Just an FYI: through some mix-up which was not at all my fault, the Brad Sucks gig on December 17th has been cancelled. Total drag.

Marc Orchant has died.

I met Marc when I was in Seattle at Microsoft a few years ago -- he was a super friendly, knowledgeable guy. We kept in contact and he was always passionate about what he was doing and what everyone else around him was doing. He was a guy I had hoped to meet up with again down the road and it's shocking that I won't get that chance.

My best to his family.

One exhaustive search and some tireless tagging later, my sample library dreams are mostly realized. The winner? MediaMonkey 3.0 beta. Voila:

MediaMonkey 3 adds support for multiple genres and a "track browser" similar to the one I like in foobar. It doesn't work exactly as I want -- I'd like to have two genre columns and be able to select, say "drums" and "kick" and have it exclusively display samples that are tagged "drums" AND "kick". But it doesn't -- it shows any that are tagged drums OR any that are tagged kick. But doing keyword or keyword -> album is still a great improvement over simple directory hierarchies.

It's also really helpful rating samples that I use frequently. MediaMonkey 3 also supports multiple libraries, all the file formats under the sun, drag and drop to Ableton Live works good and it's totally free, woooo.

And here for your benefit are the results of my many media player experiences trying to find the right sample organization client:

foobar2000 v0.9.5 - Just... complicated. Need foo_custominfo to handle WAV format genre metadata. Then that data doesn't work in the facets view, etc, etc. I'm sure some foobar hacker could make it do what I want, but I don't have the time or energy.

musikCube - Has facet view, does drag and drop, doesn't do multiple genres.

Winamp - Sort of does what I want with enough wrestling -- though the interface is a little retarded in the mind. But it won't do sample drag and drop to Ableton Live, so you're out.

wxMusic - Crashed reading in my media library and gave me lots of warnings that it couldn't read certain WAV files.

mp3rat - mp3rat only does MP3s I guess. Imagine that.

I just saved you a lot of thankless work. Enjoy!

With completing all recording and sequencing on my next album and me regaining my enthusiasm for making new music, a complete sample library reset is in order. I'm a sample hoarder but my current setup (30-40 gigs of loops and samples in d:\music\samples\ subdirectories) has always been awful. The hierarchy's all wrong and it sucks to browse. For a long time I've wanted a del.icio.us tagging style sample browser but I understand it's a limited market.

But lately I've been using the latest beta of foobar2000 for my mp3 listening and organization. One thing I totally love about it is the facet view:

You can enter a search query or click in any of the panels (you can choose what tag you want each facet to be based on) and it narrows down the other panels based on your selection or search query. It's really fantastic and makes it easy to explore your collection.

So a light bulb went off last night: this is exactly what I want for my samples! With some help from the foobar2000 forums I set up another copy of foobar and had it index my sample directories. Big problem: foobar saves all the metadata to the actual audio files -- .WAV files don't support genre metadata. Boned.

I've been scrabbling around trying to make foobar do what I want with various plugins but it's a pain in the ass. Now I'm on to trying other media players...

Really like the song Phantom by Justice but wish it had lyrics and vocals? Here is Phantom by Justice with vocals and lyrics by The Phantom:

I've been lazy with the blogging lately. Too busy, too boring. To make up for this I have put my latest Twitter status at the top of my blog now so you can know that I'm not dead if this is a concern of yours.

Twitter has been a pretty interesting service. Casual status contact with people I like is a nice addition to instant messaging. What would otherwise be a worthless bit of information is meaningful when it's someone I care about.

That being said, I hate it when blogs that I subscribe to decide to cram their worthless twitters down my throat via RSS so I will not be doing that.

Waterloo solo show went pretty good I think. Compared to Ottawa bars it was pretty surreal playing for people who were already pretty into my songs. All the laptop stuff went ok. Some show notes:

• I needed to run 6 1/4" outs into the soundboard. The soundboard was unfortunately at the back of the giant room and the sound fellow only had two DI boxes on stage and was running an XLR snake to the back. Luckily I brought along my Behringer UB1204 mixing board (just in case) that I was using for practice. So I wound up doing the sound from the stage, which was an interesting challenge when you're playing guitar. The word is it sounded OK so I guess like... I'm a sound genius.
• It is weird to mess up your own lyrics in front of people who know them and are singing along.
• In rehearsals my song switching method (via a Nostromo n50 I found in a box) worked flawlessly. On stage however as soon as I finished a song I completely forgot what song I had just played and where I was and what was happening. So there were some false starts which nearly blew my whole ruse.
• I need to edit the songs so they cut the vocal delay effect off when they're over. Too many times I was like "thank you! thank you! thank you! .. thank you! ... thank you! what the- thank you! what the- .. what the- thank you! ... what the-"

Those are all pretty minor things it seems judging by the people who came up to get CDs signed or whatever afterwards. So I feel pretty good about it. Waterloo U. students are very smart, friendly and attractive and I was given a Waterloo hoodie by the residence council so now I can pretend that I'm one of them.

And as for travel notes:

• The Super 8 should legally be forbidden from using the word "super" to describe their hotel services.

Thanks to the folks at Waterloo for having me out, everyone in the audience and anyone I met that I of course have immediately forgotten the name of. Fun!

Welp, I'm off to the Waterloo show tonight. I have shown due diligence in making sure there are limited glitches in my laptop live show so now it's all up to my lord and saviour Jesus Christ who I have always believed in without wavering, amen, am I right guys.

And I guess maybe I'll visit City 7 on the way.

Been getting some confused emails from Waterloo University students. But I've double-checked: the show is still on: 10pm this Friday at the Student Life Centre. See you there!

Bought a 37" LCD TV to make my Xbox 360 feel better, it's pretty sweet. Also had my first Xbox Live Halo experience tonight and it lived up to my expectations: I got brutally destroyed by some kid yelling racist stuff at everyone. Ah, the future.

My gamertag on Xbox Live is chillbaron (it's the opposite of chillbilly) if you would like to add me to your friends thing and destroy.

I started playing Halo 3 solo but god Halo is boring. Please, no more boring cutscenes! Maybe it'll pick up once I try playing co-op as the others did.

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine last night about whether the song Phantom by Justice could be played on the electric guitar. I thought it could be (but it would sound stupid) and he wasn't sure (but thought it would sound stupid). So here it is, me playing along with Justice's song Phantom:

Justice - Phantom (Brad Sucks at Guitar mix)

Yep. Stupid.

I turned 31 yesterday. I'm old as hell! My girlfriend gave me an Xbox 360 though so I've got a lot of game-playing to do. I've got Halo 3 and I believe I shall be subscribing to Xbox Live -- anyone out there playing? What are the good online games?

It's been confirmed: Friday November 23rd I'll be doing my first solo show at the University of Waterloo. That's nearly a seven hour drive from my home and will be my first time playing outside of the Ottawa area.

It'll also be my first hardcore test of the laptop + guitar + vocals setup. I'm hoping it goes totally awesome as that would mean I could travel with this sucker when there's no budget to lug a full band around and I could start fulfilling some of those Eventful demands.

The only two huge issues I'm really worried about are:

The laptop could flake out - I'll have the backing tracks on MP3 and CD as well as the laptop which would mean only my realtime vocal effects would be killed if something terrible were to happen to the laptop.

It could be totally lame - A dude singing and playing guitar to some laptop backing tracks -- is that cool? My favorite rappers generally just have backing track -- or a DJ going through the motions if they're rich and want to be super cool. Doing an acoustic show seems like a cop-out, but maybe having backing tracks is too phony.

Of course I'm sure something unexpected will happen instead. Who knows!

Thanks to everyone who submitted vocals for Out of It. We got 54 entries and that's pretty awesome. Quite a weird sensation to hear so many people singing my song.

Now comes trying to mix the track, woo woo! While I'll only be using a handful of the vocals on the record (I think) I'll definitely put together some other mixes with more/all of the vocals.

Scott gives the lowdown on his pre-orders. Very awesome and open of him to give the numbers out. Looks like it was a pretty great success and huge congratulations to him.

I've been thinking about taking pre-orders for the next Brad Sucks album but I don't think I have the energy or time or talent to set up a sweet system like Scott's so I doubt I'll bother. It's hard enough getting the record out the door.

Facebook finally has band pages. I made a Brad Sucks one here. These days I'm really despising Facebook, it seems so anti-Internet, full of lock-in and crappiness. Also: we got photos, events and videos for bands -- but no music? What in the--

Anyway I'm sure it's great! Check it out here.

Update: thanks to Justin for showing me what I did wrong. Adblock removed the pulldown menu that included the selection for the musician pages.

Facebook tells me they can't change the page, so I've had to make a new one here. Hooray I'm dumb!

Just a reminder: you have until this Sunday November 11th to get your vocals in for Out of It. Details here.

So far there are 22 vocal recordings on ccMixter which is a decent haul. I was hoping there would be so many it would crash the Internet so here's hoping business picks up this week!

Last Halloween was our first time trying to go all out on the decorations. This year we extended it out a bunch and improved a lot of little things. Some photos:

Everything went over real good. The black light where we gave out the candy was a big hit. We wound up dragging a big mirror out so that kids could see themselves glowing and they really dug that. You can see more pictures here if you're interested.

I've been working with David Huyck on some new Brad Sucks t-shirt designs. The first one is up in my shirt store:

Here are some of the shirt variations:

The crow on the left would rather be elsewhere.