Ylivoima-studio

Me and Aleksi Ahjopalo created a compact online presence for Ylivoima-studio, which is a Helsinki-based recording studio helmed by Bommitommi et al. The studio is strongly focused on reggae music, producing such award-winning records as Jukka Poika: Kylmästä lämpimään and Raappana: Maapallo.

http://www.ylivoimastudio.com/

New track: Picante (refix) feat. Busy Signal

I recently remixed the Jamaican dancehall artiste Busy Signal’s 2009 track “Picante”.

I participated in the Assembly 2011 music competition (had other plans first…) with it, but (as I assumed) it didn’t quite work out for me — 9th position. :D

Anyway, go on and give it a listen here:

http://www.hitlantis.com/?songId=5146146

Error-Tolerant Content-Based Music-Retrieval with Mathematical Morphology

Mikko Karvonen, Mika Laitinen, Kjell Lemström, and Juho Vikman: Error-Tolerant Content-Based Music-Retrieval with Mathematical Morphology. In Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval. Exploring Music Contents : 7th International Symposium, CMMR 2010; revised papers, volume 6684 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 321-327. Springer Verlag, 2011.

New track in Hitlantis: “Oh! A whoa!”

Well, not so new, this was already released at the ASSEMBLY 2010 music competition. This is a slightly fixed version, less bass-heavy so it doesn’t destroy your PA.

http://www.hitlantis.com/?songId=1208321

“King Thrill” has even posted a positive review, thanks!

Viking’s Rasta Retreats

Me and Fthr Productions did a Website for my Rastafarian friend Viking. :) He is renting several rooms in his beautiful house in Jamaica’s rural south coast, Treasure Beach. The site is called Viking’s Rasta Retreats. If you’re looking for a perfect place to spend a relaxed, stress-free Christmas this year, then book your flights to JA and head to Viking’s! ;)

I’m going there in January, me thinks…

Oh and btw, Viking is the same guy who is singing in this track of mine! ::

Selassie I Rise by crankshaft

Actually, this is Viking’s song which I remixed. And that’s just a demo version, full versions of this song and several other JA-themed tracks are coming in the near future…

Hitlantis – Who’s next?

I could have blogged about Hitlantis already a year ago when I was involved in programming the first version of it. But better late than never!

For the past few months I’ve been working on the Flash client of Hitlantis again. Bug fixing, adding new features and slowly but surely optimizing the existing codebase. I admit it, the current version is still rather slow, but I feel confident that during the autumn we can sort out many of the performance issues.

So, what is Hitlantis? It’s a new Music Web Service, often dubbed “the Spotify of indie music”. You can use it as an end-user who’s looking for new, previously unreleased music or as an artist who’s promoting himself and selling his/hers/their songs on the Internet.

Do not hesitate to go check it out at Hitlantis.com! You can log in with Facebook connect if you don’t want to register yet, or even use the sneak peak mode, which is limited in features but gives you an overall idea of the service. Oh BTW: Flash Plug-in 10.1 recommended for smoothest operation!

I even created an artist page myself:

http://www.hitlantis.com/crankshaft

And here are some others I like:
Aisth
Blamstrain
Reds Wonder

Applying Mathematical Morphology for Content-Based Music Retrieval

Mikko Karvonen, Mika Laitinen, Kjell Lemström and Juho Vikman: Applying Mathematical Morphology for Content-Based Music Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval (CMMR 2010), Málaga, Spain, June 2010.

Raptori – Oi Beibi (Crankshaft “Swear My Shaft rmx”)

I recently participated in a remix competition of the biggest cult hit “Oi Beibi” of a legendary Finnish rap band Raptori, who were mainly active in 1990-1991 and make a comeback every 10 years (2010 being their second comeback). I was selected as one of the Top 5 finalists. If you are on Facebook, you can listen to and vote (i.e., “LIKE”) my remix right here! Thank You. \o/

MJÖLK gets silver in “Vuoden Huiput”

MJÖLK got silver in Vuoden Huiput 2009 (the annual Best of Finnish Advertising and Graphic Design awards) in the visual identity / corporate design category. The visual identity was masterminded by Pekka Toivonen, with me and Niko Punin as web designers, lol.

See the posting here (in Finnish only).

SongHi — musical applications for the web and mobiles

SongHi Entertainment is a “Music 2.0 company making musical applications for the web and mobile platforms”. Early 2010 they released the first demo of their SongHi web service. Since then I’ve been consulting the company and project on several fronts, such as Flash/Flex development, audio DSP optimization and integration issues. The project bears many similarities to my old music startup Splice (which, by the way, continues living its own life under RemixGalaxy.com), so it’s kind of refreshing to revisit an old passion. ;)

Check out the SongHi Demo now!

http://soundcloud.com/crankshaft