Terror EBM - Again

This past weekend I felt like Audiosurf'ing some Terror EBM a.k.a Hellektro a.k.a. Aggrotech. Problem is, the only thing I own in that style is Hocico's Signo de Aberracion, which is awesome and probably one of the best albums of the genre - even if half of it is pseudo-Classical instrumental filler.

So I hear all the kids are doing this new thing called downloading music.

Wait, I mean - LEGALLY!!!

Who the fuck would've thought? I own a Mac, so I fire up the iTunes store and look around. But there's a problem with iTunes... last time I checked, Audiosurf didn't like iTunes's .AAC format, and the workaround was to take your .AAC files downloaded from iTunes and burn it to an audio CD and then rip the audio to .mp3.... no. No. NO. Fuck THAT!!!

I just so happened to have been on Amazon.com listening to 30 second previews of songs on each album anyways, (I swear to god once upon a time I was able to listen to 30 second previews on iTunes but I can't seem to do it now... WTF?)* and I pulled my head out of my ass just long enough to realize Amazon sells music downloads as well!

It turns out Amazon's downloads are already in mp3 format, plus the entire albums are consistently $1 cheaper than iTunes. So I spent the next few hours just previewing tracks of pretty much everything, using amazon's recommended shit to check out new bands I'd never heard of. Originally, I thought I'd end up getting something by Psyclon 9 and Dawn of Ashes, but it turns out I don't really like either band all that much.

In the end, I bought Unter Null's The Failure Epiphany and The Retrosic's Nightcrawler. After playing in Audiosurf for a while, I decided it would be fun to record some videos and post them on YouTube.

YouTube sucks.

Seriously, it makes good looking, well compressed video look like dick. I can record something where the track bounces and YouTube's junk compression quality just kills it. Part of the problem, I guess, is that YouTube displays things at 425x318, but always compresses to 320x240, meaning your video is always "stretched," making it look blocky and craptastic. Now, this doesn't matter for live action shots, it seems, but computer generated stuff tends to come off looking like shit.

So I switched, to Vimeo. I see a lot of other Audiosurf videos posted there, as well as various synthesizer videos over at MatrixSynth (linked to the right). I've never noticed Vimeo videos taking longer to load than YouTube videos, and the picture quality is much better.

So without further adieu - TERROR!!!


Audiosurf - Destroy Me from mtodead on Vimeo.


Audiosurf - Perrey & Kingsley from mtodead on Vimeo.

Postscript: I've been reading up on tricks to get better picture quality on YouTube, and apparently you have to cheat it and make your video 11 minutes long and encode to .flv using some obscure DOS-type utility... blah blah blah. No thanks.

Oh, and apparently there's also this, but I have no idea how they managed to do that.

*Edit: I finally figured out how to do this - you just double click on the song title for a preview. I thought this would've put it in my shopping cart. DOH!!!

Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?