It’s been a long journey but with the latest release of the MusicBrainz plugin for Songbird, the light is appearing at the end of the tunnel.  It all began with a late night desire to know who was the drummer playing on a song from my digital media player.  As simple a question as it appears, finding the answer proved to be quite difficult.  Despite all of the advances of digital technology, to date there was no simple, ‘refer to the liner notes’ answer.  While this may seem to be a trivial problem the average music listener would not be so concerned about, my inner archivist recognized it as an indication of a much deeper problem.

Music does not get created in a vacuum.  While there may be one artist or a group of artists that are put into the spotlight for the work we hear, behind the scenes there are a lot of contributors, without whom the music would have never been made.  These artists, session musicians, engineers, producers and others, are completely absent from the information about the songs we listen to on our iPhones and home media players, making the question “who’s on drums” far more difficult to answer than it should be.

A few months back I went to GtP Studios with the issue and we started thinking of a solution.  Having spent a couple of years using MusicBrainz and Picard for managing my digital collection and about a year with Songbird as my media player, I envisioned a way of brining the two together in a metadata menage that might solve the problem.  Just under a month ago GtP released the first version of a MusicBrainz add-on for Songbird.  It was a very basic solution which used a side panel to display the MusicBrainz page for the song playing in Songbird.

The latest version of the add-on, released today, takes that foundation and expands upon it.  It starts with a three tabbed dashboard layout in the sidepanel: Now Playing, Queue, Browser.  Starting in the middle, the Queue tab lets you build a queue of local files for which you can search MusicBrainz for the latest metadata.  Once you’ve found the metadata on MusicBrainz a mouse click will sync your local file with MusicBrainz adding all of the relevant track information to the local file.  You can also sync the release to your MusicBrainz collection.

During playback, if the track has been sync’d with MusicBrainz all of the metadata information will be displayed in the Now Playing tab. This tab also does additional calls to MusicBrainz to get extended information about the track, release and artist including Web Resources and related track information.  It also allows you to rate the track currently playing and have that rating sync both locally and on MusicBrainz.  Both the Now Playing tab and the Queue provide direct links to MusicBrainz pages which are opened up in the Browser tab.  Below you can see a video demonstration of all of the tabs.

This is the 0.9.0 release of the add-on.  The folk at GtP tell me that they are focused on ironing out the bugs and adding a couple of more crucial features before going to 1.0.  There’s a lot of promise in this release and those which will follow but make no mistake, as far as the issue is concerned this is still but a temporary solution. It solves my immediate concern quite well, in fact more than I even expected, but until something like this becomes a standard for all digital audio releases, the history of all of those who make the music remains in jeopardy.  It is my opinion that it is inevitable that a transition to such a standard will happen.  When it does, I can see MusicBrainz being at the center of it all and as such hope this add-on will be the catalyst which moves the initiative to the next stages.  In the meantime I’ll be using it to tag, sync and find out more information about all of the music I love.  I hope you will too.

Download the MusicBrainz Dashboard for Songbird

Published under: General
Tags: add-on • audio • digital music • engineers • GtP Studios • metadata • MusicBrainz • musicians • producers • Songbird • tagging

Harbinger of The AvantUrb, which is to music what post-structuralism is to the written word, Primus Luta dissects the essence of sound and molds it into works reflective of the human condition. He is the digital analog. The old new. The now infinite. The first struggle – creation.

Georgia born and Bronx bred, Primus Luta has been addicted to the production of sound from the early age of two when his grandfather gave him is first piano.  He would spend the next fourteen years of his life studying the various ways of manipulating those keys to create sound, dreaming of becoming a jazz pianist in the tradition of Thelonious Monk and Dr. Billy Taylor.  But a freak accident on a roller coaster would literally shatter those dreams into a hundred little pieces of bone floating around in his arm.  Perhaps because of this tragedy, Luta’s focus shifted when he was first introduced the studio through a summer internship with Salaam Remi.  After one hour of watching Remi move between the mixing board and the two inch reel Luta knew he had found his calling.

In the years that would follow Luta worked as a recording engineer, arranger, producer, mixing engineer, mastering engineer, manager, booking agent, road maneger, band leader, stage manager, and just about every other supporting role out there for a good number of musicians.  It wasn’t until the recent birth of the Heads project that he decided it was time to step out from the shadows.  Through Heads Primus has found a way to bridge his musical background with his technical know how to create the sound that is authentically him.

The Heads project is a culmination of three years of work and study in which Luta aimed to apply the principles of head based jazz to modern electronic production techniques.  The project is both a theoretical study and a body of compositions brought together in an interactive experience directed by Luta himself.

Primus Luta’s Discography

	Various Artists – Educate Yo’Self! Executive Producer
	Takuma Kanaiwa – The Lemurian Sounds of Takuma Kanaiwa Performer
	Tomchess & The Love Dogs – In The Beautiful Future Recording Engineer
	iPL – The Catalyst Producer & Executive Producer
	Dumhi – 3 Seats From Heaven Mix & Mastering Engineer
	Various Artists – WHWBAYL Volume 1 Executive Producer
	Fermented Spirits – Demystification Mastering Engineer
	Primus Luta – The Optimus Primer Mixtape

In an effort to give an about for a project that is still very much in the making, I’ve scraped from some recent emails about the project and edited them into something I hope makes a little sense.

So I started this project almost three years ago now, born from the inspiration of the possibilities in the then new open source controller the monome.  The monome itself reminded me of the book Vehicles I had read over a decade ago now on the recommendation of who would become my technology partner.  The monome is a digital box of clay.  0’s and 1’s from which you have the ability to create infinity, one step at a time.

In it I saw the possibility of realizing a recurring dream of mine to sit down with Roger Linn and design the sampling drum machine to beat all sampling drum machines.  In fact the monome went beyond that dream and it was reality.

Around a year or so later, Wynton Marsalis released a new album, which of course meant it was time for him to take public pot shots at hip-hop with the famous quote:

“Listen, I don’t have to attack hip-hop. Hip-hop attacks itself. It has no merit, rhythmically, musically, lyrically. What is there to discuss?”

“And as for sampling, it just shows you that the drummer has been replaced by a loop. The drum – the central instrument in African-American music, the sound of freedom – has been replaced by a repetitive loop. What does that tell you about hip-hop’s respect for African-American tradition?”

I not only took offense to his words but I took them as a challenge, the final catalyst for The Heads Project.  Could I create a body of music which embeded the human touch into technology based music (the human touch here characterized by the complex freedom of head based jazz).  In so doing could I prove that hip-hop is indeed a natural progression of the musical lineage Marsalis claims it has no respect for.  To catch phrase it, could I apply heads based jazz technique to hip-hop production?

So to start I began building instruments for the monome, the first of course being a sampler (inspired heavily by the first generation monome application mlr).  Since I built the sampler around the Heads concept I also built a notation system for it.  And in building the notation system for it I kind of stumbled upon the grounds for a legal argument that could change sample laws.  So then the project started embodying ways to provide evidence for this legal argument.  Heads built around the music theory colliding with technological/technical/legal definitions.

But I wasn’t just trying to make a legal brief I wanted to make music too, so I went back from the experimental phase to really putting together solid music ideas for an album.  Going back in on this from the technological groundwork I had laid building the sampler, I built more instruments, six in total. More than 50% of the album is played using these instruments.

I made lots of notes during the process and kept most of the explorations used to get to the point where I could create what will be the album.  Its a large and rather detailed body of work.  And all of it together makes up plpheads – Primus Luta Presents: Heads.  As of this writing in addition to completing the mixes of the album, I am in the process of negotiating the means by which the full project will be reaching the public.