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!

Virtiso Hosting Platform and my Work

A couple of you have heard that I started a new company and asked my what I was doing. I thought it would be nice to explain that a bit in a blog post here. First of all my new company is called Virtiso BV and is based in The Netherlands. I'm in the IT business as long as my memory goes back and in the ISP business since 1996. I have seen it all and done it all so I think I know what I'm talking about. I have also been an entrepreneur for the last 18 years. My main business is helping Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) with their IT needs. Whether it is advice or helping them to build a website, webshop, a groupware solution for E-mail, Calendars and Contacts or other Private Cloud Based solutions. To facilitate all this I build a small VMWare based hosting platform. Here you can see 8 Sun X4200 servers that have ESXi 5.1 running on them. On those physical servers I can run many virtual servers. And that is where my business is going now. Renting out both managed and unmanaged virtual servers.

For the geeks I also included a picture of the backside of the rack. The machines are all on rails by the way so I can roll them in and out easily for maintenance. These servers are located in the datacenter BIT-2A of the company BIT BV in Ede. This is the company I started together with my partner Henk in 1996. We are both still share holder, but no longer active in the operation. BIT has grown onto larger customers with high demands. With my own company I'm focussing on the market below. Small entrepreneurs, freelancers and companies with smaller IT needs or companies that just need decent webhosting without 99,99% SLA needs. Even so I tried to setup my platform as redundant as funds allow. There are two netscreen firewalls, double internet feeds, the VMWare platform is fully redundant and I also rent storage on a very redundant NetAPP cluster from BIT.

Here is the management platform. Here is also some storage that I use for backups only and the servers to manage the Sun cluster. The network stuff in in the picture on the lower right. Here you can see the switches and firewalls. BIT provides me also with redundant powerfeeds with both UPS'es and Diesel generators on both the A and B feed. So I guess this platform is not too bad :) Do let me know if you are reading this and think that I can help you out with something. I'm specialised in VMWare, Microsoft and Ubuntu Linux but I'm also very experienced with Kerio Connect, Control en Operator. Very cool products. Do look them up if you never hear of them on http://www.kerio.com. These product I also rent out as a managed service.

Next to this technical stuff I also design websites, build webshops and develop software. For the graphical side you probably have seen my 3D animations as well. That is another hobby I run next to my music stuff. For this 3D stuff you need a lot of computer power as well. Even rendering out a small animation takes a long time. For this I'm also building a platform in BIT's datacenter. This is a seperate platform from the hosting platform. I will show you this in the near future as well. I hope to find some customers as well for this in the graphical business. So I would say if you know someone who is looking for rendering capacity do let me know as well. And if you are looking for a datacenter in Europe/The Netherlands do check BIT out :) http://www.bit.nl. OK I hope it is a bit clearer what I do now. The website for my new company is hardly finished btw so I'll post that later when I think it is suitable :) If you have questions do ask of course :) Just send me an E-mail.

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.

Bellerob - Paper Planes Fan Video

Bellerob did it again! This time he made a very nice video with the track 'Paper Planes' from the PrimiTiveS album by Remy and Synth.nl Enjoy !

Synth.nl Apollo Documentary by Thomas de Rijk

In 2010 I was contacted by Thomas de Rijk who was studying at that time at the Willem de Kooning Film Academy in Rotterdam. He asked if I wanted to cooperate in a documentary for his school project. And of course I agreed. He made this very cool documentary about my burn-out and how I got into producing my own music. I think he did a great job! The documentary is in the Dutch language, but it has English subtitles. I hope you enjoy it. I has some nice NASA HD footage (courtesy NASA) and also some nice shot from my Apollo Studio. It took a while before it ended up online, but here it is:) The music you hear is coming from my Apollo album. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks a lot Thomas!

Bellorob Apollo 9 Fan Video

Bellerob made this very cool video of my 'Apollo9' track from the 'Apollo' album. Enjoy :)

Interview with Bruce Gall on AR FM about PrimiTiveS

Bruce Gall from Sunday Synth at the UK radio station AR FM did another two hour special. This time on the PrimiTiveS album I did together with Remy Stroomer. Bruce played all 9 tracks from the album and in between he did an extensive interview with me. It was broadcasted on the airwaves and also on the web stream. I cut out most of the commercials, so it is a bit lot shorter now. You can listen to most of the album though. I hope you will enjoy it and buy the album of course when you like it. You can find a copy of the interview here: http://www.synth.nl/interviews/AR%20FM%20Interview%20(07-04-13).mp3

PrimiTiveS available as MP3 and FLAC

I have good news. PrimiTiveS is now also available from the download shop of Groove Unlimited. You can chose between two formats. Either 256 Kbit/s MP3 or Full Quality FLAC. Both files include the complete artwork. You can pay with PayPal or Ideal (from The Netherlands) and after your payment you get an immediate download link in your E-mail. All very easy and it saves you shipping costs if you are from outside Europe. You can find the download links on these URL's:

MP3 -> https://shop.groove.nl/gr-198-mp3
FLAC -> https://shop.groove.nl/gr-198-flac

More information on the album here: http://www.synth.nl/PrimiTiveS

Two more PrimiTiveS tracks on Elektroland Radio

Here is another chance to listen to two more tracks from the PrimiTiveS album by Remy and Synth.nl. They were played by Bjorn Jepessen on his radio show Elektroland. This radio show is also available as a podcast online, so you can download the show and listen to it whenever it is convenient for you.

You can find Bjorn's Elektroland show on this URL: http://www.nattefrost.dk/elektroland/playlist.htm

Ambient Visions Interview with Remy & Synth.nl

Remy and myself were recently asked to do an interview with Ambient Visions about our collaboration on PrimiTiveS. We gladly accepted this of course. Remy and I both answered half the questions and it is all about how we met and how the album evolved. I think it is an interesting read. So if you are interested you can find the whole interview on this URL:

http://www.ambientvisions.com/primitives.htm

Solar Power for my Apollo Studio

For all of you that always worry about the power that my studio uses. Even though it even isn't so much as many think. (the whole studio is on one 16 Amp fuse). But I have good news for you. The whole studio is solar powered now! I put 13 solar panels on the roof of our garage. They are 250 Watt Peak each so that is a total of 3250 Wp. It isn't even that sunny yet in The Netherlands but they are working hard already. 55 KWh in 3 days time. So from now on my music is totally CO2 free!

Here is the inside unit. It doesn't not only deliver the power to  the house, but also measures it. On the display you can see the power it delivers. I have already seen 2900 Watt during the afternoon when the sun was pointing directly at the panels and the summer still has to start :) I also ordered a network interface for this unit so that I can read it out from my PC. It makes nice graphs from the measurements. The last thing to do now is get the power company to install an intelligent measurement unit as well so I can see how much power we do and how much is coming from the solar panels. And I also have to file some papers to apply for subsidy from the local government here.

[Release] PrimiTiveS by Remy & Synth.nl

First of all my apologies that it took so long to write this message. I have been very busy with work the last few days. But here is the good news:

PrimiTiveS was finally released on CD on the 6th of April! It was released during the E-day festival organised by our record label Groove Unlimited. So after 1,5 years of work it is finally there! Both Remy and myself are extremely satisfied with the end result. I think the music is a good mix between Remy's music and my music, but we both would never have made this on our own.

You can read a bit more on the album and listen to some samples on my website. The samples are just short fragments. Everybody agrees so far that the CD is much better than the samples :)

You can order the CD from these places:

http://www.groove.nl/jump2.php?artiest=synth.nl
http://www.desertedislandmusic.nl/

It will be available later on more places like CDBaby.com as are my other albums and it will also be available later as digital download in both MP3 and FLAC format. This can all take a while though. I will let you know when this happens.

The first reviews are also in already. You can read them here:

http://www.synth.nl/reviews-primitives/blog (don't forget to press 'Read More') on them. So far the reactions and reviews are very very positive :) We are both very proud of course!

Last week Bruce Gall of Sunday Synth did a 2 hour special on the album including an interview with myself about the creation of the album. I got permission to put it online in case you missed it. It will be an opportunity to listen to most of the music of the album as well. I will put that online soon and let you know.

So don't wait and order your copy now. You won't regret it :) Please let me know if you need any assistance in acquiring the album from your country. Thanks for your support!

I hope you will have as much fun listening to the album as we had creating it.

You can find more info here: http://www.synth.nl/PrimiTiveS

PrimiTiveS on Dreamscape Radio

Here is the first chance for you to listen to a track from the upcoming PrimiTiveS album of Remy & Synth.nl. Ron Boots plays a part of the openingstrack from the album on his weekly Dreamscape Radio. The track is called 'Underground Tubes' and it slowly warms you up for the rest of the album. (we hope). The whole track is 12 minutes and 18 second long. I hope you like it. You can listen Dreamscape Radio on this URL: http://www.dreamscaperadio.nl/. The show will be online for a week so be quick to listen to it.

Another Release coming with Ron Boots!

While I'm very busy together with Remy Stroomer to promote our new collaboration album I have more exciting collaboration news. Last year we spend a weeks holiday again together with Ron Boots and his family in BorkHavn, Denmark. And YES we brought our synthesizers along with us again! We made a lot of new music there and decided that we will release this music on a new collaboration album. We still have a lot of work on this album, but the plan is to start working on this right after E-day. We already selected the best pieces that will go on the album. I'm really looking forward to another release together with Ron Boots. More news will follow later this year.

Quick Update on PrimiTives and E-Day

I have a quick update on PrimiTiveS for you: Everything is done for PrimiTiveS. Wouter Bessels has done an excellent job on the mastering and everything is of now to the mastering plant. I also send out the first album previews to some radio stations and the reactions are very positive. I already got 4 interview request from that, so keep posted for news on those. I also replaced the sneak preview clips I uploaded last week with the final mastered version. You can find them on the usual URL's: http://www.synth.nl/PrimiTiveS and https://soundcloud.com/synthnl. of course this is only mp3 quality so the actual CD will be much better. More good news is that E-day goes on for sure! Enough tickets are sold now so you can definitely pick up your copy on Remy's stall on E-day 2013 on the 6th of April in Oirschot in The Netherlands. More info http://www.e-live.nl

Keep E-day Festival Alive! Order Tickets now!

The release of PrimiTiveS was planned on the yearly E-day festival that my record label Groove Unlimited organizes every year. Unfortunately the ticket sales are very bad and the event maybe cancelled :( That would be a real bummer and mean no release party for PrimiTiveS either and possible the end for the festival definately :( So PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE buy a ticket and come and pick your copy up at the E-day festival in Oirschot in The Netherlands on the 6th of April. Remy and I will both be present and sign it for you if you like. E-day is a great festival with concerts all day a lot of artists present and a great atmosphere. Go buy your ticket here NOW PLEASE!

http://www.e-live.nl

Let me know if you need any assistance.

PrimiTiveS Sneak Preview

I promised to get back to you when I had some sound clips. I have put together a short mix with sound clips from the first masters I got back of all the tracks of the PrimiTiveS album together with Remy Stroomer. The mastering process is not complete yet, but this will give you a good idea of the music and the overall sound of the album. You can listen to them on both my SoundCloud page or on my own website. Here are the URL's:
https://soundcloud.com/synthnl + http://www.synth.nl/PrimiTiveS
I hope you like them.

PrimiTiveS pre-order possible from Groove Unlimited

Remy and myself finished our work on our PrimiTiveS album. Wouter is very busy now for us doing his mastering art. We can hardly wait for the final release on the 6th of April. In the mean time Groove Unlimited is already preparing the release as well. From now on you can already pre-order the album from the Groove Unlimited CD shop. If you want to get it as one of the first I would say go to the website an order your copy. We will have audio clips available very soon, but I guess when you like Remy's and Synth.nl music you don't have to wait for that ;) You can pre-order your copy on this URL: http://www.groove.nl/jump2.php?artiest=synth.nl. If you want to be sure you can also get your copy first hand on the E-day festival on the 6th of april in Oirschot in the Netherlands. There are still tickets available. More information on http://www.e-live.nl/. More information soon!

PrimiTiveS Artwork Animation

I made a little animation of the artwork for the upcoming collaboration album together with Remy Stroomer. This animation and all the artwork was made in Cinema 4D.

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.