iPhone App Review: I Am T-Pain

Written by: Al Morita

I’m a big fan when it comes to music apps, especially ones that let you be creative. “I am T-Pain” has two modes – one lets you sing like T-Pain on his songs and a freestyle mode that is worth the $2.99 alone. When connected to a speaker, the freestyle mode lets you use the app like an auto-tune machine. You have the option to have the auto-tune setting set to T-Pain or you can customize the tuning to major, minor, and even chromatic scales. This app works great for non-singers and singers alike as it automatically adjusts your voice to the nearest note in real-time.

The “I am T-Pain” app includes 14 songs to sing along with. Five of them are instrumental versions of T-Pain songs including the hits “Bartender” and “Dreamgirl.” Three are Christmas karaoke songs, and the other six are T-Pain beats you can freestyle with. You can also purchase additional T-Pain songs in the app for $0.99 – $1.99. None of the songs are installed by default, so you might spend some time downloading the songs if you have a slow connection. I found the karaoke interface to be very good with easy-to-read lyrics on the screen. If you mess up, you can easily restart the song. By default, all your songs are recorded onto your device so you can listen to them later. You can also upload your audio track to the Smule server and also add an audio player with your songs to MySpace and Facebook. They also updated the app so you can sing along to any song in your iTunes library, which is a cool feature. The only limitation in this mode is that you can’t upload it to the server.

This app has many hours worth of entertainment with the auto-tune feature and a good list of songs to sing along with. I applaud Smule for updating the app with new features and songs. They made an excellent product even better. The possibilities are endless, who knows – you might see someone using the “I am T-Pain” app at your next karaoke party. I know I will.

Pros:

• Excellent auto-tune feature in real-time
• Good selection of songs with app
• Share your songs via the upload feature
• Ability to sing to any song in your iTunes library
• Solid karaoke mode
• Good recording quality

Cons:

• Needs vocal recording level option

Learn more about the I Am T-Pain app in the App Store

iPhone App Review: How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Name: How the Grinch Stole Christmas (iTunes Link)
Written By: Oceanhouse Media
Category: Books
Price: $3.99

Size: 9.6 MB
Requirements: iPhone / iPod Touch
Version: 1.0.1
Rate: 5 out of 5 Stars

The holiday season wouldn’t be complete without the Grinch. If you haven’t read the book yet, there’s a fabulous app that will read it to you! And if you have read it, you’ll love all the memories this app brings to you and your little ones.

“How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” is the first official Dr. Seuss ebook and it’s tons of fun! You have the option of the book reading to you, or reading it yourself. The pages are filled with the original book artwork and the animation is just spectacular. It’s perfect for young children learning how to read, and big kids who loved this book as a child.

In the “Read to me” mode, the book will read to you. As it reads, the words are highlighted in red.

In the “Read it myself” mode, the audio is turned off. If you would like to hear the audio, simply tap on the text and the app will start reading that phrase.

There is also another fun and interactive element in the app. If you tap on the page’s illustrations, the object or item’s name will appear in big red letters, and a voice will say what it is. This app is a great reading tool for children just learning how to read as well as big kids like you and me! It’s definitely a must-have for any Grinch fan. The iPhone/iPod Touch app is currently on sale for $3.99 and well-worth it.

This review was originally published in iProng Magazine issue #56.

Disclaimer: I’ve received a promo code for “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” iPhone app from Oceanhouse Media in exchange for a review.

Screenshot

Free Holiday Music!

What’s the holidays without a little bit of holiday music? I found some great holiday music for you, and best of all, they’re free!

Amazon 25 Days of Free Holiday Music

Amazon has 25 Days of Free Holiday Music where they give a new Hoilday mp3 each day before Christmas. Free music includes songs from Lady Gaga, Tori Amos, Casting Crowns, and more! Amazon also has a free Sampler Claus album as well!
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Screencasting Tools

I attended a “How-to Screencast” session at the library, and here were the free tools demonstrated in the workshop.

The screencast software that were demonstrated were:

• Screencast-o-matic
• Windows Media Encoder
• Jing

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Katharine McPhee’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”

Take a listen to Katharine McPhee’s sweet voice as she sings her rendition of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” It’s beautiful, very soothing, and perfect for the holiday season.

The song is also available in the iTunes store for free, so get your copy now.

Back to the Future Trilogy

I loved Back to the Future! I guess my age shows when I tell you that these movies were on VHS tapes when I was a kid. But not to worry, the complete trilogy is now available on DVD format and for only $10.49! It’s a great gift for the “Back to the Future” fan.

Purchase Back to the Future – The Complete Trilogy (Widescreen Edition) from Amazon.com.

Note: There are some reports of framing issues on Disc 2 and 3. Here is an update on the issue.

Cali Lewis on Verizon Commercial

Screenshot from Verizon’s “There’s a Map for That” commercial

I was watching TV last night and the “There’s a Map for that” Verizon Commercial (also embedded below) came on. As the girl checks her tweets… I noticed the familiar avatar. That’s Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.tv! Yes I notice geeky little details like this. I just thought it was awesome. ;)
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Trick-or-Treat with the Guild

Happy Halloween everyone! Now you can celebrate with The Guild! Here’s a very cute Halloween episode written by Kim Evey and directed by Greg Benson! I love real-world loot, don’t you? ;)

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Tekzilla Explains Google Wave

Tekzilla explains what Google Wave is. Thanks so much for the shoutout Veronica! You can jump to the segment at 3:43 or go to the Google Wave segment notes.

Interview with Felicia Day

Felicia Day was on the road to stardom shortly after she moved to Los Angeles. She landed roles in TV series like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “House,” and “Dollhouse.” She also starred in web series like “The Legend of Neil” and the Emmy-winning “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” But one of her greatest achievements was when she went from actress to script writer and producer, creating what millions of fans know today as “The Guild.

The Guild is a comedy web series about the online and offline lives of a group of gamers. It’s a must-see, as you will find yourself laughing at all the characters and the storyline. The characters are like exaggerated versions of your friends or better yet, you!

As The Guild enters its third season, many extra surprises were revealed to the fans at the last Comic-Con. The first of the surprises was the addition of a “Guild” comic book written by Day and published by Dark Horse Comics. The second was the exquisitely funny bonus music video called “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar.” The song topped the charts in a matter of hours on Amazon and iTunes, surpassing mainstream music! And lastly, the addition of Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation) to the cast!

With the recent release of a new DVD package containing the two seasons of The Guild, I got to speak to Felicia Day about her show, new comic project, and more.

How did it all start? What inspired you to create the Guild?
We started over 2 years ago. I’m an actress in Hollywood who has been acting for 5 years. But I got bored with the opportunities I was being offered because I’m not really a standard Hollywood girl — I don’t look like everybody else, I’m not perfect, and I’m definitely a little awkward sometimes. I worked consistently, but I wasn’t working all the time, so I had a lot of free time on my hands. I ended up getting a bad addiction to online gaming. In the downtown of acting, I filled it with a lot of gaming. It was not the most productive use of my time. And at one point, my friends and people close to me intervened and said you should probably fill time up with something else.

So I sat down to write something and that was The Guild. Because they always say, write what you know, especially on your first project. I wrote the Guild as a half-hour pilot. It wasn’t practically something that would get traction in Hollywood because it’s a very specific audience. And Hollywood content tries to reach everyone at once. So when my co-producer, Kim Evey, came on board, she suggested that we should do this as a web series. It wasn’t particularly popular at the time, but I thought hey, this sounds like fun. So we just shot it in our houses, and that’s how the show started.

What is your process when writing an episode of The Guild?
Web video doesn’t really have a template, like a half-hour comedy does, or a page count. We don’t have to conform to standards of broadcast because there are no standards of broadcast on the internet. Dr. Horrible episodes were 15 minutes each. In the beginning, the Guild had shorter episodes because we didn’t have enough money to shoot more. But now, they’re a little bit longer, and episodes are up to 5-8 minutes. At any rate, it’s very short pieces of content, and no one has really defined what a 5-minute episode of a web series is. It varies which I think is great, it’s a creative ground for people to invent things.

For all 3 seasons, I always sat down and wrote them as a whole season. The first season was a half hour pilot that I rewrote to make it longer to fulfill the 5 minute episodes and get 10 episodes. For seasons 2 and 3, they were essentially feature-length scripts. I write them like a feature, but the format of a feature length script is different from what a movie would be.

What was the craziest place you had to film the show?
When we started doing the show, we established a lot of our sets in rooms in our own houses. Four of the characters, Clara, Bladez, Vork, Tink, were based only in my house. Ironically, my character (Codex) was the only one we didn’t shoot in my house. One of the reasons why Codex moved at a certain point in the show was because we lost our location.

One of the craziest places we shot was in my shed. For one, it’s really hot and uncomfortable. And then for Season 3, we couldn’t afford permits, so sometimes we just had to go out in an alley and be paranoid someone was going to see us shooting. Even now, we still have to steal shots and things like that.

What challenges do you face when writing the comic? How is it different from writing a video series?
The comic is very challenging and I’m in the middle of developing that right now. It’s a much more truncated sort of story-telling. I’m very verbose when I write and my shows have been dialog-heavy. So I have to reconfigure that for the comic, and there’s not a lot of space for dialog. Additionally, I don’t think particularly visually when I’m writing. I’m very much into the characters and how they’re communicating with each other and I leave it to the director and DP to define the look. In comic-writing, the writer has to be a DP, director, and a writer all at once. So you have to be able to tell the story in a much more visual way — which is a great exercise for me but it’s much different. The cool thing about this comic is that I can go outside of people’s houses more because we don’t have budgetary restraints. I’m particularly excited about them having a whole life in game, and following their adventures in game because we don’t define the game they play in the show because of copyright purposes, and I basically want to concentrate on the characters. But here, I can invent a whole world and see why they have so much fun together in the game.

What inspired you to do a Guild Music Video?
It was a combination of things. We have a fan who’s a professional artist, Jeff Carlisle, and he had done some fan art for us to sell at conventions. And it had our faces on our avatar bodies and the fans loved it. It was our best selling item. So, I always thought, “Hey wouldn’t it be cool for us to be in our avatar outfits?” But you know, it’s very expensive to get things made like that.

But while writing Season 3, we usually have an additional video that we turn into Xbox for our order — we do 12 episodes a season, and we have a bonus video. And I knew I needed to come up with an idea for that, and I’ve been listening to a lot of 90′s dance music while writing. So I crowdsourced a playlist on Twitter. And since Dr. Horrible, everyone has been asking me to sing, but it’s hard to figure out venues for that.

So those three things combined led to the idea of the title “Do You Want to Date My Avatar.” And I emailed Jed Whedon, who’s the director and co-writer of the song, and I said, “Hey, I have this idea for a bad 90′s dance music video and song where we sing in our avatar costumes, and here’s the title..” and he said, “I’m on board!” So I sent him lyrics, and within hours he sent me something back. The song went back and forth, until we finally came up with the track. I wanted him to direct, because I just had this feeling that he would be fantastic at it, even though he’s not necessary a director. But now he is because he did such a fantastic job with the video.

How did you ask Wil Wheaton to be in the Guild and how did he react?
Wil has known my co-producer, Kim Evey, for years. They did comedy together in ACME, a comedy theatre in LA. I would always see him at social functions and I knew him from online. I always knew I wanted to use Wil at some capacity because it’s just so much fun to be around him. I felt that he would really fit in the show very well. But I didn’t just want to put him in just because of who he is and his experience. I wanted to find a great character for him.

I was at a convention and one of the guys who was helping us at the booth was wearing a kilt. So I was obsessed with making a character who wore a kilt. When I came up with the idea of a rival guild, I was like, “Oh, Wil can play the rival guild leader and he’ll wear a kilt! Now let’s just find a character for him and ask him to be in it.” So I came up with the idea of the character that I thought he would be fantastic playing, and I took him out for coffee, and the minute it came out of my mouth, he was like, “yes, yes, and yes.” So he was very excited to be involved. And we’re really lucky to have him because he’s such a good actor and having so much experience working, he just centered the whole new guild in a way we would not have had with anybody else. He’s just really funny and subtle and he really just fills the character out. I’m excited for people to see what else he does in this season.

The Guild seasons 1 and 2 have just been released on DVD. Learn more about The Guild at WatchTheGuild.com. Learn more about Felicia Day at FeliciaDay.com

This article was originally published on iProng Magazine, 50th Issue!

Related Posts and Articles

• Comic-Con 2009 On-Site Report
• The Guild Seasons 1 & 2 Dvds
• Do You Wanna Date My Avatar Music Video
• My Discovery of The Guild
• iProng Magazine: 50th Issue
• Felicia Day Interview on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
• Buy The Guild: Seasons 1 & 2
• Buy Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
• (Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar (feat. Felicia Day)

Leo Laporte’s Speech at ONA

I really enjoyed Leo Laporte’s keynote at ONA (Online News Association). He’s the founder and host of the techy netcasts called TWIT (This Week in Tech). It’s a great presentation about how TWIT started, how media and technology have changed through the years, and the evolving form of journalism.

Quick Question.. do you think Leo would hire me as his fashion consultant? Surely I’d pick out a better tie. Kidding Leo! I love you and the Twit Army, even if your tie reminds me of a roll of livesavers. :)
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The Guild DVD Seasons 1 & 2

Just a reminder to go get your The Guild: Seasons 1 & 2 DVD now! It’s released today for only $14.99 in retail stores!

What is the Guild? It’s a show is about a group of online gamers who meet in real life, and all the funny adventures they have together. The new DVD set is beautifully packaged and comes with a ton of great extras that I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

I got mine, now go get yours too! I had the pleasure of interviewing Felicia Day about The Guild. Be sure to look for it in the next iProng Magazine issue (Tuesday, Oct. 6th).

Also, be sure to watch Late Night with Jimmy Fallon tonight for Felicia Day’s guest appearance! And yes Jimmy, Felicia Day is quite awesome. :)

Related Links

• The Guild: Seasons 1 & 2 DVD
• Watch The Guild.com
• Felicia Day.com
• Felicia Day on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
• Purchase The Guild in retail stores & content
• Felicia Day Interview in iProng Magazine (Preview)
• Do You Want to Date My Avatar Music Video

Did You Know 4.0

This is another official update to the original “Shift Happens” video. I really enjoyed it because it’s filled with all sorts of statistics from the new media generation and technology shift.

This is another official update to the original “Shift Happens” video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist. For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit http://mediaconvergence.economist.com and http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com.

Content by XPLANE, The Economist, Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Laura Bestler. Design and development by XPLANE, http://www.xplane.com. You can follow us on Twitter at @xplane

Do You Wanna Date my Avatar Video

If you’re a gamer, know of a gamer, play World of Warcraft, or a big Felicia Day fan, then you probably have already seen this amazing The Guild music video! The song was written by Felicia Day and Jed Whedon and I can’t seem to stop watching it!

I got my first glimpse of the video at Comic-Con 2009, and believe me, the crowd there went wild! The song and video were recently released to the public on Aug. 17th, 2009. And yes, I purchased them the minute they hit the iTune store. You can too!

• (Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar Single (iTunes)
• (Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar Music Video (iTunes)
• (Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar Single (Amazon)

If you’re interested in Felica Day’s work, check out WatchTheGuild.com, Dr. Horrible, Dollhouse, and her blog.

Related Posts

• Comic-Con 2009 On-site Review
• I’m a new “The Guild” fan

Coder Girl

Being a coder girl myself, I greatly appreciate this ode to female programmers. Totally awesome. Thanks Dale Chase! You’re quite talented and amazing. These lyrics are tight!

My favorite part of the song is:

A cross-platform version I can work with

She’s not wrapped in flash

all she wants is her java and a shell to bash

While, she’s a sight to C, plus

Her smile glimmers just like a Ruby does

Check out the rest of the lyrics to this amazingly written song.

Related Links

• Dale Chase Website
• Dale’s Twitterstream
• Coder Girl Song Lyrics

ChocoPod

@hotmilkgt (Tony Wang from Twit.TV & 3rdGearTV) was in Japan recently and got me this is awesome gift. When I opened the mailing package, I kept wondering how he brought this chocolate to the U.S. without it melting.

haha.. when I finally opened up the box, I found an even more pleasant surprise. I love it, thanks Tony! Watch the video to find out what it is. ;)

Drums on Guitar Hero World Tour

@dragonal rocks out on the drums on Guitar Hero World Tour for the Wii. His Mii looks a lot like him, especially when he’s wearing glasses. ;)

Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word at PodCamp Hawaii

I was out today, so I missed all the sessions from Podcamp Hawaii! So I’m trying to catch up, starting with Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word session. I really love hearing about WordPress news.

Stream videos at Ustream

What I’m really excited about is WordPress 2.7, Automatic Updates, and BuddyPress! Check out the session, it’s very interesting.

iPod Nano – Just Shake It!

I was at the Apple store in Las Vegas, Nevada and finally got my hands on the new iPod nano. Boy it’s cute! And it comes in an array of colors! My favorite feature, if you haven’t guessed it already, is the shake feature! Just shake it and it’ll play a random song. ;)

(Sorry about the video quality! I’m such a video n0ob!)

The Guild

I just realized I never blogged about my favorite webisode! After seeing Mahalo Daily’s report on Comic-Con, I discovered an actress named Felicia Day who did a webisode series called The Guild.

I watched episode 10 one night and loved it. I ended up staying up the rest of the night to watch all 10 episodes! Totally loved it! The characters reminded me so much of my close friends!

The Guild is a independent sitcom webisode about a group of online gamers. It is written for gamers, about gamers by a gamer. Episodes vary from 3-6 minutes in length, and follow the Guild members’ lives online and offline.

“The Guild” is the winner of the YouTube and Yahoo 2007 Video Awards for Best Web Series, as well as recipient of the SXSW/On Networks 2007 Greenlight Award for Best Series.

Here are all 10 episodes. Let me know if you enjoyed it as much as me!
Season 1 – Watch all 10 Webisodes!

Source: Watch the Guild | YouTube | Viddler

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