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work by Greg Rasmussen, thanks Greg!

Plus, we got Vectorized!

Too Late for Roses in Pasta

Yes – it’s Too Late for Roses, written out in Pasta on toast.  What else?

Now well see how many free EP downloads we get from Japan…

<12/13/2010> Update! Well, that went super-ly. Thanks to everyone who came out we had (yet another) fabulous time at the Clubhouse. The ugly sweater party was a bonus, and the Bluff Rats reunion opening set was a treat. Photos below…

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Kyle Batty joins us on Drums for a night of original music.

Rock, post-rock, mountain surf music, percussion, flute, synth, bass, drums, voice…
Full bar, it’s out in the woods, let the good times roll.  \”/

• Here’s the Facebook Event!
• Here’s the MySpace Event!

Address:  The Clubhouse at This Old House, 740 West Foothill, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401  Google Map

Our new pals.

Well, at last – Too Late for Roses is up and live on Pandora.com. Check us out over at our Pandora page.

The process changed from a couple of years ago – then you could just send music directly to Pandora (no pre-qualification required), and eventually they’d let you know if you got ‘in’. It’s worth pointing out that Pandora is fairly picky – they need to keep the quality of the less-known artists high enough so that when they mix them in with (say) Death Cab for Cutie, the listener isn’t repulsed by the crappy song that came on AFTER Marching Bands of Manhattan and bails out of the site altogether.

Now, you have to get your CD available for physical sale on Amazon.com, with a valid UPC (bar-code). CDBaby.com is probably the best way to do this, plus get your stuff on iTunes and virtually all the other sales channels. Then and only then you can submit a couple of songs at http://submitmusic.pandora.com/ , and wait to hear if you got the green light.

[ This is a convoluted way of saying "we feel pretty" that Pandora deemed us worthy. Whee! Let's give our mastering guy, Joe Gastwirt some of the credit too. ]

Now the interesting stuff happens – it’ll be fascinating to see how Pandora compares to the new nerds on the block, i.e. thesixtyone.com, jango.com, spotify.com etc. My sense from chatting with random folks around town (“hey dude – is your band on pandora yet?”) and from seeing the number of restaurants / clubs that use Pandora on a netbook for background music (BTW – does ASCAP/BMI just freak out about that or what?) is that Pandora has crossed the tipping point from being a niche site that nerds know about to a site that regular civilians know about and more importantly, use.

If true, we should see an up-tick in site visits, listens, downloads, and (who knows) sales. It’s cool that Pandora has the buy-now link on each song played.

So, getting on Pandora is a long, fairly demanding process. But…it’s a big audience.

//

It was well received by the 92Y Tribeca crowd.  We did a quick Q&A session, mingled with the animation fans (a pretty different world than the usual rock-show crowd), and headed out into the downtown New York summer night.    Good times…   In a couple of weeks Pat and I will make a few edits and tweaks , make a 35mm film print, and hit the film festival circuit in the Fall.

Want a preview? Check out the soundtrack now:

Also see:  More Music | Other Videos | Photos | PatSmith.com

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‘Traditional Animation is far from dead.. it’s just resting in the dark imagination of Director Patrick Smith. Come see a collection of Smith’s recent short films, featuring the World Premiere of his latest animated film “Masks”, his darkest and most twisted short to date. “Masks” is based on the experimental audio talents of Karl von Kries, who has previously worked with Smith on his short films “Drink” and “Delivery”.  Also screening will be a behind the scenes mini-doc directed by filmmaker Liz Lyons.  Patrick Smith will be in attendance for a Q and A after the show.’

For anyone in the NY Metro Area, this is a great chance to see “Masks” for the first time, and to hang out for the Q&A afterwords (Karl will be joining the Q&A as well).   http://92ytribeca.org/ (tickets, more info)

Related:

• http://www.toolateforroses.com/video/
• http://www.toolateforroses.com/music

Dear Fellow Nerds,

"Dance, puppets!"

So, with the release of the iPad we decided to update the TLFR website for it, and also for the iPhone. Here’s the problem: the iPad and iPhone don’t run Flash. Slate has an interesting write up on the probable reasons why Apple hates Flash, but the result is that Flash audio players out there don’t work on iPads & iPods, and probably never will.

But fear not, because the emerging HMTL5 standard lets web browsers do a lot of cool things without the need for special plug-ins and other add-ons. There are some insane videos showing what HTML5 can do in a modern browser…

The TLFR site is run on WordPress, and we were lucky to find the very literally titled ‘Degradable HTML5 audio and video” plugin.   This thing is great – when installed on your WP instance, it will serve up sleek HTML5 players in browsers like Safari (which is what the iPad and iPhone use), but ‘falls-back’ to the very nice flash WP Audio Player for browsers that don’t play HTML5 nicely.

But wait – FireFox IS an HTML 5 browser, so why can’t it use native audio playback and skip the Flash?  The reason goes to MP3 licensing.  Mp3 is a proprietary format, and the FireFox foundation hasn’t / doesn’t want to pay for the license for economic reasons perhaps and to slow down the spread of non-open codecs (the encoding / decoding algorithms that among other things make big audio or video files small enough to move well over the web).   FireFox does support a fully ‘open’ audio codec called Ogg Vorbis – if you convert your original uncompressed AIF or WAV file to a .ogg file, Firefox opens and plays it in a sleek no-plugin-required player.  Cool!  And, it sounds great!

So, to review:  you need your website to serve audio/video via HTML5 for it too work on iPads and iPhones.  But, pure HTML5 playback won’t work on FireFox IF your files are MP3s, because of Firefox’s battles with the owners of the Mp3 format.  Using the very cool Degradable HTML5 audio and video” plugin sidesteps the problem by playing MP3s using Flash plugins on FireFox, or smartly uses the OGG version if it’s available.    [ You can't just use OGG files instead because many web browsers don't know how to play them].

Re OGG – it sounds really good.  And, if you put the OGG version of the audio file in the same folder as the MP3 version, then the HTML5 player plugin will use the OGG version on FireFox.

So, how do you make OGG files?  The best ways is to download the open-source, and quite excellent Audacity audio editing program.  It runs on everything.  In Audacity’s preferences, you can set the OGG quality – we went with 6 which is approximately equal to a 400kbps MP3 (very good) – then choose the menu option’Export to Ogg”.  Note:  DON’T just open your Mp3 in Audacity and save it to Ogg – because Mp3s are already ‘lossy’ (degraded) files, you’re missing out on creating a fresh, best-possible sounding Ogg file from the WAV or AIF original.

So -

• use HTML5 to make the iPad happy
• use OGG format audio if you ALSO want HTML5 to work right on FireFox.
• use the Degradable HTML5 audio and video” plugin to simplify all this stuff on WordPress.
• And now… Too Late for Roses music works awesomely on the iPad.

In conclusion – Suck it, Sub Pop – our shit works on the iPad!

——————

Download our new free EP at http://www.toolateforroses.com/  – free mp3s of new california rock music