Barking Spider Electronics

My mac recently stopped playing Flash audio - not only in Safari but also in Firefox. This was rather frustrating due to the number of sites that now use Flash for tune previews. After a bit of reading today I discovered that the cause may have been installing Audacity and the solution bizarrly was to run Apple’s Garageband software once. This actually worked! Don’t let this put you off trying Audacity - this small issue aside it’s a great free audio editor.

Got a variety of music up for sale at the moment via my ebay page:-

http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQsassZskanksta23QQhtZ-1

and directly through my cds for sale page on this site.

Aye that’s right - you can pick yourself up off the floor - after a very long break I’ve finally written a new tune! Not entirely sure about it myself but feedback so far has been encouraging - it’s on a bit of a grime tip and isn’t entirely finished but you can grab a listen below.

SCART Thug - Nervous

When running a music site there is nothing more annoying than 3rd party web sites hotlinking your mp3s - particularly where dj mixes are concerned. This uses valuable bandwidth without the downloader ever having visited you site, read your forum or registered as a user. Fortunately it is quite simple to prevent with the use of a little file called .htaccess (note the preceeding dot).

Requirements

You will need to be running an apache web server with the mod_rewrite module loaded. If you are not sure whether or not this is the case save the following line to a text file called phpinfo.php:-

< ? phpinfo(); ?>

Upload this file to your web server and then load it into your browser eg http://www.yoursite.com/phpinfo.php. Fairly close to the top of the page you should find a section called either apache or apache2handler. At the bottom of this section is the loaded modules - mod_rewrite should be one of the values to the right.

The .htaccess file

The next stage is to create the .htaccess file. Once again create a new text file and insert the following:-


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yoursite.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule [^/]+.(mp3|MP3)$ http://www.yoursite.com [R,L]


Replace yoursite.com with your domain name in lines 3 & 4. Line 3 details the domain that is allowed to download the files - if you wish more than one domain to have access to them simply duplicate this line. Line 4 redirects people to your homepage if they click on a link to one of your mp3s from another site. Save this file as .htaccess and upload it to your mp3 folder on your website. And that’s it!

Use of this is of course not just limited to mp3 files - it can be used to prevent leeching of images for instance by changing the file type in the RewriteRule on line 4.

Some cracking local releases coming out at the moment:

• Tangible - Gameover (Point One) - second release from the Glasgow based label bringing you some Drexciyan type techno lushness
• Sleepless Crew - Spell House (Dalriada Limited) - squelchy acid pumping party goodness
• Various - Music Volume 3 (Benbecula) - the long awaited follow up to the Music series - Frogpocket, Christ., Greenbank and more - still to hear this myself but I’m sure it’ll be class.

New Christ. album coming up on Benbecula later this year and the fourth installment from Stuff Records is due fairly soon as well. The electronic music scene in Scotland is stronger than ever on the releases front even if the clubs are dying off a bit.

My mate Matt Dopamine has released his 2nd 12″ this week. “Harsh” on Klaus Hill’s Title Fight imprint is the follow up to his massive “Hold You” on TCR. The 12″ features the original plus a rework by Matt and Klaus Hill himself. Definitely worth checking out - you can buy it on vinyl from Juno or buy the mp3s from DJDownload.com.

Links
Dopamine Web
Title Fight
Thursday Club Recordings

The BSE site has been down for a few days due to server trouble. Back up now and all the mp3s have been re-uploaded.

PS. I have loads of gmail invites to give away if anyone is looking for one. Drop me an email.

Saw Lady Sovereign playing live in Edinburgh last night. Written a wee review of it over on Miscreat.

Lady Sovereign Live @ Cabaret Voltaire in Edinburgh Review

There’s also some pictures taken from her last Edinburgh gig on the 27th May 2005 here.

Not exactly a fresh BSE album being as some of these tracks are almost 5 years old but a new collection of tracks on the mp3 for your listening. Grab them on the Sleep Is For The Week download page.

After being rather quiet for a while there’s been a glut of releases on the Avionix site. Get over there for a new netlabel mix from Patrick Walker, a 3Carbine mp3 EP and the 3Carbine remix of Jakeone’s “Shake”.

http://www.avionixrecords.com/index.php