keyboard experiment, DeepComposer, is no more. In a blog post today, the company announced it’s shutting down the 5-year-old DeepComposer, a physical MIDI piano and AWS service that let users compose songs with the help of generative AI. “After careful consideration, we have made the decision to end support for AWS DeepComposer,” […]

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A pair of friends turned founders, Thomas Magnano and Benoit Herbreteau, have created a service that can make your life a little easier if you want to migrate your music listening between streaming services. They founded their company Soundiiz in 2013, which was originally supposed to be a music search interface, but they found that […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Soundiiz is a free third-party tool that builds portability tools through existing APIs and acts as a translator between the services.

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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Here’s a bonus August mixtape inspired by the music our family listened to while driving around Oahu last week.

I made it from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at End of an Ear. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

This is the mix I really wanted to make for August, but I needed to go to the island first to make sure everything worked. (“Make Time Stop” should’ve been the September mix!)

SIDE A

– Richard Myhill, “Hawaiian Link”
– Janet Kay, “Silly Games”
– Heimo Rhonda, “Sunshine in Hawaii”
– Haruomi Hosono, “Saigono Rakuen”
– Raymond Scott, “Vibes & Marimba”
– Benjamin Rogers, “On a Coconut Island”
– Dominique Demont, “Un jour avec Yusef”
– Paul McCartney, “Ram On”
– Roedelius, “Wenn der Südwind…” (snippet)

SIDE B

– Señor Coconut, “Showroom Dummies”
– Martin Denny, “The Enchanted Sea”
– Harmonia & Eno, “When Shade Was Born”
– George Kulokahai and His Island Serenaders, “Aloha Oe”
– Raymond Scott, “Portofino 2”
– Gaussian Curve, “Impossible Island”

This tape was trimmed down from a 2 1/2 hour playlist I had on shuffle as we drove around the Windward Coast and the North Shore. The best way I’ve found to make a “vibes” playlist is to dump a bunch of stuff in there, and put it on shuffle, and anything that doesn’t fit, you just delete it as you go. 

When it comes to making an actual tape, however, I think you just have to start with the song you want to start with on side A and do one track at a time. (I was going to start with “Ram On” — it was really kind of a theme for our trip: I learned it on ukulele while we were out there and the 9-year-old even requested it — but it’s a song that works better for me towards the end of a side.)

Janet Kay’s “Silly Games” wasn’t on my original playlist, but I heard it by the side of the pool and I got excited because I love that song and started singing along and realized I haven’t put that one on a mix yet. (They were playing a lot of great Jamaican tracks at the resort we stayed at.) 

Everything on this mix is streaming for now, so you can listen on Spotify: 

This is the 9th mix I’ve made this year — if you’d like to listen to them all in one big batch, I made a 6+ hour playlist out of them.

Here’s August’s monthly mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at End of an Ear. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

I was going to save this summer fading fast vibes mix for September, but I’ve decided these days not to save things, to make them when they’re ready:

It was a short tape (only 30 mins) so it was a short mix:

SIDE A

– the first few seconds of Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog”
– waxahatchie w/ MJ Lenderman, “right back to it”
– big thief, “time escaping”
– durutti column, “sketch for summer”
– nick drake, “pink moon”

SIDE B

– the mamas and the papas, “got a feelin’”
– bob dylan, “went to see the gypsy”
– the feelies, “raised eyebrows” (faded out around 1:50)
– crooked fingers, “sleep all summer”
– thee oh sees, “golden phones” (faded out after about a minute to fill the tape)

A couple of these selections seemed a little obvious to me, but “Pink Moon” is the perfect song for filling 2 minutes at the end of a mixtape! (And it’s also a perfectly recorded song, no matter how many commercials you hear it in.)

It was a cheap tape that I hit a little too hard on the recording, so it runs a little hot.

I’m trying to extend the pool vibes from the “Firecracker” mixtape, so I don’t really plan on listening to this again until September, but you can listen to it any time here:

This is the 8th of these mixes I’ve made — if you’d like to listen to them all in one big batch, I made a 5-hour playlist out of them.

Filed under: mixtapes

Four Tet’s Three is one of my favorite albums of the year, so I was delighted to come across an interview with Kieran Hebden on the Tape Notes podcast discussing its making. He rarely gives interviews, so before listening, I really knew nothing about him or how he works. It was a delight to hear about the making of a record I’ve spent so much time with. 

Four Tet’s music is extra special to me because my 11-year-old composer and I both love it — I put “Loved” on my February mixtape and Owen put “Lush” on the mixtape we collaborated on this month. It was wild to me to hear Hebden describe how he works in Ableton, drawing the notes on the piano roll instead of playing them on the keyboard. (Something I see Owen do a ton when he’s composing.)

I really loved Hebden’s attitude towards making music after many decades. He says that if he can stay excited about listening to music and enjoy the making of it while also avoiding the trappings of success and the bog of the industry, that it actually makes the work more successful. Just a wonderful listen. 

When he was asked about his most important piece of equipment, he said his hi-fi system because it’s what helps him listen to music in a level of detail that helps him really explore and hear sounds. (Check out the gigantic ongoing Spotify playlist of what he’s listening to.)

This emphasis on listening came up over and over again in the interview, and I wanted to copy down his advice to other musicians: Listen to more music.

“Listening to a lot of music and really exploring it and doing that level of investigation of really understanding where things have come from.”

He then describes swimming upstream: 

If you listen to a current record now that samples an old nineties record, and then you check out the old nineties record, find out that sample’s like an old soul record for the drum break or whatever.

And then you go listen to the old soul record and then you find out who the drummer was who played that drum break. And it’s like, oh, it’s Bernard Purdy or whatever.

And then you look on Wikipedia and check out all the other records he made. And then you’re like, oh, he worked with this producer a lot and you check out what that producer did.

To listen to music in that way and explore it and study it, I think is hugely valuable in terms of learning how to be a good arranger, a good producer, a good musician. The more you take in of understanding the sort of like great music that’s out there and the things that came before, it’s so powerful.

Everything’s there, all the information’s there. And then if you take everything you learn from that and then combine it with your own ideas and your own emotions and stuff, then you sort of set up to sort of push things forward. I think that’s much more useful than spending all your time being like, I’m just gonna be learning what every single thing in Ableton does now for the next few months…

You’ve got to love records so much, he says, that you want to make something that can sit on a shelf alongside the records you love.

It’s a lesson that is true for all creative people: Your output depends on your input.

If you want to be a great musician, you need to listen to more great music. If you want to write great books, you need to read more great books. If you want to make great films…

(Steal like an artist.)

Here’s another monthly mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at End of an Ear. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

This one started out a little differently than the others: I asked my 11-year-old son and composer Owen (check out his album TECH) to trade tracks with me in a collaborative playlist. See if you can tell whose tracks are whose: 

This was enormously fun — we had a little iMessage window going and our Spotify windows open and could see our changes in real time. Some of his picks really impressed and surprised me. 

Only trouble was, I misjudged the length of the tape, so I had to cut it down and rearrange it a bit — I started side B with “Funkytown” (we both love that song) and wound up adding Yukihiro Takahashi because we’d been listening to so much Yellow Magic Orchestra: 

SIDE A

– yellow magic orchestra, “firecracker” (with a snippet of Martin Denny’s original at the beginning)
– daft punk, “motherboard”
– four tet, “lush”

SIDE B

– lipps, inc., “funkytown”
– yasuaki shimizu, “kakashi”
– yukihiro takahashi, “drip dry eyes”
– toby fox, “ruins”

I’ve made 7 of these mixes now and I wound up buying another dozen 99 cent cassettes when I was at End of an Ear last time, so it looks like I might just do this indefinitely?

If you’d like to listen to them all in one big batch, I made a 5-hour playlist out of them.

Filed under: mixtapes

Here’s another monthly mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. (Loudon Wainwright III’s Grown Man.) I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

For this one, I was going for summer pool vibes. I started with the Junior Murvin track that I think I’ve played every day of this month.

All these songs are streaming online, so you can listen on Spotify or Youtube:

SIDE A

– junior murvin, “roots train”
– the marvelettes, “the hunter gets captured by the game”
– james brown, “super bad”
– donovan, “epistle to dippy”
– the everly brothers, “gone, gone, gone”
– junior murvin, “give me your love”
– prince, “the ballad of dorothy parker”
– deerhoof, “running thoughts”

SIDE B

– the knife, “heartbeats”
– wailers, “duppy conqueror”
– new order, “thieves like us”
– bacao rhythm & steel band, “PIMP”
– lefty frizzell, “always late”
– mulatu astatke, “tezetaye antchi lidj”

I was running out of month so I made another monthly mixtape from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

This one turned out weirder and sadder than I thought it would? The title wasn’t planned — I just saw the headline in a magazine and switched around a few words to suit the vibe.

I used a bunch of snippets of songs from Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee faded in and out to bookend it, so it can’t really be replicated on a streaming service, but you can listen to an approximation on YouTube.

SIDE A
– cindy lee, “dracula” (snippet)
– grandaddy, “hewlitt’s daughter”
– cate le bon, “sad nudes”
– james brown, “i don’t mind”
– king geedorah, “fazers”
– lee moses, “hey Joe”
– cindy lee, “dracula” (snippet)

SIDE B
– cindy lee, “always dreaming”
– yukihiro takahashi, “flashback”
– stevie nicks, “bella donna” (demo)
– yeahyeahyeahs, “y control’
– judy mowatt, “the gardener”
– the zombies, “tell her no”
– ketty lester, “love letters”
– cindy lee, “stone faces”

I’ve made these mixes five months in a row now, so I guess I’m going to keep going for the rest of the year…