Competition Winners

AudioJungle Competition Winners

Last month we gave AudioJungle customers the opportunity to give us some feedback about how you use the site and how you intend to use the site in the future. Thank you to everyone who participated, we received some very informative insights into why you come to AudioJungle and why you purchase the great audio on our site.

And the winners are…

In exchange for your feedback, we made a totally random drawing from everyone who left comments in our blog post. The winning users will each receive a $20 credit which will be applied to their envato marketplace account very soon! With over 7,500 items currently in the AudioJungle library, we’re pretty sure you will be able to find some awesome audio to purchase with your free credits! Here are the ten winners, congratulations to everyone and thank you again for your feedback! :)

The Winners

mrpuck, maximalfx, laptopman, gutsyheron, burningstonecold, Flash360, Vyrtue77, Enru_Chem, SnedekerDesignz, MasterDKR

New AudioJungle Site Manager – Welcome Scott Wills!

Sadly Joel Falconer, the AudioJungle site manager, has moved on to focus on FreelanceSwitch.com. We’ll all miss him, and hope he comes back to visit now and then.

However, the MASSIVE silver lining is that the amazingly talented Scott Wills is now taking over the AudioJungle reins! Scott is an exceptional all-round creative, but he also composes gorgeous music and has even released his own album (available on iTunes).

Scott has already had some brilliant ideas on how to improve AudioJungle, so stay tuned for some big changes!

Happy Birthday AudioJungle: 44 Articles for the Recording Musician

Today is exactly one year since Adrien (the other Adrien, who later became our Community Manager) posted his “Welcome to the Jungle!” message to announce the birth of AudioJungle. Happy birthday!

The last year has been an eventful one! AudioJungle has grown to be a successful audio marketplace, and currently has 176,113 members, 5,678 music files, 2,069 sound files and 34 source files. Our forum is active, our blog is attracting eyeballs, and many of you have made money. Well done!

In this article I’ll highlight the 44 articles (not including competitions and site announcements) that have been written by various authors over the last year. They cover a wide range of topics that every recording musician should be aware of.

Here are 44 articles to equip, educate and inspire the recording musician:

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Win $3500 to Spend on the ULTIMATE Audio Setup!

Please note: This competition is now CLOSED and comments on this post have also been closed. Final entries were allowed up until June 15, 2009. We are currently judging all entries and will post an update on our blog soon. Meanwhile, to anyone who had problems submitting entries that may have been prevented from reaching us due to our Spam Filter, you will be glad to know that all public collections created during the competition period will be added to the competition entries! Even public collections that were not submitted via any of our blogs. So hold tight and good luck!

Today Envato is very excited to bring you our BIGGEST competition yet! This is an awesome chance to win $3500 in cold, hard cash to spend on the ultimate creative set-up. You’ll also win up to 30 of your favourite Envato Marketplace files and a year of Tuts+ membership. And best of all it’s dead easy to enter, read on to find out how.

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Stay in Touch with AudioJungle

AudioJungle has several methods of staying up to date on the newest files and news, including the monthly newsletter, RSS feeds, and our Twitter account. Now we’ve got a new page with everything you need all in one place, including a few new features.

RSS
In addition to the existing AudioJungle feeds, there’s now an RSS feed for every category! This way, you can stay on top of the file types you care about most. Check out all the new feeds here.

Twitter
Stay up to date with the latest news, links, community happenings, and chatter on AudioJungle’s Twitter account. We’ll also showcase one great AudioJungle file every day. You can follow AudioJungle, or any one of the marketplace accounts found here.

Weekly Mailouts
There’s nothing more fun than seeing AJ’s latest and greatest files. Now there’s a weekly mailout showcasing 7 of AudioJungle’s best, including one featured file. This is in addition to the monthly newsletter, so be sure to sign up separately here.

No matter how you like to get your updates, AudioJungle has an option for you. As always, happy browsing!

40 Tips for Better Guitar Technique

The guitar is one versatile instrument. It is both a rhythm and a melody instrument. It works well as a solo instrument or in a band. Electric and acoustic guitars have very different personalities, yet similar skills will allow you to play both. It is portable enough to take with you on a trip, and loud enough to entertain a whole room of people.

Learning how to play guitar requires mastering a set of skills. You can achieve great improvement in your playing by getting fussy about your technique, and caring enough to do things properly. You need to banish sloppy playing from your musical vocabulary. (more…)

Important Author News: Back-end Tagging Is Here!

The second stage of planned major search improvements is live. Right now this will only impact authors, but in the future this will help everyone search for files quickly and easily.

From now on when authors upload a file they will need to fill in a series of tags that pertain to their file. The tags have been divided up into categories to help authors pick useful tags.

During the reviewing process, reviewers may edit tags slightly so that wording remains consistent wherever possible (eg. entered tags of “puppy”, “doggy” and “hound” might be edited to consistently be “dogs”). This will make tagging more useful for search.

Please note that if your file tagging is incorrect or missing but otherwise the file is appropriate for sale, you file will still be approved. Reviewers will add or alter tags as they see fit during the review process, and you are free to update your file and refine your tags at a later date.

For now tags will only be visible on the upload and update pages. In the next stage tags will then be used in search and to navigate groups of files, which will be a massive improvement!

In order to add tags to existing files, authors will need to update their files, only filling in the Tagging fields. In order to assist reviewers in getting through any tagging updates quickly, please put “Tagging Update Only” in the reviewer notes wherever possible. This is not essential, but will definitely be helpful to the review team!

We expect a big jump in updates as authors will be adding tags to their existing files, so we ask for your patience if the queue gets temporarily longer. There will be at least a month before tagging will be used in search, so there is no need to update all existing files immediately.

If you have any troubles or questions about this new feature, please let support know, and stay tuned for stage three, where search will be supercharged with tagging!

Audacity: The Versatile Audio Tool for Everyone

I spend a lot of time looking at other people’s computers, and I see Audacity installed on a lot of them. Not many software programs deserve the adverb “versatile”, but Audacity is one of them. It is the Swiss Army knife of audio applications.

Audacity is used for all sorts of audio tasks. There may be more specialized applications in each category, but Audacity does a great job. If you have anything to do with audio, this program deserves to be in your toolbox.

And Audacity is not only free of cost, it is open-source software. Among other things, this means it will always be free of cost. It also means that if the current development team lose interest in the project, others are able to take it up. Audacity will be there for you in the future. Your investment in learning the program will not go to waste.

Audacity has a lot of enthusiastic fans, and it is an excellent audio application to get started with. How do people use Audacity?

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Licensing options are here!

There’s just so much great content on the Envato Marketplaces these days, closing on 20,000 different items. All those items means there’s many, many different uses for them. So we’ve been working to create ways for buyers to purchase different types of licenses for use. Having multiple licensing options means buyers can get exactly what they need, and for authors it means greater potential earnings!

To begin with we’re adding a new multiple use license that means you pay less to get more usage out of an item. Here’s how it works:

1) Buy a Standard Single Use License.
This is the same license as the old default license, to be used when you wish to purchase a file to use on a single project.

2) Buy a 10 Project License for just 3 x the cost of a Single Use License.
A 10 project license means you can use the same file over and over – up to ten times – without having to buy it again and again.

For more information on what each of these license types entails, please visit this page. If you have any queries or concerns at all, please contact support who will be happy to assist you.

Stay tuned for more useful license types in the future.

Thanks and happy shopping!

Nashville Notation: Playing by the Numbers

As a Mathematics graduate, I know how useful numbers are. People paint by numbers, dial phone numbers, organize books by numbers, and tell time with numbers. I’ve decided to start playing by the numbers.

Numbers have been used to analyze classical music for many years. Within a scale, Roman Numerals are used to represent chords. Upper case letters are used for major chords, and lower case letters for minor chords. In the key of C major, the chords C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am would be notated like this: I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi.

I first saw this in a book I bought many years ago called “Basic Principles of Music Theory” published by Harper & Row. I started playing around with the notation, but preferred to use the notation 1, 2m, 3m, 4, 5, 6m. But I never got around to using it for my main chord charts: it was too much of a leap.

Years later I discovered that many musicians use that notation, and call it “Nashville notation”. I recently decided to get serious about using Nashville notation, bought some index cards, and have started scribbling. Here’s why.

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