How To Use Invoice Mode to Collect Client Payment on Google Checkout.

As a musician or an artist, you will often need to collect money from clients for the works you are going to provide (never perform a work without a payment or good promise of it!)

One of the easiest ways to collect money from your client is to use Google Checkout. Since it uses credit card and all major cards are accepted and it is far more reliable to get paid than to use checks. Also the system is sophisticated enough that it will check things like "return credit" history of individuals before the charge can go through. This will, in general, try to avoid you a hassle of dealing with people who do not have a real intention to pay.

You may have seen Google Checkout buttons on searches and some catalog merchants. But there is one more mode in Google Checkout that you can use to invoice people directly.

But first, if you have not yet set up a Google Checkout account, it is fairly straight forward to do, just go to https://checkout.google.com/ and set up your account. Now you are a Google Checkout Merchant. The word Merchant is important to remember because you will be dealing with Google Checkout as a merchant and not a consumer.

How To Invoice Your Client Directly via Google Checkout

• First go to Google Checkout Merchant Page: http://checkout.google.com/sell/ And be sure to Bookmark this in your browser since you are going back there a lot. But if you forget, don't dismay. Just search Google for "Google Checkout Merchant" It is important that you remember to use the Merchant mode otherwise you will be in a consumer mode trying to buy things from other merchants.
• Log in using your Google Account
• Once signed in you see the Tools menu/tab on top part of the page. Click it.
• Find "Email Invoices" link and click it.
• Just follow the instructions on the page.

When the payment clears you will be notified via Email.

Apple Logic Pro: MIDI Track Gone "Grayed Out"

I was working on a project last night and I muted all MIDI tracks to listen to the audio recorded track.

Then I unplugged a MIDI interface and restarted the Logic.

I was surprised to see all of my MIDI tracks when to "Grayed Out"

It turns out what Logic did was to muted all of the MIDI regions when it found unassigned MIDI track. Reassigning the MIDI channel does not do anything.

Instead you need to go to the Region menu and un-mute all of the regions.

Better Way of Music File Sharing

By Manabu Tokunaga

StokeMaster's Music Blog

http://stokemusic.blogspot.com/

We continue to hear about RIAA bringing lawsuits to students and other people who cannot obviously afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars in awards. Also the industry is trying to work with the government to mandate the installation software that will monitor peoples music usage on computers. I personally do not agree doing that is a solution to the problem.

Most musicians doing music to generate their income may be sympathetic to that, but on the other hands we tend to see only one side of the story that we want to hear. If you are a professional musician, you may tend to side RIAA, but if you are a music fan, you may think RIAA is an evil greedy organization.

So I did a bit more search on the network and found Electronic Fronteer (EF) web site on this topic: http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing

You may find this interesting because what they propose is to either use or start organizations like ASCAP and BMI who collect and distribute broadcast, in this case file sharing, payments to respective musicians.

According to the article, by collecting $5 to $10 from music fans per month and allowing them to do file sharing to their hearts content, the potential revenue it generates is significantly more for artists. Which I think is a great model especially for indepenent and individual musicians since more freedom for music fans to distribute music means a built-in promotion mechanism.

If you explore this site, it has many other useful information on music file sharing. As a professional musician, you should study this a bit as to where the industry and the digital public is heading to. Also I should remind you to join ASCAP or BMI if you have an album. Basically if you currently have your work released from commercial venues like Amazon, CD Baby etc., then you are very likely to be accepted.

What do you think about this?

http://stokemusic.blogspot.com/ (c) 2010 Manabu Tokunaga

Recording Mac's Internal Audio To Logic, How To

Many people who do Pod Casts may know this already, but we sometimes have a need to record Mac applications' audio-out into Logic. You could do this with a pair of cables to loop back the audio out but it can also be done via a piece of software.

You may be wondering why you'd want to do this. Here are some examples;

You may want to do this for recording online telephone phone conversations, or if you want to use Mac's speech system's output into a cool effect.

One such software is SoundFlower which is Open Source and the information is at this site: http://cycling74.com/products/soundflower/

As with any digital recording technology, you do need to respect copyrights of commercial work as you do this.

Update on M3 FireWire with Apple Logic

Previously I have discussed M3 with its Firewire Board (FWB) and today I have finally came to the arrangement that works fully digitally.

The key is that solved the main problem was that I was insisting on sending the output to M-Audio FastTrack device. As soon as I have eliminated that from the audio chain, I was able to do pretty much what I wanted.

The problem was that

• It was almost impossible to rout the output sound to FastTrack
• M3 can directly play back the sound coming out of Mac.

In my situation, what made possible to monitor both the Logic (samples and software instruments) and M3 to send the output to my keyboard monitor was to send the Output from Mac to the Individual Out 1/2 (or 3/4).

Turn the volume of all your external sound equipment to zero just in case.

To do this, first set the input mode on the M3;

• Press GLOBAL
• Press PAGE SELECT
• Select Basic Setup Page (P0)
• Press the AUDIO tab at the bttom
• On the Top section with a (>) select FireWire
• Then for Input 1 under Bus Select, select 1/2
• For Input 2 select 1/2 also

Do not send the signal to L/R. This will cause the output of Logic to feed back into the input of the Logic.

You are not quite done yet...

• On your Mac, launch the M3 Editor
• When it starts up. Press the GLOBAL button on the M3 Editor window
• Under the Audio Settings
• Audio Driver is set M3 (0164) <- This number may vary for your card
• Audio Output: Individual 1/2
• Buffer Latency (4 ms works for me but experiment with it)
• CPU Load (High setting works for me but experiment with it)

Now connect the external monitor speakers to the Individual Out 1 and 2 then you can hear what Mac is sending out. You can even enable Software Monitoring.

As for the Buffer Latency you need to experiment with it until you do not hear clicks and pops from skipped or missing samples.

Note: I have not quire figured out how to turn off the FireWire MIDI. Even the MIDI setting on the M3 Editor says USB, right now if the USB MIDI is connected the keys double up (i.e., if you press a key the same not appears twice in the Event List). I am using it without USB for the time being which is just fine for my applications.

Logic 8 - Audio Track Stop Playing When You Moved To Another Computer

I use two different Macs for my project. I have a "Studio" Laptop which I use to compose and record tracks. Once I am basically done with it, I move the project to my Desktop iMac. It is much more comfortable to make some tweaks and do the mix on a big desktop machine.

When you copy a project from one machine to another though you might run into a problem of an Audio track not playing another machine. This happens to happen to me just about every time very consistently! May be the fact that I have a KORG M3 EXB-FW Firewire interface driver on my laptop. But, I don't know.

This has puzzled me for a good 3~4 hours and finally I have figured out at least what to do to correct the situation (not necessarily perfectly fix it.) If you are reading this and know exactly the best way to fix this, I would like to know, but here is my version of how to prevent and fix the issue.

Prevention -- Always Leave the Universal Track Mode On

Apparently this is important when you are moving project from one machine to another. So on all your projects, before you start them be sure to go to the Audio setup and be sure that the Universal Track is turned on and left being on.

How to Remedy If Your Audio Track Does Not Sound

• First from the Arrange window know which Audio Track number is the one that does not sound.
• Next, open the Environment window
• Find the channel strip servicing the "dead" audio track.
• Go to the left panel that where you are going to filled with it.
• First check the Driver setting. This should correspond to the Audio driver that you are using on the second machine. Most likely Core Audio but you may have other devices.
• Next try to assign this strip to another unused Audio track number. In my case just doing that make the sound to start feeding to the normal output channels.
• If above does not work, click the Universal Track mode on/off, save the project, come back and turn it on/off again, save the project until you can turn it back on, and try the above steps. (I think there really is some bug in Logic along this line!)

OK, good luck and enjoy!

Logic 8 - Record Each Separate M3 KARMA Track

Desired Effect:

You want to record KARMA output into Logic but want to create a track per channcel.

Do This:

• You need to check how many MIDI channels are used in a COMBO
• Create multiple External MIDI tracks
• On Logic Go to File > Project Settings > Recording > Auto demix by channel if multitrack recording" option.
• Go to M3 and Make the synth to MIDI LOCAL CONTROL only.
• Press the Record Enable button on the Logic on all Tracks you created.
• Record