Opuzz Royalty Free Music

In the past I have been looking into viable options for royalty free music. I found lots of options - covering everything from small to big sites with lots of music. Many sites also have loops and sound effects as well.

First I want to clear up any misapprehensions about royalty free music. The music is not free - you need to buy it. But when you have bought it you can use it for whatever purpose your license agreement allows you to use it without paying any royalty. From an economical perspective this is good as you have fixed expenses you can include in the budget.

Royalty free music's counterpart is big organizations like RIAA. If you want to use music they manage you'll have to pay a royalty per use. That is usually more expensive - trust me.

But today I'll write about Opuzz, a royalty free music site that just crossed my web browser. There are several thing I like about Opuzz:

• They use a blog as a communication platform with their customers. This way you can see what they have been doing in the past.
• There are no limits in their license. It makes it easier for me as I don't need to count downloads, uses or anything else.
• You can purchase small parts of a song or the song as a whole. Small parts of a song if of course cheaper than the whole song.
• Instant download. (If your order is less then US$100, and not loops either.)

Price

As with everything - price is important. If it is too expensive you will walk away. Opuzz have several prices, one for about whatever need you may have. From buying one track (US$29.95) to all versions of a track (US$34.99) the gap to buying the complete CD online (US$59) is small.

Price Stingers $2.99 Music Loops $4.99 10-seconds $4.99 15-seconds $9.99 30-seconds $14.99 60-seconds $19.99 Full Length $29.99 Alternate Mixes $14.99 Music CDs $59 CD Downloads (download entire CD!) $59! Quote from their website on March 28, 2007

Music CD promotions

When I move back and forth I often find "Music CD Promo" - which sounds great. Two CD's for only US$79. But when you read the small print you'll see that it only applies to physical CDs only.

I'd love to see same or better promotions for downloads as well!

Loops

I found one loop collection that sounded interesting. Their best-seller Music Loop collection Vol 1 with a total of 117 loops at only US$49. A bargain - so I bought it.

But what do I find? Each collection contains about 30 loops. But each song (from where the loop is made) you get three versions. This gives you loops from 10 different songs.

This was not what I expected, and I am somewhat disappointed. Opuzz should be more clear about what is included in their loop. And I should have been more skeptic as this information is not easily available.

You can listen to a flash demo of all three jingle-bells loops here.

Quality of music

What is quality? What goes for me does not have to be what goes for you. But big collections makes it easier to find something you like! And with good categories it is easy to search for the song you need.

Hard drive

Opuzz sells a hard drive with all of their music for only US$1999. I have not seen this elsewhere, but I  like the idea. Unfortunately I can not afford it.

Conclusion

This seems to be a good web site with lots of music for a reasonable price. I miss sound effects - but will I ever be satisfied? :)

Music stocks compared

This article was updated on march 25. 2007 with a few more options in the comparison guide and the definition of price.

This article is an comparison guide between the different music stock options that I have looked into. I do not look at the quality of the music, but their prices and licenses as I believe they are more important to choose a starting point in the quest for music you can distribute.

Prices are for use on small websites or other small projects. Usually I have printed the lowest price for a complete track. Some offers part of tracks for a lower price.

Site	Price pr. song US$	Distribution limit # copies	Comments
Opuzz	29.99	none	Good price for albums of music - US$59. But read the fine print - no discount for "download only" purchases!
Stock-music	29.95	5000	You can buy their entire stock for US$199.
Stockmusic	29.95	none	Albums available for US$99.95 and 10 songs for US$199.95.
Royalty Free Music	59.95 Subscription available.	5000	Albums available for US$99.95.
Shockwave-sound.com	Varies a little, average 30	5000	Albums available for US$99.95.
Smart Sound	99.95	none	Discounts available.
Soundrangers	49.95	none	Clips available for lower prices. Very good choices of sound effects.
all music library	12.95	none
Proud Music	€59.50	1000	Expensive. I am not impressed by the music either...
Music Tracks Library	Varies a litte, average is 19.90	1000

Music stock brokers

A search at Google for stock music brokers gave me a few sites to choose from. So I decided to look into them to see what I can get today.

Most of the sites seems to have same price (collusive pricing???), around US$29.95 for a track with similar licenses.

I listened to some of the music, and I am sorry to say that it is hard to find good music here. It seems like the good artists all joined up with RIAA. Most of the music I can find here is boring, alternative or best used as background music.

Images at stockxpert

For some time ago I wrote about how to find and add cool graphics to your website. The site www.clipart.com is still a favorite of mine as they are cheap and have lots of cool drawing, art and photos.

But lately I have found out that I also want more real-life pictures on my site, in addition to clipart. But I don't want to pay much for it. Is this possible?

I found the site www.stockxpert.com where you can buy the right to use images starting at about US$1, depending on size and license you want.

Their metadata is not as consistent as with www.clipart.com but they sure got lots of images.

Give it a try!

Hosting Umbraco at GoDaddy

I love good products. And when I can use two products together it is even better! I earlier wrote about my experiences with GoDaddy as a hosting provider and I have also written about Umbraco CMS.

My question is simple: can I host Umbraco at GoDaddy? The answer is yes, I can!

The cheapest hosting option at GoDaddy is sufficient. You need to create an MSSQL database and then create some directories on your site with read/write permissions.

External links:

• Umbraco homepage.
• Wikibooks Umbraco FAQ.

WAN optimization with Riverbed

Today I had a chance to work with a product for WAN optimization for the first time. I ran a live demo at a customers site.

	It works. At least if your network traffic is predictable and repetitive. Most networks are, as clients tend to do much of the same.
	It is too expensive for most customers. It is really hard to justify the cost and more importantly the return of investment.

Acceleration of SSL traffic

Rivedbed promised to support SSL in version 4 of their software. I can't wait to try this one out. It only requires you to install your private key on the box inside your datacenter.

Steelhead appliances now accelerate encrypted (SSL) traffic, using all of Riverbed's algorithms to deliver LAN-like performance for those key business applications.

Of course this won't work for external web sites as you don't have access to private keys. But for intranet applications this is cool!

Exchange 2007

Exchange 2007 supports encrypted MAPI connections. Much details on this issue is not known at this point.

Based on our testing, we've found that the encrypted connections that appear by default in an Exchange 2007 environment with Outlook 2007 clients are a proprietary "MAPI encryption", not SSL.

Impression

Riverbed Steelhead appliances are easy to set up and work without the need to do much. Just make sure the traffic is unencrypted and leave the rest to Riverbed.

RiOS 4.0

I will do a new lab with RiOS 4.0 when it is released and do tests on Exchange, Sharepoint and web traffic. All SSL encrypted. If you are curious about this, please leave me a note.

Photodex ProShow

Photodex ProShow is a tool to make your everyday boring still pictures come alive. ProShow comes in three flavors, depending on the size of your wallet. My personal flavor is the US$69.95 Gold flavor.

What it does?

For my still images it does three things;

• Add background sounds.
• Allows zoom, pan and tilt on my images, making them seem alive.
• Adds captions to images.

Of course, it does a lot more - depending on your flavor. A flavor comparison guide is found here.

What is produce

This is the best part. If produces lots of output formats.

• Flash video
• An Windows Executable
• DVD's (it can burn DVD's directly)
• VCD
• HTML via ActiveX control
• MPEG1/2
• QuickTime
• HD TV compatible outputs
• Autorun CD (with Windows Executable)
• Screen saver

The GUI

The GUI is relatively easy to work with. I spent 3 hours to get a grip on the product. And when you have learned how to use ProShow you can move on and do more with it. The only glitch I have found is that it does not work well with AVG 7.5 Anti-Malware. AVG from time to time eats all my memory when ProShow is running, and ProShow locks up. (The solution for now is to wait until AVG is done - then I can continue to work.)

Flavors

As I mentioned it comes in three flavors. Producer, Gold and Standard. The producer is my choice of product if money is of no issue. It has lots of more features than Producer. I can add motion to captions, open RAW camera files, loop videos and much more.

The Standard edition does nothing exiting, and you probably want to go for Gold right away - it is worth the extra US$40. At least I will.

You can compare the flavors here.

Demo

Of course I have to show a demo as well.

Format	Size
Windows Executable	6MB
Flash 1.5Mb broadband	12MB in files
Flash for ISDN	2MB in files
Web with ActiveX	4MB in files
MPEG for PC	22MB

A peek at GoDaddy

Shared hosting at GoDaddy is cheap, but are they any good?

Earlier I talked about web hosting options, now I will look more in depth on GoDaddy, as they seemed most promising.

Their shared hosting starts at US$3.99 and gives you either Linux or Windows based hosting. With MSSQL (on Windows) and MySQL database access. They charge you monthly instead of yearly as many competitors do. And they don't require you to transfer the domain to them to host the site.

We're the affordable, reliable place to host your site

Linux and Windows plans compared

You can see all details here. Below you can find the most important differences.

Linux	Windows
MySQL databases	MySQL and MSSQL databases
PHP, SSI, FrontPage extensions, Java, ColdFusion, Python, Perl, Ruby	ASP and .NET (1.1 or 2.0), ASP.NET Ajax, ColdFusion, FrontPage extensions
Apache	IIS

Access to databases

You can access databases through a web interface. The interface is easy to use, but simple. You need to understand how to use databases. With MySQL you got an option to dump the database to file. But you cannot do so with MSSQL. There is no easy way for you to move the database in case you want to change hosting provider.

Changes to your configuration

You only have a few options you can tweak on your site. You can add subsites (subsite.domain.com) and set directory permissions (on Windows). All changes to your configuration takes up to 24 hours to complete.

You should not be in a hurry when you want to do changes as it takes time to do changes. When I created a database it took about one hour before it was ready for use. The web interface is always slow - GoDaddy can do this better. It takes a few seconds to load each page.

Access to your files

All files are accessible via FTP. GoDaddy have some limitations on the FTP access, at least on the economy and deluxe plans. You can only have two FTP sessions active at any time, and the speed is limited to 40kB/sec.

In short it takes time to transfer data to/from GoDaddy. If you have 10GB of data it takes at least 72 hours to transfer data off the site. And with small files it takes even longer because of the overhead involved with setting up file transfers.

Uptime and access times

What is uptime? I see uptime as when my website is available on the net. Uptime is hard to measure, as many different factors are involved. To monitor uptime and access times I have used ipMonitor and configured a probe that download a static file every 300 second.

With GoDaddy I have 99.7908% availability the last day on my Linux account (this blog). This is also the average. I have never had 100%. In comparison, the same measurement on Blogspot gives me 100% availability.

Both sites are located in the US, and access times are much higher than in Europe. Speed do not seem to be a problem. On large files you get the bandwidth you expect.

Conclusion

I like GoDaddy. They are cheap, and their products fits me. I just wish I could find a comparable solution in Europe. Until I find this, I will stay on GoDaddy.

Sender Policy framework

In the war against forged emails we have a new contender that seems promising. The name of the new contender is Sender Policy Framework. The specifications are outlined in RFC4408.

SPF works like a charm - when configured properly. For my domain helge.net I have added the following TXT record:

helge.net. 3600 IN TXT "v=spf1 mx -all"

By doing this I say that emails from my domain helge.net is only allowed to originate from my incoming mailserver.

Given this information the received can check to see if the receiving email is forged or not.

Sender address forgery is a threat to users and companies alike, and it even undermines the e-mail medium as a whole because it erodes people's confidence in its reliability. That is why your bank never sends you information about your account by e-mail and keeps making a point of that fact.

For this to work you need to add a TXT record to your domain. At the project homepage you can find out for yourself how to do so.

A site that is not IE compatible

I few years back we all had sites optimized for Netscape. I find it fun to see that we now have pages that are optimized for Firefox and not Internet Explorer compatible.