del.icio.us adds support for media formats - audio, video and image formats, along with auto-podcasting feeds. Pretty awesome.

The professionally manufactured CD of my album I Don't Know What I'm Doing is now available for orders. It's ten bucks plus shipping. I made enough money giving my music away for free -- through licenses and digital sales and donations -- that it was possible to press up some sexy CDs.

For a long time people have asked me to sell a "professional" copy of the album and I'm happy to finally be able to provide one. Thanks to everyone who helped make it possible.

Steven's first entry of The Catch-22 of Open Format Adoption is on music formats and he does a great job of explaining how I feel about OGG format audio as well. It's a great format, but it's a pain in the neck to support a format most people can't play or use.

It would be nice if this MP3 license fee business would become public knowledge so everyone would understand how much nicer it would be if we used an open format. But that seems to be a ways off.

WhiteHouseTapes.org - "The secret White House tapes and recordings of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower." I assume these are all in the public domain and legal to sample.

According to Wired, music is muffled in Star Wars Galaxies due to LucasArts concerns over players potentially violating copyrights:

Players can play Wookiees or bounty hunters and even musicians -- like those in the cantina band from the original Star Wars.

But musicians are not permitted to actually make music -- except a handful of canned tunes -- because of copyright violation fears.

Seems like it's an area the ringtone barons should get into. $2 to play a 30 second clip of some polyphonic Star Wars themed music.

shufflehacks - "dedicated to hacking, modding, and pimping the hoo-ha out of the iPod shuffle."

Total Eclipse of the Heart video - featuring a stove and some partially bare butts.

Morbid & Macabre & Suicide Songs - a blog entry and comments suggesting songs about death and dying.

Working for the Weekend - some guy's very entertaining homemade video for Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend"

Improv Everywhere does U2 - another great Improv Everywhere prank, they do a rooftop gig as U2 across from Madison Square Garden.

Story of the Sex Pistols - a Flickr photoset of an old comic book from 1984.

So allegedly there's a Yahoo! Music hack that lets you get DRM-free songs. I've been wondering how long it was going to be until there was some sort of issue like this. I thought it might take the form of sales misreporting from digital download services, but this one would work too.

So is Yahoo! liable for damages to musicians if there's a security hole and their songs get downloaded without DRM?

Doctor Who theme remixes - if you like Doctor Who remixes, there's a lot to like here.

Mashup Town - blog / podcast of commercial mashups. It is important that you listen to "Smells like Booty" and "Owner of a Lonely Butt".

A Guitar Teacher's Lesson Notebook - a pretty cool blog by a guitar teacher. Lots of interesting stuff in there.

The Guns N' Roses Self-Similar Midi Synth is Guns n' Roses songs made up of sped-up samples of entire Guns n' Roses songs. How it works:

First, We took the recordings of several Guns N' Roses songs, from the albums "Appetite for Destruction" (1987), "GN'R Lies" (1988), and "Use Your Illusion I and II" (1991). We sped up these recordings exponentially until the tempo of the song became a pitched frequency. This is generally in the area of 480 times faster than normal playback speed (at this speed a song that lasts 4 minutes would be over in 0.5 seconds). Then we take these short sounds use them as samples to play back midi files of various Guns N' Roses songs. For instance, the GNR Self-Similar version of Sweet Child O' Mine may use the entirety of November Rain as its snare drum sound and the entirety of Patience for a note in Axl's voice. In this way, we can make Guns and Roses songs that are made up of very small Guns N' Roses songs, which could reveal themselves under a sonic microscope, yet are too fast to hear in the actual final product.

Paradise City and Sweet Child O' Mine are available.

'Yoda' - I'm kind of in love with this video of a Yoda puppet dancing to "Just a Gigolo".

The "Creative Commons Magnatune Lisa Debenedictis Remix Contest" has just started. 10 remixes will be chosen, and those winners will get signed to Magnatune. Source for my track Sick as a Dog is on the loops page.

Big Bends Nut Sauce - "Big Bends Nut Sauce stops problems with string breakage and eliminates problems with pitch drift. Big Bends Nut Sauce is a "state of the art" lubricant that will not run or drip."

Derek Sivers from CD Baby has some sorta depressingly obvious news: cover songs sell the best on the digital download services. Derek claims the top selling independent artists are ones that do covers of well-known songs that people search for, therefore stumbling onto the new artists who have covered them.

So now, I'm advising musicians to do a creative cover song on their next album. Find something that hasn't been done TOO much. (Example: CD Baby has 762 versions of "Amazing Grace". Really!) Find something that you can add your unique twist to. Then make sure to include it on a full-length album, so that people who discover you by that song can get turned on to your own music, and buy the whole collection.

Derek's probably 100% right that that's what an aspiring artist should do, but now the idea of doing covers kinda creeps me out.