raf's Kompoz Music Blog

Thank You Pascal

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 01:48:00 UTC

I want to publically thank Pascal for helping to produce a great mix for my band. I challenged him with low-quality tracks and he somehow managed to make it sound great!

You should hire Pascal for you next project. He's that good. Oh, and he's an incredibly talented musician and a helluva nice guy. Have a listen to our cover of Santeria.

We're Back Online

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 09:40:03 UTC

Wow. What an ordeal. As you probably know, Kompoz.com was offline most of the day yesterday. The cause? Our trusted, beloved, amazing, uber-redundant, cloud-based hosting provider -- the same one used by the Web's powerhouses, such as Foursquare, Instagram, Flipboard, and countless others -- took a dive. It was widly reported (here and here and here and here) that Amazon's cloud services suffered a very embarassing outage.

What started as a small issue affecting some instances of Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) in North Virginia became a full-blown outage of AWS in North Virginia. Major services, such as Reddit, Foursquare, Minecraft and Heroku, were down.

Two of the primary Amazon services we use Elastic Computing Clould (EC2) and Relational Database Service (RDS) experienced "degraded performance" (Amazon's words). We now know "degraded" means totally ph*ked in Amazon-speak!

Thanks for your patience!

Using Tags to Organize Your Projects

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 18:58:22 UTC

Long-time Kompoz members probably remember that Kompoz once had a feature called Project Folders. The idea behind the feature was that you could organize your tracks within each project by grouping them into folders. A good idea, perhaps, but the implementation was flawed. And, the name "folder" was a very poor choice on my part, because that word has a strong association with PC file systems. With file systems, you move files from one folder to another, but that's not how Kompoz used folders.

So I ditched Project Folders a few months ago.

Today, we are introducing Project Tags -- the right way to organize your project tracks. Tags are labels, which you define within your projects. You can then apply the tags to one or more tracks. A track can have more than one tag. Tags can be used for anything. Here's a short video that demonstrates how to use tags within your projects.

Introducing 'Kompoz Konnect' Mac App

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:30:37 UTC

We're happy to announce the official release of Kompoz Konnect -- an application for Mac OS X users. Konnect allows you to upload files directly from your Mac to the Kompoz servers. Drag-and-drop files from Finder to Konnect, then upload them in one step. Konnect also allows you to download files from Kompoz to your Mac. Features include:

Upload files from your Mac quickly and easily.
Auto-detects track information, such as track type and suggested title.
Drag-and-drop from Finder to Konnect
Download files from any project
Download tracks from Kompoz, and add them directly into iTunes (including album art).
Creates folders based on project names

Konnect is available today on the Mac App Store.

Facebook Sharing Update

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:15:30 UTC

It was recently pointed out that our Facebook share button was broken. Our bad -- it turns out that we missed an update to the Facebook JavaScript library.

I am happy to report that it was fixed yesterday. And I'm even more happy to report that we didn't stop at just fixing the button -- we also added more cool Facebook sharing options.

The biggest change is that the Kompoz Player can now be embedded within your Facebook post. As you can see in the screen cap to the right, Facebook will show the project art with a playhead overlaid. When you press that, the project art is replaced by Kompoz audio player so that listeners can enjoy the song without leaving Facebook.

Actually, that's not the biggest change. The biggest change is that embedding the player is automatic for any track. You don't have to do anything special to make it work. In fact, you don't even have to share from Kompoz to make it work. You can simply update your Facebook status (like you might normally do) and include a link to a Kompoz track (must be the track detail page -- the page with the Kompoz player on it) in that status update. Facebook and Kompoz will do the rest.

One more thing: we also added Facebook "Like" buttons throughout Kompoz. You'll see them on the project pages and track pages (of course), on Finished (published) song pages, and on your blog pages.

Study shows Pop music all sounds the same

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 13:38:36 UTC

It's official -- science has essentially proven, with a study, that Pop music is indeed both getting louder and diminishing in variety. A team of researchers in Spain headed by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra have run a set of songs from the last 50 years through a set of complex algorithms that have yielded the following results: Pop songs on the whole have become more bland in terms of chords, melodies, and types of sound, and are intrinsically louder to boot than they’ve ever been before.

Read the full blog from: Engadget

New Hire: Voice Professional

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 17:16:25 UTC

Just a quick blog to introduce our new voice talent at the Kompoz office. He's quiet, keeps to himself, and does not drink all the beer like that last guy. Here's a sample of his work.

Converting Track for Online Playback:

Cannot Convert Audio File:

Track Not Found:

We keep him locked up in the server room, and put him to work the second new audio files are uploaded to Kompoz.

Kompoz Podcast Needs You

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 14:47:52 UTC

Hey Kompozarians, we're currently finishing up the next Kompoz Podcast. Want to be in it? It's easy.

Simply record a shout out, and upload it to the Kompoz Radio Sounds project. Your shout out should be 15 seconds or less -- something like "Hello Kompoz, this is (insert your name here) from (insert your country here). (short optional message here)". You don't have to stick to that format. Be creative, but keep it clean.

New Project Licensing Options

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 15:14:34 UTC

Today we added two new Creative Commons licensing options; available to all members. The two new options are:

With the addition of these two new options, Kompoz now fully supports all six Creative Commons licenses. These apply to both Public and Private Projects for all members.

For Kompoz PLUS members only, we have added a traditional "(c) All Rights Reserved" license option for Public projects. Up until now, this was only available in Private projects. Thanks for all of the input.