New Website for TTV BIT.NL

Some of you might know that I also play table tennis. And if you didn't now you know ;) I recently made a new website for the table tennis club. I used to of our players pictures in the header of the website. The most important new feature on the site is the new calendar and the news section up front. The website is hosted at the shared Joomla webhosting of Virtiso BV. I hope you like the new design. You can find the live website at: http://www.ttvbit.nl

New Website for Biz2Be

I showed you the Biz2Be 3D logo and 3D under construction page before, but now the website is finished. The customer selected the 3 pictures and I made the header graphic in Cinema 4D. I think the graphs complement the logo and general theme of the company. I made the rest of the website in Joomla 2.5 for the customer so that he can update the content himself. The website is hosted on a shared Joomla webserver at Virtiso. You can visit the website if you like at http://www.biz2be.nl. The customer did call me last week that he had a spontaneous potential customer already. Always nice to hear :)

Biz2Be 3D Logo and Under Construction Page

For a friend who is starting a new company I'm currently doing some 3D work. First of all another design company made a new logo for him in 2D. I got the vector file from him and we made some adjustments to the bottom text and then I made this 3D logo for him. I think it turned out quite nice. Then he asked me to make an 'under construction' page for him to put the logo online while he is working on his website. I though let's make something nice. I rigged the little character to take this position and added some nice contruction elements to make a complete 3D scene out of it. You can view the full version by clicking on the picture or visiting his website http://www.biz2be.nl (as long as it is not done yet). I hope you like it. And do contact me if you have a job like this :)

New Synth.nl website with HTML5 Media player

I just launched a new version of the Synth.nl website. The design is still the same, but under the hood it is now based on Joomla 2.5 where the old website was based on Joomla 1.5. I did make some adjustments to the design as well. It should load a bit faster now. I did rearrange some content: The interviews, reviews, pictures and videos are now accessible directly from the main menu. I think they are easier to find this way. But there is also some new stuff.

First of all I incorporated a new mailing list. It is now easy to subscribe and unsubscribe directly on the website from the 'newsletter menu' under the main menu. This is the first newsletter from the new plugin. I did delete all the old logins since it was full with spam accounts. Please make a new account for yourself if you want. It is now a bit harder for spammers since I use a Captcha verification.

The biggest change is the new HTML5 media player on the website. I used to have a flash player on the old website and got some complaints in the past because not all browsers support flash anymore. Especially on Ipads. Now it should work in all browsers.

I also uploaded new sound excerpts of 5 PrimiTiveS tracks. They are all 5 minutes long. So you get a good 25 minute impression of this over 70 minutes long album that I made together with Remy. I guess that should be enough for you to decide to buy it and support both me and Groove Unlimited my record label.

You can find the new player and PrimiTiveS excerpts on this link http://www.synth.nl/PrimiTiveS

Please help me to test the new website for errors. If you find anything please send me an E-mail on michel@synth.nl

Thank you very much for all your continued support!

New E-live 2013 website online

Twice a year Ron Boots from Groove Unlimited (my record label) asks me to make a new design for his festival. On the 19th of October the yearly E-live festival will take place again in Oirschot in The Netherlands a little town near Eindhoven. This time I parted with the purple color we had the last years and switched to blue. I made a new headline graphic with the artists that are playing this year. I hope you like it. Do have a look at the nice line-up if you like electronic music and buy your tickets in time. You can find the website on http://www.e-live.nl. Ofcourse I will be present as well during the festival possibly with a stall to sell CDs but I'm not sure about that yet.

New E-Day 2013 Website Design

Twice a year Ron Boots asks me to make a new design for the yearly E-Live and E-day events Groove Unlimited organizes. This this it is E-day time again on April the 6th. I made a new header graphic based on all the pictures he got from the artists and tried to make it look a bit like they are all on stage. I hope you like it. There are still tickets available by the way for this fabulous event where also the new CD 'PrimiTiveS' by Remy and myself will be released. So some listen to some nice electronic music concerts there and pick up your copy of PrimiTives from Remy and me personally. More information on http://www.e-live.nl where you can also have a better look at the new graphic I made.

Groove Download Shop Recommendations

Hi by now Ron Boots has added all Groove Products in the new download shop both as MP3 and FLAC. It is nice to see that everything works perfectly and people are ordering their favorite music. Of course you know you can buy my music there, but there is much more nice music in there. I thought it would be nice to share some of my personal favorite Groove titles with you. These are albums that I personally like and you can get them in an instance when you want. In no particular order:

• Ron Boots - Acoustic Shadows (mp3, flac)
• Gert Emmens - A Boy's World (mp3, flac)
• Eric van der Heijden - Da Capo (mp3, flac)
• Nattefrost - Underneath the Night Sky (mp3, flac)
• Johan Timman - Trip into the Body (mp3, flac)

We also added two new buttons in the menu on the left that take you instantly to the new FLAC and MP3 products.  Go and have a look on https://shop.groove.nl

New Groove Unlimited Download Shop with FLACs !!

I have some great news. It has taken a lot of work, but the new Groove Unlimited Download Shop is open!!! At this moment you can already buy a lot of titles as MP3 and FLAC and Ron Boots is very busy filling up the shop with even more titles. But at this moment all my Synth.nl albums are already in there and you can buy them as 256 kbit/s CBR MP3 or in the Full Quality Lossless FLAC format. FLAC is a compression method that doesn't alter the audio at all so you get the same quality as the CD but cheaper and no shipping costs etc. All the artwork for all my albums is included and I have personally checked all the audio files. You can pay by Ideal (bank transfer), PayPal and major credit cards via PayPal at the moment. Soon also Mastercard, Visa and American Express will be directly available, but we are still waiting for the payment provider to get the contracts in order. We didn't want to wait for this to put the site online though. When your order is complete and payed you will receive an E-mail with the download link directly and you can listen right away! As you might have read before I have build this web shop for Groove Unlimited and I'm very proud that it is finally online. So go have a look and buy some nice stuff :) Groove Unlimited deserves some reward as well for all the hard work I guess in ripping all the CD's and making them available for you in this very easy way ;) So go over now to https://shop.groove.nl and look around!

Adobe Edge and HTML5 Video Project

I did another project with Adobe Edge. This time I made an animation that shows my video projects on the first page of http://www.osenbruggen.nl. When you click an icon a HTML5 YouTube player pops up. You can click next to it to close the video. I hope that is clear enough by the way. I hope you like it. I plan to do the same thing on the rest of the website, but it is a lot of work so that can take some time :) I also changed the menu of the website to make more room for this animation. I guess the website will be a work in progress for a while. I tested the animation on Firefox, Explorer, Safari and Chrome and also on an Ipad and an Android tablet. It seems to work even though on an Ipad the auto start of the video doesn't work. Well please let me know if you encounter any problems. Go to the website to see it: http://www.osenbruggen.nl

First Adobe Edge Experiment on Synth.nl website

Today I also did my first little animation in Adobe Edge. Edge is a new product that is still in preview stage. It outputs animations using HTML5 technology, so it works without the use of Flash and it is supported by all modern browsers now. In the background it uses also JQuery JavaScript libraries. I'm starting to test with this since more and more people use mobile devices that don't support Flash and even Adobe seems to be abandoning Flash on the long run. You can help me by letting me know if it worked for you. If not please let me know which operating system and browser you are using. You should see the albums on the top of the screen on my main website http://www.synth.nl/ animating on. And you should be able to click them to go to the album pages. There is still a Flash mp3 player on these pages, but I plan to find an alternative for that as well in the future. If you are interested in Adobe Edge you can still download the test version for free from Adobe Labs for now. I also centered all the YouTube objects by the way to make the website better looking on Ipads.

New Osenbruggen Productions Webdesign

The last few days I did a lot of work updating my Osenbruggen Productions website. I redid the header with a background image that I made in Vue 10. So it is not a photograph, but a computer rendered image. The rest was done in Cinema 4D. I also did a lot of work on the menus so now it is easier to click through all the images and animations on the website. I'm still looking for some nice jobs for 3D animations work by the way ;) I hope you like the new design. You can find the website on http://www.osenbruggen.nl

New E-Live 2012 Website

Last week I made a new header image for the website of the new edition of the E-live festival that my record label Groove Unlimited organizes every year. I got some pictures of the main acts being 'Bernd Kistenmacher' and 'Gert Emmens & Ruud Heij' and made this composition of it in Photoshop. The rest of the website is build in Joomla so Ron Boots from Groove Unlimited can edit/add the content himself. Keep an eye out for the other two acts that will play on this festival. They will be announced soon. I hope to see you all there at the E-live festival in 2012. I might have a new release there as well on my stall. You can find the website of the festival on http://www.e-live.nl/

Ripping FLAC and MP3 for new Download Shop

As you might have read before, I'm currently building a new web shop for my record label Groove Unlimited. I'm in the process of finalizing and testing now together with Ron Boots. From this new shop Groove will sell all my music as CD's but also as downloads. At the moment you can already buy my music on other places as MP3, but new will be that they will be also available as FLAC. This is a loss-less compression that assures that what you get is exactly the same as it is on the CD's. So you will get full quality including all the artwork from me. At the moment I'm ripping all my CD's to FLAC and MP3 and listening to all the tracks to make sure they are perfect. I hope we will have the webshop online very soon. I'll let you know when there is news of course!

New Synth.nl Facebook Page

Recently I opened a new page on Facebook for Synth.nl. You will find all articles that I posted about my music, my studio or synthesizers on here. You can also find older articles and things that other people write about me. You can find the new page on http://www.facebook.com/Synth.nl. Please note that everything that is posted here that is not related to Synth.nl will be removed. If you are on Facebook you can also send me a friend request on my personal page http://www.facebook.com/mvosenbruggen if you like. If you don't have (or want) Facebook there are of course other ways to stay in touch as well. Read all about them here: http://www.synth.nl/contact

New Website with 3D Animation work

I know some of you like my 3D work as well as my music. I plan to do lots more work in this direction with or without my music. But because it doesn't really fit on the Synth.nl website I just put up a new website on http://www.osenbruggen.nl/. I'm planning to do some jobs for customers as well together with my wife. We already build a few websites, videos, logos and animations for customers and we are hoping to get a few more jobs in the future of course. We are using the name 'Van Osenbruggen Productions' for this from now on. Maybe you have seen the name popping up in one of my videos already by the way. Well anyway on the website you can find the videos, websites, logos and animations we did so far. More will come for sure :)

BIT Project (Part 2)

Last time I showed you the rough model of the building of BIT BV, but now it is time to add detail. Today I spend a couple of hours modeling this security camera. BIT has a lot of these all around the building. I modeled it as close as I could from some picture I took of them. It looks simple I guess, but I can tell you it is a LOT of work to model something like this from scratch in Cinema 4D. Well I'm quite happy with the outcome myself and I'll put them on the building soon. There is a lot of other stuff I also need to model and I'm starting to get an idea of how huge this whole project will be. I hope to update you soon with some more stuff I made.

BIT Project (Part 1)

At the moment I'm working on quite a big and ambitious project. If you have read my biography you will know that music is just a hobby for me and that my main job is actually operating a business ISP company that is running a couple of data centers in The Netherlands. Our current website is Dutch only and needs a big overhaul. I'm currently working with my colleagues on some ideas for the new website. The first this is that is needs to go in a multilingual CMS system. So the good news is that you guys will be actually able to read it later on :)

One thing we want to have on there for sure is a virtual tour through our data centers. The idea is to use real video footage in combination with 3D animated graphics. But before you can create any animation you need to build a model of the whole building. And that is what I'm currently doing. Bart Auceps made a start with the model a while ago in Autodesk 3D studio max and I just completely redid large parts of his model in Cinema 4D and also made some adjustments and additions already to the model. I'm also redid the texturing already.

So now the rough outside of the building is almost done and I need to work on the detail and the interior and after that I need to build the server rooms of the data centers. Most things here I did from the top of my head, but next week I'll take some pictures of details of the building to be able to reproduce that also in the 3D model. I guess this will be project that will take a couple of months for sure. I will post updates on this blog from time to time so you can follow along.

In our house style we use a couple of Dutch bridges as a metaphor for stability and reliability. In the past we took pictures of these bridges and altered them, but for the new website I'm also experimenting with a rendered approach. In the picture on the right you see a bridge that in real life is in Amsterdam, but now it is in my computer. In this way I can get it from any angle and position the water and clouds etc. anywhere I want. I don't know if we will use it yes, but I hope so, since I think it is starting to look quite realistic. If you are interested in the old website and the company you can have a look on http://www.bit.nl/. This website is Dutch only, but I guess you can use Google Translate to read what it is about. There is a lot of text on there btw, but the new site will have more graphical elements and less text for sure. You can click all the pictures for a bigger version btw and every thing you see is computer generated. No actual pictures where used anywhere.

New Groove Unlimited Website Online

Yesterday my record label Groove Unlimited launched the first part of a new web design that I did for them. I made the 3D logo design in Cinema4D from an EPS file of their old logo. The website was build with the Joomla CMS. I think it looks quite new and fresh compared to the old website. The old website is still running by the way since there is a CD shop on there with lots of articles. In the mean time we are also working on a new webshop, but it is a LOT of work to complete that project. So this is step 1 of a 4 step project actually. If there is more news I'll let you know of course. But for now I'm happy that this first step is live. You can find the new website on http://www.grooveunlimited.nl/ or the good old http://www.groove.nl/ which redirects to the new site for now. P.S. you can actually buy all my music from the CD shop ;)

Synth.nl on Sound Cloud

Since yesterday I also put my music on Sound Cloud. You can find all the samples I also have on my website there. But still some people can't use the flash player I have on there apparently. This seems to work on Apple Ipads as well and so on. You can also comment on certain pieces of a track if you want. I think this is a very nice new way to share music and interact with the artist. I also put the new Apollo sound clips on Last.FM, ReverbNation, iLike, MySpace and Hyves. So all of you should have a good chance to listen to my music now. I hope you like it and buy the CD when you like what you hear. You can find my SoundCloud profile here: http://www.soundcloud.com/synthnl

New Website Design for Apollo

To get you in the mood for my upcoming Apollo album I decided to give my website a redesign. I made a new Apollo theme. I hope you like it. Have a look on http://www.synth.nl and let me know what you think of it. And please do report if you run into any kind of problems so I can look into it. Please also take the time two read the articles on my main website. If you do not want to miss out this kind of news you can subscribe to my newsletter. Instructions are on http://www.synth.nl/contact