Sessions
Sessions are complete samplings, instrumentals or beats.
You’d need ‘em for your new Flickr montage, interludes for your latest podcast, background music for your independent indie what-not media making. Check this out for an idea of the format:
Loops
A loop is a loopable piece of audio. A small, or a few small, pieces of a single instrument played for a while. You’d probably nod your head if we said drum loop or drum beat. Anyway – something like this:
Shots
We collect most shots in packs. A particular drum set would be packed all together – just like a specific sound setup, close mic, overheads or a Fender-guitar would. Not really that hard to figure out.
No matter what, you’ll need your ears and some patience. iBeat has a pretty diverse collection of audio – so you’ll like something and hate a whole lot of other stuff. Don’t blame us. Blame yourself or culture.
We’ll stop ranting now – we just need to put some text up every once in a while (Google says so).
We are considering releasing the iBeat archive with one of those royalty free sample pack license stamps.
We haven’t been doing much with the site for a few months and quite frankly we’ve been up for air.
Publishing audio samples, music instrumentals and shot packs is tedious, time consuming – and let’s just be honest – the downloading listenership (contrary to readership) haven’t given us much back.
The royalty free admission to the audio archive would be to build a smaller, and more interactive/interested userbase. It would also make our happy little sampling club way more exclusive. It would also mean that we could cut server costs.
We’ll update you in due time if we change anything.
Found an audio loop? Don’t have time to get the audio pitched, stretched and looped? Let iBeat do it. Simply post a an audio loop request in the comments, and the crew will work it out.
A little background
iBeat is introducing a little bit of interaction. Looping audio for our users.
When we post our original audio loops and samples, we cut them down in size so the file size is kept down – and clutter kept to a minimum. This works well for a variety of reasons, but when mediamakers come looking for samples this isn’t always the best approach to publishing audio loops.
Many DJs, video-creators can’t bother, or don’t have the time, to download and learn a sequencer and cut, fade, pitch, stretch, cut, paster and whatnot – therefore: we will loop, limit and semi-master your music.
Exactly how to get your audio looped
Just tell us how in the comments. How long, fades and specifications thanks. We will deal with the requests on a first served basis. We often dish up raw lossless audio here on iBeat, so be sure to let us know in what context you need the audio looped.
That’s it. Not the biggest innovation, but there have been quite a few mail requests in regards to longer samples and this is what we came up with.
By j
|
September 22, 2009
In no order, what so ever… uhm, well, maybe the last one is actually the most important (so I out it in bold).
- If it peaked, throw it out.
- It’s not a good idea to record with effects on. It might seem smart at first, but you might wan’t to get rid of that thick reverb later.
- Make sure lyrics are understandable. Just because you know what you sang, doesn’t mean others can figure it out.
- Do not compress and limit sound until the very end – drag this as long as you can.
- ‘Wall of sound’ it with extra real recordings, don’t just copy and paste.
- Delay backing tracks just a bit. A BIT!
- Just because you think cheap wandering stereo automation is cool, doesn’t mean anyone else will.
- Never stereo pan more than 25 – unless it’s a complete left/right pan.
-
Give lyrics a EQ boost toward the high end if you need presence/
sounds dull.
- Never put effects on single tracks before everything else is recorded, premixed and done. Then start mixing and adding.
- Importance: 1. the musician … 2. the instrument – and no, I didn’t get it wrong!
I
- f you sound bad on a Shure SM58 – don’t go out and buy an expensive Neumann U89I… rather: if it sounds good with the Shure, you may be able to make it sound great with the Neumann.
- Keep it simple, find something that works – you can always mess it up later. Harder to do it the other way around.
Listen, don’t use shitty automated lists like this.
There has been some updating going on. A little fuzzyness and downtime was involved. No need to panic. Everything is running quite as usual again.
The layout of the audio archive is lacking a bit – but useable. We are introducing some features and working out the GUI problems as they come a long.
One thing that IS implemented is OpenID login. This is usefull in regard to a new playlist feature, that makes it possible to collect and remember what sounds you promised yourself you’d use, but haven’t gotten around to – or just to build your own private sample archive.
The actual audio entry pages have gotten some better info – especially in regard to attribution. It’s now possible to click through and copy paste different attribution types – and read a bit about Creative Commons.
More to come.
If everything goes well we will even upload some audio ;)
If you use, and browse, the archive please try some of the features: rating, playlist, comment and what not fun stuff. Let’s find out if it works.
