Do you want an easy way to download DJ mixes and podcasts?

You need Juice, an excellent program written by the fathers of podcasting Adam Curry and Dave Winer. Juice is a podcatcher, a podcatcher is piece of software that allows you to subscribe to a podcast or RSS feed. Juice will automatically download any new DJ mixes or podcasts as they become available, this is particularly useful if you decide to listen to many podcasts as it saves you from having to visit each individual website and download the podcasts manually.

There’s even more excellent features.

• Synch it with your mp3 player so that Juice automatically loads your podcasts on to the player. Perfect if you running out the door. A whole bunch of new mixes for you to listen to on the go.
• It supports Bittorrent and several other formats.
• If the media player on the system supports it, the downloaded content is automatically added to playlists.
• The content is kept on the local harddrive in nested folders, titled with the show’s name.
• The system works on Mac, Linux and Windows.
• An alternative to iTunes.

If you download this little gem, be sure to add our AgentCast RSS feed URL

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/AgentCast/

Happy listening!

Added by: Warren Daly | 13^th June 2010 Leave a comment!

The Internet revolution is like the railway revolution of 200 years ago. New and excessive opportunities are available for everyone. The major record labels missed the 6.15 and while they stand freezing on the virtual platform they whine about ‘piracy’ and CD sales being down. They fail to point out that online music sales are increasing at an exponential rate. They state that the increase in digital sales has not made up for the decrease in revenue from CD sales. Let’s get one thing straight, video didn’t kill the radio star and the Internet is a powerful tool for musicians, event promoters and record labels.

Choice please

I’m surprised the entertainment industry hasn’t reported ground breaking news like ‘VHS sales down’. Well, that’s because VHS sales are up! Drops in CD sales are obviously not because the technology is archaic and well, absolutely rubbish. The fact of the matter is: large record labels don’t want to give the customer what they want, choice.

track-by-track purchases create a significant revenue shortfall: where in the past those consumers would have generated revenue equivalent to an entire album’s worth of sales, now they only offer a small percentage of that revenue.

Major labels don’t appreciate users who want to select a few tracks from an album. They force users to download the entire album. I’m sure musicians will argue that you must listen to their entire album to fully appreciate its magical journey. However, users should still have a choice.

Meanwhile, the larger labels continue to cloud the waters with complaints of revenue loss due to ‘online priacy’. Hopefully they’ll all stop stamping their feet soon and appoint executives who have a brain.

There’s a set of data that shows that file sharing is actually good for artists. Not bad for artists. So maybe we shouldn’t be stopping it all the time – Douglas Merrill, EMI’s newly appointed president of digital music group

Big brother is getting bigger

It seems Google, Amazon and Apple want to create a DRM cloud. They want to digitally watermark your downloads. Apple and Walmart are already using this technique to track users. Labels are demanding that a user can only stream music that is watermarked to their username a.k.a ‘dirty MP3s’. Change the username, or try to stream music that you’ve ripped from a CD, and those songs won’t play. Yes, it’s true, DRM is raising its ugly head again.

To make matters worse, major labels are making deals with large ISPs to offer music on tap. Dirty MP3s and dirty ISPs, I have a bad feeling about this….

One of the UK’s top ISPs is preparing to launch an unlimited music service that would see it pay record labels for songs illegally downloaded by its customer

Ironically, Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal face up to $6 billion in damages for pirating a massive 300,000 tracks. Seems you can have your cake and eat it.

Added by: Warren Daly | 12^th June 2010 4 Comments

I love vinyl as much as the next old school audiophile. But at times temperatures in South East Asia soar in to the 40′s and humidity is in the 90′s. It’s clear that records were not built for this type of environment. Trust me, warping is confirmation. Records should be stored in a dust free, low humidity setting with a temperature between 16 and 21 degrees Celsius. Anyhow, there are no record shops selling 12″ vinyl in Phnom Penh and flying to Tokyo every month for a shopping spree is tempting but out of the question. It’s not easy to expand an existing collection.

Carry less, do more

I don’t intend to lug 40 Kgs of hardware and vinyl around to play a set. You can call me lazy, but the standard tools of my craft are packed away. Final Scratch, Tracktor and Mixxx are all fantastic inventions. But ditching just my record bag still leaves me with 20 Kgs of Technics plus the mixer to lug around. Even though it looks like vinyl is going to out last MP3s. Luckily for the mobile DJ, software and hardware developers have come up with new ranges of innovative gadgets to make our life easier. You can replace your record bag, turntables and mixer with just one box. No, it’s not an iPod.

USB DJ controllers

Similar to purchasing any new gadget this is going to take endless hours of research. Will it interact with my DAW? Does it need proprietory software? Does it have a motorized controller? Is it powered by USB? The list is potentially endless. There are 50+ offerings of DJ controllers from Reloop, Vestax, Numark, Novation, Stanton, Akai etc…and prices range from $99 to $1000+. This is going to be fun.

Research is king

It’s worth doing your research. For instance, the Vestax VCI300 does not run on AMD CPU powered computers. I’ve seen controllers without a cross fader (I’m certain the design engineers have a valid reason for this). Some hardware will only operate with 1 particular DAW, others will only run on Windows. It also depends on your DJ’ing style. There are specific controllers aimed at the turntablist or straight up house or techno DJ. These factors will whittle your list down rapidly. However, it’s most likely your will still end up with a hand full of equally dazzling gadgets battling it out for your number one spot.

It’s looking like it will take me another few weeks of research to find a solution that suits me. The biggest challenge will be finding a store that sells it in Cambodia. Wish me luck.

Added by: Warren Daly | 8^th June 2010 1 Comment

Excellent news from the friendly folk at Juno. They are phasing out MP3 downloads. Horray!

As from today Juno have stopped accepting label uploads and deliveries in MP3 and will only accept lossless WAV, FLAC or AIFF.
We will continue to sell your releases in MP3, WAV and FLAC formats, but will only accept content deliveries in lossless formats (not MP3)

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality.

Invisible Agent has always supplied free downloads in the OGG format along side MP3. Ogg Vorbis is an open method of encoding, compressing, and streaming digital audio. Ogg compares favorably to MP3.
All our other releases have always been available for purchase in the WAV, FLAC or AIFF format on a multitude of online shops. Just click on our banner on

Purchase this release

Added by: Warren Daly | 2^nd June 2010 1 Comment

Electronic music producer & recording artist Fredrik Mjelle A.K.A ‘Beem‘ has released his 3rd album, a 9 tracker entitled ‘Peel’.

Beem is a co-founder of Skweee, a musical style with origins in Nordic countries Sweden and Finland. So what’s the deal with Skweee? Some say it’s a Nordic take on minimal techno, 8-bit hip-hop/dubstep hybrid or r&b made by the electronica crowd. Whatever you want to call it, this album is a happy-go-lucky journey, full of funk, layered with rich chords and jammed with retro-synth hooks. Apparently Beem has turned down offers from multiple record labels and released his album for free.

Early Skweee releases were exclusively put out on 7″ vinyl, major players in the Skweee arena are labels such as Flogsta Danshall and its producer-founder Pavan, the Finnish record label Harmönia and Norwegian dødpop to name just a few. Get your fill of Skweee, Wonky, Aquacrunk, you know it’s good for you.

Added by: Warren Daly | 1^st June 2010 1 Comment

In 1990 I saw MC Tunes vs. 808 State performing ‘tunes splits the atom’ on ‘Top Of The Pops’. Within a few weeks I’d saved enough money to purchase the MC Tunes album entitled ‘The North At Its Heights’. Twenty years later my cassette tapes remain un-digitized. Transferring all that wow and flutter isn’t very appealing, not to mention the time it would take me to record, edit and tag. So I headed over to Emusic and to my delight I was able to download the album within a few clicks.  Next thing I knew I was downloading old favorites such as Double Trouble & the Rebel MC, Stereo MCs and Tyree Cooper….. I’m loving every minute of them, and no sign of an ‘auto-reverse’ button anywhere! Glad to see Nicky Lockett is still keepin’ it real.

Write a comment and let me know of any old diddies you’ve rediscovered.

Added by: Invisible Agent | 30^th May 2010 Leave a comment!

Wow, a free service where you can stream top notch podcasts, radio shows and other goodies all for free.  But they don’t call them podcasts…

A Cloudcast is an extended audio show that is hosted in the “cloud”, in other words hosted somewhere centrally on the Internet rather than on your local hard-drive. Therefore, unlike Podcasts, Cloudcasts can be enjoyed via on-demand streaming without any waiting required.

Let’s hope the nice people at MixCloud have good ideas (please don’t do what Last.FM did) about how to generate revenue to pay for the terabytes of disk space, not to mention the bandwidth that is being consumed. If you are worried about other legal issues..

Mixcloud is committed to supporting artists who appear in music Cloudcasts and has an objective to provide a superior legal alternative to file sharing. As such, Mixcloud is fully licensed by the PRS for Music, and all playback of copyrighted songs contained within the tracklists on the site are reported so that the correct licensing royalties can be attributed to the artists.

Our AgentCasts will always be available to download or stream from here! Follow us on MixCloud if you want to stream tons of other fine mixes when you’re not listening to your favorite Invisible Agent artists.

Added by: Invisible Agent | 27^th May 2010 Leave a comment!

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I swiftly glide through various genres in this 60 minute aural excursion that includes a few classics. I’m hoping to hear more from Ed Chamberlain soon. I saw him at BLOC in 2007 and his liveset was absolutely brilliant. His last pressing was in 2008 on Baselogic. Fingers crossed he’ll come out with some crackers this year. Adam Freeland supplies a healthy serving of dirty sawtooth bass to keep your woofers rumbling. I couldn’t resist using a tantalizing amount of ‘french kiss’ and ended on the 1994 breakbeat mutation ‘bomb scare’ by 2 Bad Mice. I hope you enjoy the set as much as I enjoyed mixing it.

Tracklisting
Apparat – Fratales (Pt.1)
Modeselektor – The White Flash feat. Thom Yorke
Ed Chamberlain – Styge
Moderat – Rusty Nails
Ed Chamberlain – Charly
Ellen Aillien & Apparat – Way Out
Errors – Mr Milk
Alex Metric – In Your Machine
Adam Freeland – Glowsticks
Bassnectar – Everybody
Aphrodelics – “Rollin’ On Chrome (Dub remixed by Richard Dorfmeister)
Leftfield – Not Forgotten (Hard Hands Remix)
Acen – Close your eyes (XXX Mix)
Lil’ Louis – French Kiss (The Original Underground Mix)
Donna Summer – I feel love
Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley – Jack your body
2 Bad Mice – Bomb scare

DJ Mix / PodCast by Warren Daly – IDM, Electronica, Breakbeat, House -  Right click and “Save as” to download – MP3 (192K)
Also in the OGG format….
DJ Mix / PodCast by Warren Daly – IDM, Electronica, Breakbeat, House -  Right click and “Save as” to download – OGG (6)

Added by: Warren Daly | 25^th May 2010 Leave a comment!

Facebook chief exec Mark Zuckerberg recently confessed that his network “missed the mark” regarding privacy controls. I’m still laughing at his leaked instant messages from 6 years ago :

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Mark will be delighted to know we still have a Facebook account (setup with erroneous information) to keep the cool kids updated. It’s about the only reason to stay…..

Added by: Invisible Agent | 25^th May 2010 Leave a comment!

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I was delighted to be contacted by Simon Hayes a.k.a Swarm Intelligence recently. He kindly offered to record a DJ mix as part of the AgentCast series. Currently based in Berlin and active on the music scene for a number of years he also manages the Stasis Records label. As a DJ and producer, Simon is skilled at intertwining many Electronic genres. A number of Irish labels and producers feature on this excellent 30 track excursion through complex IDM and broken Techno. Big shout out to Stasis Records and a big thank you to Simon… check out his other mixes and the excellent releases on Stasis Records. Hopefully we will hear more from Simon on Invisible Agent this year. Enjoy the mix.

IDM, Broken Beat, Techno – DJ Mix / Podcast by Swarm Intelligence -  Right click and “Save as” to download – MP3 (192K)
Also in the OGG format….
IDM, Broken Beat, Techno – DJ Mix / Podcast by Swarm Intelligence -  Right click and “Save as” to download – OGG (6)

Tracklisting
01. Autechre – r ess [WARP]
02. Lakker – Oeace [Forthcoming on Stasis]
03. LFO – Them [WARP]
04. Disjecta – Smokehead [WARP]
05. Monolake – Avalanche [Imbalance Computer Music]
06. Rhythm Invention – The Mad Hi Hatter [WARP]
07. Autechre – Bcdtmx [WARP]
08. Dialect – 16ka2 [Transporta]
09. UniNerves – Black Ops [Mantrap]
10. Molez – Routine [Acroplane]
11. Milanese – Vanilla Monkey (1 Up Mix) [Arcola]
12. Swarm Intelligence – GRND (Ed Devane Remix) [Forthcoming on Stasis]
13. Cane – Fall [Arcola]
14. NHK – Mogra [Important]
15. Euphiophone – Inflayid [Forthcoming on !Kaboogie]
16. Jake Slazenger – Hot Fumes [WARP]
17. Speedy J – Pure Energy [Plus 8]
18. Ancient Methods – AM-02 B1 [Ancient Methods]
19. Swarm Intelligence – Grinding Teeth [free download from swarmintelligence]
20. Fran Hartnett – Sword & Shield [Forthcoming on Stasis]
21. Rory St John – Wasted [Forthcoming on Stasis]
22. CYP – New Equipment [Transporta]
23. Olga+Jozef – Track2 [Olga+Jozef]
24. Grovskopa – 180″ (Brethren Remix) [Audio Assault]
25. John Dalton – After (Eomac Remix) [Forthcoming on Invisible Agent]
26. Richard Devine – Mov Macros 7 [WARP]
27. Ø – Atomit [Sähkö]
28. Eoin Smith – Glow [SSTN Noise Series]
29. British Murder Boys – Don’t Give Way to Fear Part 2 [Counterbalance]
30. Aphex Twin – Dodeccaheedron [R & S]

Added by: Invisible Agent | 2^nd April 2010 7 Comments