As many Texans face economic hardship, a new study shows a growing trend toward taking debtors to court, we’ll have the latest. Also, anyone else ready for a haircut? Are you sure? As the governor relaxes orders to keep salons and barbershops closed, concerns about reopening on Friday. And Dr.Fred Campbell of UT Health San...

New data in one of the most closely watched political contests in an ongoing Texas election season, we’ll have the latest. Also, honoring Moms in the biggest border city in Texas. Why this year is doubly special. And dealing with a deadly and highly contagious virus, not the one you’re thinking of, that’s affecting other...

If the Nats aren't on TV, turn on a computer and log onto the Internet, where you can get free, almost-live updates on the progress of games and, for a small price, live video and audio broadcasts too.

The mouse clicked in Indiana, but the gun that fired the shot heard 'round the Internet sits on a game preserve in Texas. Now, 14 states and an influential congressman want to ban online hunting. -Robert MacMillan

Orthopedists say they are seeing an increasing number of patients with similar symptoms, a condition known as "overuse syndrome" or "BlackBerry thumb." In some patients, the disability has become severe.-The Washington Post

Mecho-pets such as the catbot is easier for many people -- the elderly, the allergy-stricken, the autistic and disabled children and adults -- to relate to than a real cat.

The guy's Irish or Scottish or something like that, and he's drunk as a skunk. He staggers down the street, stumbles to his car and starts fumbling to get his key in the lock when two cops walk up, one male, one female.

You can now watch high-definition television on sets as cheap as $500, with plenty of programming from a variety of channels. But HDTV is missing from one crucial corner of the home-entertainment business -- the DVD. Companies are still developing and promoting two different, incompatible high-definition versions of the DVD, neither of which will have any consumer relevance (read: tolerable prices) until next year at the soonest.

Don't take this personally, but Google wants your Web search history.

Two years ago this coming Thursday, the online music business stopped being a joke. When Apple Computer opened its iTunes Music Store for business on April 28, 2003, people finally had a song-downloads destination that provided a fair value for the money.
-Rob Pegoraro

MCI Inc.'s board of directors embraced a cash-rich offer from Qwest Communications International Inc. after months of saying the company was a financially weaker and strategically less desirable merger partner than Verizon Communications Inc.
-The Washington Post

A movement toward greater use of telemedicine is widening the spectrum of care doctors can provide from afar and enabling more outsourcing of services overseas.
-The Washington Post

You match the Nicole Kidman card with the Nicole Kidman card, the Julia Roberts card with the Julia Roberts card, the J.Lo card with the J.Lo card. Simple enough. The game is called Ditto, and it's on the Web site of Ladies' Home Journal, and Karen Heal is, at this very moment, too preoccupied playing the game to talk about it.

Ive been making music for couple of years now but still cant figure out why my mix doesnt sound professional. Im I doing something wrong? This is the link to my tracks http://www.ourmedia.org/node/300488 Someone please help me out.

The 100% guaranteed way to get your bedroom mixes to sound more professional (and by far the most expensive) is to spend time in a recording studio. Take the raw tracks to something you want to mix, import it into their ProTools setup (or whatever they use) and have a pro engineer (must be a talkative, friendly one, not a grumpy, cynical one) to mix it. ASK A BILLION questions, be a dork and write stuff down if you have to. The worst case scenario is that after 2/3 hours at least you'll know what questions to ask of Google or at the local tech book store. The best case is that your music impresses the engineer and he/she becomes a pseudo mentor for you. Engineering is by far my weakest area (along with playing in tune and in time) so everything that follows is said that caveat: I have found that going cheap on mastering tools (compression, limiters, eq) hurts bedroom mixes a lot. Money I've spent on the top utilities there (I use Waves) dwarfs all my other plugins put together by an order of magnitude. (Reason's mastering suite is pretty good so you may be covered there; although I've applied Waves L2 to mixes done after the 'final' Reason mixdown and there's no question there was a marked improvement in pro-sheen.) I have found tweakheadz site very useful, especially their mixing 101 page. Finally I have been told (and have experienced it myself) that posting often to ccM and asking for real, brutal reviews and feedback has helped a lot of people. I, for one, am very, very embarrassed by several of my uploads from 2 years ago here, while only very embarrassed by more recent ones; all strictly due to people hearing stuff I didn't.

that sounds good. ill look for a studio near my place. at the end you said that the comments from ccmixer is very useful but what shall i do if i want a brutal review of my own original mix? because on ccmixer i can only upload remixes or samples or separate tracks.

being a remix site and short on resources we can't handle original material. so, er, get remixing... ;)

my buddy des has a great blog he runs that can surely help almost anyone here with improving their production. http://www.hometracked.com/ also, his music is worth checking out, just so you can see that he knows what he's talking about. des is a great guy and a really excellent artist. http://www.deshead.com/

U need to have a good pair of monitors, headphones will not do at all! I agree with Fourstones, Waves is a very good suite. I use it within SoundForge and it really does help in cleaning up the frequencies. My mixes really improved when I had monitor speakers included in the set up. Experiment and let me know, I'll give u some quality feedback, no holds, sometimes the truth hurts! LOL! EZ m8 Morr

The best thing I can say is: learn about sound. Learn about frequencies, which ones sound like what and do what to the overall mix. Whether or not to use a low or high pass filter on something. Fiddle with EQs for hours. And more importantly, get criticism. It's the easiest way to learn what sound to look out for, and such. And most importantly of all: Practice. Mix till your ears bleed. (from the time spent listening to the same song, not due to the terrible mix :P) Mixing is one of my strong suits, but most of it is just being able to hear the song, and make the adjustments that I want, to be able to make the necessary changes and just know what needs to be done.

bravo!

That's a very good point- I started with a Mac LC, EZVision and an M1, with the only audio manipulation being Hypercard. I got good at customizing patches and finding seamless loop points manually just to get what I could out of what I had, with mastering being 1/4"-to-RCA from the headphone jack on the M1 to AUX IN on the cassette player, or the same thing with 1/8" adapter for the 'puter sound files. Then I'd record and bounce these cassette tracks to my 4-track, with final routing from 4-track's headphone-out back to the cassette. Ugly stuff, but that's what I had to work with...

This is a very good point. I think that it's easy to keep adding new gear, and thus miss the richness of existing gear and software. I like to work with more limited software sometimes, so that I can feel as if I am exploiting it to its fullness.

Ive been making music for couple of years now but still cant figure out why my mix doesnt sound professional. Im I doing something wrong? This is the link to my tracks http://www.ourmedia.org/node/300488 Someone please help me out. The first thing I noticed was the lack of higher frequencies in your mix... My mixes always end up being bass heavy (because I suck horribly) so I can see we both have the same problem... There's is (however) an over-abundance of frequency-fighting in your track... A lot of distorted things competing for my attention (at least in my ears). Dunno if any of this has been helpful, but we could all learn things...so hopefully you'll have advice for me in the future ;-) Good luck, and we me luck too! -Joel

This is a useful thread. Im just in the middle of mixing a new ccmixter-based song and its just not coming together for me. The tweakheadz and hometracked sites are great. A couple other useful sites: tips and techniques at gearslutz - http://www.gearslutz.com/board/tips-techniques/168409-tips-techniques.html ; Live tips - http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27120 ; general EQ reference - http://www.idmforums.com/showthread.php?t=11466 Im definitely going to get the mix Im working on up here, I need some blunt advice.

OK, I uploaded Hollywood Picture Book (feat Calendar Girl and Kaer Trouz) and entered a pluggy plug for comments over this weekend.

As the rain gets heavier by midweek, we can also expect cooler lowland temperatures and snow in the mountains.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — At one hot, faraway world, it’s always cloudy with a chance of iron rain. That’s the otherworldly forecast from Swiss and other European astronomers who have detected clouds full of iron droplets at a hot Jupiterlike planet 390 light-years away. This mega planet is so hot on the sunny side […]

The cold weather system from Canada that had forecasters predicting unseasonable cold and light snow in the Puget Sound lowlands has shifted west, changing the weekend forecast, according to the National Weather Service in Seattle. That doesn’t mean we won’t get some cold, rainy weather, wind and possibly a flake or two, but the impacts […]

If self-isolating or social-distancing to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus has been stressful, you can get a much-needed mental-health boost by getting some sunshine, exercise and fresh air -- as long as you stay away from others.

John Alderete was trying to catch a few hours of sleep while the rains beat down Tuesday morning on his home in Kapa’a, Hawaii, on the island of Kauai. But shortly after a quarter to 6 in the morning, he was abruptly awoken by the shrill blare of his cellphone. A tornado warning had been […]

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A moderate earthquake Wednesday near Salt Lake City shut down a major air traffic hub, damaged a spire atop a temple and frightened millions of people already on edge from the coronavirus pandemic. There were no reports of injuries. The 5.7-magnitude quake just after 7 a.m. damaged the spire and […]

The UW wants you to stay away from the quad — but you can add the school's cherry blossoms to your home streaming queue.

Nothing dramatic is coming -- just some aptly named "nuisance rain."

Twice the normal amount of snowfall fell in January and enough snow continued in February and March to maintain a slightly above normal snowpack.

The high hit 67 degrees at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport as of 4 p.m. Thursday, marking the warmest day since the area reached 69 degrees on Sept. 26, 2019. If you're tempted to go outside and enjoy the sunshine, remember to stay away from other people and wear the proper gear.

Seattle is closing more than a dozen of the city’s largest and most popular parks for the weekend because officials are worried about people crowding into the parks to enjoy the pleasant spring weather and spreading the novel coronavirus to each other, Mayor Jenny Durkan said Thursday.

CHATSWORTH, Ga. (AP) — Storms that killed more than 30 people in the Southeast, piling fresh misery atop a pandemic, spread across the eastern United States on Monday, leaving more than 1 million homes and businesses without power amid floods and mudslides. In Alabama, people seeking shelter from tornadoes huddled in community shelters, protective masks […]

Masks may not help protect you from pollen, but they'll protect others from your sneezes, which is more important than ever during this coronavirus pandemic.

It's been the driest start to April since Seattle started recording its weather, with less than one-tenth of an inch of rain so far, according to the National Weather Service. That's about to change — perhaps making it easier for sun lovers to observe the governor's stay-home order.

Seattle banned the use of playgrounds, athletic fields and sports courts weeks ago, taping off playground structures and swings.

Here comes a straight week of small weather systems marching across the Puget Sound, one right after the other, each bringing scattered showers with sun breaks, according to the National Weather Service of Seattle.

A huge asteroid will make a (relatively) close pass of Earth early Wednesday, but you'll need a telescope to see that; however, an exceptionally bright Venus should be visible to the naked eye at dusk and in the early evenings. Look to the west.

The early part of the week will seem like more of the same, but an approaching high-pressure ridge could really heat things up for the weekend.

The National Weather Service in Seattle counted about 250 reports of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes. "It made for a pretty good show for us," meteorologist Dana Felton said.

BOSTON (AP) — The northeastern U.S. is about to get a cold spring farewell from winter’s bad boy, the polar vortex, which could bring rare May snowfall and record-low temperatures to some areas over the Mother’s Day weekend, forecasters say. Usually the polar vortex is a batch of cold air that stays trapped in the […]

Andretti Autosport and Chip Ganassi Racing are the first two American teams to commit to a new electric SUV off-road racing series scheduled to begin in 2021. The Extreme E series has five events planned in what the league is calling “some of the most remarkable, remote and severely damaged locations on the planet.” The […]

A year and a half after announcing its creation, Facebook has named the initial 20 members of its oversight board, a quasi-independent panel that is to make decisions on thorny issues. The board’s members were named by Facebook and hail from a broad swath of regions around the world. They include Tawakkol Karman, a Nobel […]

A year and a half after announcing its creation, Facebook has named the initial 20 members of its oversight board, a quasi-independent panel that is to make decisions on thorny issues. The board’s members were named by Facebook and hail from a broad swath of regions around the world. They include Tawakkol Karman, a Nobel […]

PRAGUE (AP) — The Czech Republic and the United States have signed a joint declaration Wednesday for cooperating on security of 5G technology. The Czech government office said the document was signed remotely by Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The signing comes amid a global battle between the […]