I’m toying with the idea of trying to do the work I do using only the iPad and an external keyboard. From the point of view of portability and convenience, it would be worth attempting.
There are a few workarounds I’ll have to adopt and I’m sure there will be some niggles (like not being able to Cmd-Tab my way around applications) but I think there’s very little I won’t be able to do.
I suspect some of the activities I do regularly (like blog posts) will take a little while longer than usual – at least at first, and I won’t be able to upload audio from my Zoom H1, video from my Flip camera or photos from my Lumix digital camera – but I can use my phone and the iPad itself for capturing media – and while it won’t be quite to the usual quality, I don’t think there’ll be too much of a trade-off.
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Tagged: Computer, iPad
- Published:
- March 21, 2012 – 10:00 pm
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- By dubber
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I was in Lancaster with Tim today, and we visited the student radio station that he worked at in the late 1970s when he was at university there – now called Bailrigg FM. We met a great bunch of students there, and they got a bit of an insight into their history.
Check some photos from the visit here.
Tagged: student radio
- Published:
- March 16, 2012 – 10:51 pm
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- By dubber
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For the past week or so, I’ve been enjoying having Jake back home after his five months living in Mumbai. We’ve been hanging out together, watching some movies, listening to music, making websites and just catching up and telling stories.
He had an amazing time – running a stage at a music festival, writing for an online independent music magazine, interviewing his music heroes, going to gigs and generally being a music industry worker. Lots of challenges and lots of new experiences. India will tend to do that for you.
A month from now, he’ll be on his way to Brazil for three months. More music festivals, a film festival, working in a recording studio, touring bands and learning lots more about the music business from the grassroots.
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Tagged: Jake
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- March 11, 2012 – 4:41 pm
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- By dubber
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I’ve just sent out my first ‘message from the author’ from my Leanpub account.
Sadly, as is sometimes the case with new features on websites, there are one or two bugs still to be ironed out in the system and so it looks like the formatting got a bit messed up. Instead of a nice looking email, readers were sent a big block of text with HTML tags where simple paragraph and line breaks should have been.
Unfortunate and disappointing, but (hopefully) hardly catastrophic. At any rate, I thought I’d repost the message to my readers here. If you’ve downloaded Music in the Digital Age – this is the email I wanted to send you.
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Tagged: communication, Email, leanpub
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- March 3, 2012 – 9:10 am
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- By dubber
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the price of my Music in the Digital Age book this evening.
I listened to the Lean Blog podcast in which Mark Graban talked to Leanpub founders Peter Armstrong and Scott Patten, who talked about their philosophy for the business, and it started me thinking about the trajectory and the development of the book.
They made quite a convincing argument for the idea that a book-in-progress start off at a lower price, and then as it grows and improves, the price can go up. The people who have paid very little (or nothing) at the start are thereby rewarded for their input and early support, and there is an incentive to get in early.
Essentially, you could call that the Amie Street ‘demand-based’ pricing model. And it seems like quite a good idea on first impressions.
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Tagged: leanpub, money, pricing
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- February 28, 2012 – 9:59 pm
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- By dubber
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I’ve been running a music blog called .com/music for a while now. It started life late last year as just a semi-private thing between me and my friends and colleagues – a way for me to process, bookmark and recommend all of the great music I was discovering on Bandcamp while writing reviews there.
Along the way, I’ve started to get into a routine with it, and I have posted there every day this year so far, and plan to continue to do so as much as possible for the foreseeable future.
But a few things have changed – including the way in which recommendations work on the Bandcamp website (interesting stuff happening there soon now: check the ‘Staff Picks’), and so I’m no longer writing lengthy ‘Album of the Week’ reviews, though I am still going to be heavily involved in the recommendation and discovery process there.
So I thought I’d make my music blog a bit more public, send the recommendations out beyond my own circle of friends, and also use it as a way of soliciting further recommendations.
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Tagged: blogging
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- February 27, 2012 – 3:32 pm
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- By dubber
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I ended up in something of a debate about ad-blockers on the internet yesterday. Radio “futurologist” (inverted commas because that term is so problematic for me) James Cridland wrote a blog post entitled Piracy and Ad-Blockers Are Both Theft.
To which my simple, immediate and gut-response was simply “you’re wrong”.
James tweeted a link to his post, and I responded on Twitter. He invited me to discuss it further in the comments of his blog on the basis that he found it difficult (in his words “it is impossible”) to have a nuanced debate about the issue in a 140-character medium. I declined on the basis that I was reluctant to contribute to his (then) ad-supported blog.
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Tagged: argument, debate, emotion, logic
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- February 24, 2012 – 2:02 pm
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- By dubber
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I’ve been teaching music radio programming for a good few years now. All right, maybe it’s a decade. Or more. At any rate, it’s something that I really love doing and it’s something that I think there’s a real opportunity to have fun with, particularly given the technology available now.
That said, it’s not as straightforward a process as you might think (as my students and any half-decent DJ will tell you) and there are lots of things to think about when doing a job that essentially involves choosing what song comes next.
In part to show my students what’s possible; in part as research for the book I’m writing about Radio in the Digital Age; and in part just because I’ve always wanted my own music radio station, I’ve decided it’s time to finally just get it going.
Introducing… Simple Radio – my own online, internet-only music radio station.
I’m going to play an extremely broad variety of music; I’m going to play a lot of music (at least five times as many songs in the catalogue as most commercial broadcasters – more than ten times some I could name); I’m only going to play music that I absolutely love; and I’m only going to play music that I think works together.
Simple, right?
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Tagged: Radio
- Published:
- February 21, 2012 – 6:27 pm
- Author:
- By dubber
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My book Music in the Digital Age is a work in progress. It’s already available, but it’s being published as I write it over the course of this year. As of today, it’s being published in multiple languages as well.
I’m trying to get it translated into as many languages as possible, and I have a bunch of translators around the world working on different versions of it as we speak. Some of them were ready to go live today with the first 4-6 chapters, and as a result you can get a German, Estonian or Greek language version of my book, which will automatically update as more material is added.
While I have about 15 languages already in progress, I’m looking for some more translators. Ideally, I’d like this book to be available in as many languages as possible. You don’t necessarily have to be a professional translator – just someone who is deeply interested in the material, whose first language is the one that it will be translated into, and someone with a bit of confidence that they can pull it off successfully.
I’m splitting the proceeds from sales of each translated version 50/50 with the person who did that translation. That might be very little – or it might be a lot. I’m hoping for the latter, for obvious reasons.
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Tagged: translation
- Published:
- February 13, 2012 – 3:50 pm
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- By dubber
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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been encouraging Jake to update his website. He’s been so busy in India that he hasn’t really had time to blog, but he has his own domain (jakedubber.com) and web space, so we had a chat about what would be a useful thing to put there.
What he’s ended up with is ideal (have a look) – but in particular, I think it’s a really good model for my students to consider following. It’s more informal than a CV, but acts as a really good calling card and easily-updated professional link to send people.
A photo, a short bio, some links to where you can be found online (for Jake that’s Twitter, Soundcloud, Bandcamp and Flickr – rather than Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube and so on – but you should amend as appropriate) and some direct links to some work that you’ve done. Simple.
His one uses a template called Coming Soon by Templatic – a simple, one-page, easy to edit basis for this kind of thing, but there are others you can consider.
It just struck me as something that a lot of my students should be thinking about if they’re planning to shop themselves around for internships, job placements and so on.
Tagged: cv, web
- Published:
- February 8, 2012 – 1:05 pm
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- By dubber
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