This is what you're doing Saturday night. Just FYI.

7:30PM (early, so you can get your discoteque on later) with Ryan Sayer playing a cool Americana set to open.  The show is ALL AGES.

740 W. Foothill Drive, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
[ Map ]

Stoked to play, stoked to see you there!

Feeling all social-media-y?

• Facebook Event Page
• Myspace Event Page

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

‘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

If you’d like a free advance copy of the first song, “Take Me Out” click this link -
http://trkurl.com/sDGd7g

You will be asked to post a tweet about the song,
& to share your email address with us.

Then comes the link for the free download.

Thanks for helping us share our music.
; )

Yeah, we're not making them like this.

First press packages just went out which means…  which means…  we’ll be waiting around for a few months.  The record needs to land on music reviewers desks, then they take a listen, write up some stuff, and the magazines finally get printed and shipped.  It’s hilariously slow and pre-web,  like a nice home-cooked meal vs chewing on a handful of sugar cubes.

So, figuring we need at least two months lead-time for the mags, we have an Official Release Date for the Too Late for Roses album “Debut” of June 1, 2010.  Ta da!
» Hear Some of the Music
» Check out the Album Art

Live in Central Coast California?   Read More Here!

We’re manufacturing the disks in Digipak format, which I think will show off the work beautifully.  Behold!

We were shooting for something moody, interpretable, ‘big’, and detailed, maybe with echos of OK Computer and Summer Wrist, but with some of the sepia surf-vibe of Pacific Dust mixed in.

Surfline responded, and took the video down.  The deal is that this video appeared in a’user moderated’ section of the site, so it wasn’t vetted in the usual way.  Very nice of them to act so quickly (not surprising they didn’t dig the Pismo Jetski antics once they reviewed it).
So, yay Surfline – check them out here!      [ And support the Central Coast Marine Sanctuary! ]

This normally useful website is promoting a ‘featured local video’ of guys just… riding jetskis.  On a totally paddle-able beachbreak.  Note that they’re not using the jetskis to tow-in, or travel somewhere.  They’re  just… screwing around in the surf-zone.   Where the actual surfers surf.  WTF?

Can you imagine paddling out and having these three jackasses wizzing around on their polluting, loud, unsafe gizmos when you’re trying to catch waves?  Sorry, JetSki guys, your right to ride around like a moron stops when you do it on densely-surfed, ridable waves, or degrade the beach experience of the entire rest of the world.

What’s next, Surfline celebrating the leaf-blower? The incredibly lame ATV scene? This is the LAST THING they should be promoting on a surf site.

I’m not linking to the actual video because I don’t want to reward this video with page-views and banner clicks, but here’s a screen-cap:

Send your feedback to SurfLine re  the “Central California User video on 11.21.09″ to:

Click here to leave an Editorial Comment with Surfline
or
Click here to leave an Video Comment with Surfline

Let’s encourage them to not celebrate the -needless- motorized degradation of the surf-zone.

- Karl

1)  I visited the Dave Smith booth – he’s the guy who started Sequential Circuits back in the day.  I had a Sequential Six-Trak, which was freaking awesome, and I’m sad I sold mine.   But they had this kick ass director’s chair with the SC logo on it…

Dave Smith had a bunch of great sounding new synthesizers, including the Morpho and the Evolver.  Very tempting.   Then, I’m standing there and Don Buchla walks in!  Buchla was one of the original synth pioneers, along with Moog, Don Buchla, Hugh Le Caine, Raymond Scott and Paul Ketoff.

Buchla build some of the biggest, wildest, most imaginative electronic instruments ever, so it was a synth-fanboi* treat to see him there.

(* I once built a Paia Proteus-1 synth from a kit over an entire summer, so yes, I have a serious serious problem with synth love),

2)  THE COOLEST THING AT NAMM, I SWEAR I WILL FIGHT YOU IF YOU DARE DISAGREE

This firm, Teenage Engineering, showed their RIDICULOUSLY cool ‘palm-top’ synth / sampler /production gizmo, the OP-1.  It’s a gorgeous

The Best Thing at the NAMM Show, the OP-1

piece of design, machined from a block of white-anodized aluminum, color coded keys and knobs, built-in speaker, built-in FM RADIO (for sampling), fantastically beautiful screen with brilliant brilliant amazing user interface, ability to filter external sounds, USB file transfer, oh my GOD!    Shipping ‘in a few months’.

If this thing turns out to be vaporware I will hang myself.

Their turntable design is also disgustingly awesome.