Partners In Rhyme and many other royalty free music libraries have been having a lot of problems recently with a situation created by Audiosparx (a royalty free music library) and GoDigital Media Group (monetizes media used in youtube and elsewhere).

Sometime last year GoDigital offered Audiosparx the chance to join their Adshare program. The Adshare program utilizes YouTube’s Audio Match ID feature to monetize any video that has music that matches the audio in GoDigital’s database.

Audiosparx joined the program and submitted 15,000 royalty free music tracks to the GoDigital database. Again, these are royalty free music tracks and Audiosparx and GoDigital were wanting to earn “royalties” off of this music (I still don’t understand the logic behind this at all).

The main problem with this though is that this same music is also being distributed by many other royalty free music libraries throughout the internet and Audiosparx does not have an exclusive agreement with any of the composers involved so when Audiosparx does something with the content that is owned by these composers their actions end up effecting the business and reputations of other royalty free music companies.

So, in October, Partners In Rhyme and other music libraries started receiving customer complaints that videos that included legally purchased music were being tagged in their YouTube account as possibly containing copyrighted material owned by GoDigital Media. The videos would then be monetized by GoDigital with Adsense ads and the owner of the video would be denied the right to monetize the videos themselves with their own ads.

Partners In Rhyme had to hire lawyers and send a registered letter simply to find out what was going on but we were finally told that Audiosparx had submitted this music into the GoDigital database.

We checked with our composers who also had material in the Audiosparx library and they had never heard of GoDigital and had no idea their music had been placed into this system and they confirmed that they had not given expressed permission to have their music placed in the GoDigital system.
We made GoDigital and Audiosparx aware of the mistake they had made and Audiosparx apologized and withdrew from the Adshare program.

GoDigital however still has much of the content in their system and is still earning revenue off of content that they have no permission to have in their database.

They say they are trying to remove the content but it is somehow YouTube’s fault now and they are not able to delete the content from their end for some reason.

I am simply posting this explanation so our customers are aware that the problem is being dealt with and to contact Partners In Rhyme (or any other music library that you have purchased royalty free music from) to get GoDigital’s false ownership notices removed from your YouTube videos should they appear.

I just updated our Free iMovie plugins page on partnersinrhyme.com here:
Free iMovie Plugins and Mac Software Downloads
I hadn’t realized how popular the page was until people started contacting me with lots of questions. On the new page I explain the problem with using effects plugins in newer version of iMovie (’08 and ‘08) and a solution for Mac users who still want to use effects plugins and newer version of iMovie.

We created these ringtones specifically for our iPhones so that we could have something other than the stock ringtones or the latest iTunes hip hop track blaring out of our iPhones when someone calls us.

To be honest we tried to figure out how to sell these ringtones to iPhone users but it is just too much of a hassle and we’re busy with lots of other stuff so we thought we’d give them away.
No strings attached.
A collection of 200 unique, different, hip and cool iPhone ringtones for you to drop right into the ringtone area of your iTunes program and then synch up your iPhone to load them in.
Once your iPhone is synched up go to settings and choose a new ringtone.
There’s something for everybody here to check it out.

200 Free iPhone RIngtones.zip 13megs

Just wanted to send out a big thank you to the Partners In Rhyme programming team at Harvest Technologies.
We’ve come to rely on Guru and the team to realize all of our ideas and help update our websites and keep things running smoothly. Whenever we receive a feature request from our clients (which we do quite often) we immediately contact Guru and see if we can implement the idea.
We’re particularly proud of our latest website at http://www.naturemusicdownload.com/ which the guys did a great job from design and functionality to coding and implementation.

Also notice the Partners In Rhyme T-Shirts the guys are wearing in this photo.

Thanks a lot to Guru and Harvest Technologies and look forward to realizing more of our ideas with you and the team.

A friend of mine sent me a link to Finalight.com which is a new website that sells VFX stock footage. For those of you that may not be familiar with the term VFX is short for ‘visual effects’ and is used to describe all the computer generated effects you see in films these days.
Finalight.com sells elements like smoke, fire, shockwaves and explosions that you can use to add to your video or film project. You need basic compositing knowledge to add the effects to your project but the guys at Finallight have made it pretty easy by providing masks and well-filmed or computer generated elements.
They have three elements available on their site here
http://www.finalight.com/-/maindir/webpages/STHANKS.php
So you can test them out to see if you want to purchase anything from their library.
I purchased a flame effect and added it to a quick VFX test I am working. Take a look here

Adding audio to your website or blog post isn’t always as simple as it sounds. I put together a quick tutorial using my favorite little plug ‘n’ play flash embed code for adding a nice looking audio to player to a web page or blog post.
Here is an example of the player:

Instructions:

1. Upload the music to your server in MP3 format. If the MP3 file exists on a server somewhere else you just need to grab the URL of that file (but remember if the owners of the server change the location of that file your embedded music will no longer work).

2. Copy the URL, it will look something like this
http://www.royaltyfreemusicclips.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/waiting-mix067.mp3

3. Copy the code below and save it somewhere on your computer so you have easy access to it

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3247397568-audio-player.swf?audioUrl=MP3_FILE_URL" width="400" height="27" allowscriptaccess="never" quality="best" bgcolor="#ffffff" wmode="window" flashvars="playerMode=embedded" />

4. Where you see MP3_FILE_URL in the code above replace that with your URL, so your code would now look something like this

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3247397568-audio-player.swf?audioUrl=http://www.royaltyfreemusicclips.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/waiting-mix067.mp3" width="400" height="27" allowscriptaccess="never" quality="best" bgcolor="#ffffff" wmode="window" flashvars="playerMode=embedded" />

5. Now paste the result into your blog post or web page and you will get a nice looking flash player for your audio file.

There’s a very funny and very informative conversation going on regarding performing rights organizations like BMI, ASCAP and in this case PRS going after people singing to themselves at work (?!?!?).

Check it out if you have a moment, it’s pretty enlightening;
this_is_getting_ridiculous_now_recording_industry

This comes as ASCAP loses their battle to charge mobile phone users every time their phone rings calling their ringtones a “public performance”.
Judge: No Royalties for Music Industry Each Time a Ringtone Plays

Here are the top-ten selling royalty free music tracks from www.musicloops.com for September 2009.
There’s some pretty cool stuff here:

1 Supercritical_Supercilious by Michele Vanni

2 HighLights by Dan Phillipson

3 Hope For More by Dan Phillipson

4 Live Wire by Bjorn Lynne

5 Lift Me Up by Bjorn Lynne

6 Fashion Groove by Michael Cymbalista

7 Les Pieds by Felipe Vassão

8 We Are Loud by PIR

9 Mataleon by Roberto Feltracco

10 Starting Lineup by Mark Petrie