New York, NY, April 17, 2008: To remind the public, members of the music industry and U.S. legislators of the central role and rights of those who conceive and create music, ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) today officially launched a ‘Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers.’

This awareness-building initiative centers around 10 core principles, including ” We have the right to be compensated for the use of our creative works, and share in the revenues that they generate” and “We have the right to license our works and control the ways in which they are used.”

For those of you who don’t know. ASCAP is one of the societies that collect performance royalties for us when our music is licensed and played on things like TV, video games, radio, or other public performances..

Make Your Voice Heard! Sign now.

Click here to read more.

Me and my longtime friend Xavier have been planning to put together a record label. It took me long enough to try to figure out a name, although, I did find one. The name is actually a term I used in the early ’90’s to describe the style of bass-lines in UBM’s music at the time. The style jumped octaves and musical fifths all over the place, therefore making “Octava” suitable and descriptively simple.

www.octavarecords.com is now online, it’s just basically a splash page at the moment. I wrote newsletter subscription code for the front page today so everyone can be updated when the site officially launches. I’ve been doing tons of work behind the scenes on the administration panels and database structure mostly, but because of the work I’ve been getting done in the administration panel, I’ll soon be into the front-end user interface stuff.

I basically created an editor in php that I can use as a common editor for all the various database functions, much like how scaffolding works in Ruby on Rails. If you’re not familiar, there is a screencast called Creating a weblog in 15 minutes to demonstrate how much it can speed up and simplify things by not repeating a million lines of code. I basically lay down definitions in my php pages containing information about the database structure, such as:

• Database row names
• Database row type (e.g. Integer, Boolean, Text, or even things like File. — As an example, the code will make things like Boolean appear as a checkbox when editing or adding new entries.
• Friendly names, displayed as labels, such as ‘Name:’
• If the database is storing integers to refer to another database table, such as artist id #1. This section also includes data referring to the table ‘artist’. Giving definition to the id number that’s stored as an integer.
• And a few other options.

The common included file will then generate pages to Display, Add, Edit and Delete database entries based on that array of information about the MySql database. It’s been a lot of work creating the code to do all this, but it will be nice and simplify things in the long run, because I’ll be able to re-use the code in other projects of mine.

So, basically, I’ve just been über-geek lately… Perhaps it’s time I buy one of those illuminated wi-fi signal status detector shirts from ThinkGeek? Oh well… What the hell am I talking about? Take a look at yourself! You, too, are on this damn infernal cobweb of a net… You know you want one!

Anyways, Octava will be the new home for my various music projects and collaborations, past and present. Including: The Underground Bass Masters, Polaroid Kiss, and Audesi. I will also be producing and mastering new music from Xavier.