New sound effects site launched by Bjorn Lynne

Dear visitors, readers,

I'm happy to announce today the launch of my new website, www.1SoundFX.com. This is a brand new site that I've been thinking about developing for years, and I've finally got around to doing it. Today the site is taking live orders for the first time.

1Soundfx.com is, quite simply, a site to obtain sound effect files from. Even though the site is now live with approx. 10,000 sound effect files online, I'm in this for the long haul, and I plan to keep developing the site and the sound effects catalog for years and years.

I know from experience that it takes a long time to make a site successful in the long run. I started my royalty-free music website Shockwave-Sound.com back in April of 2000, now more than 9 years ago, and this site is a huge success today with more than 3,000 unique visitors each day and doing a lot of business. Over time, I want to do the same thing with 1SoundFX.com

So, what's so great about 1Soundfx.com? :-) It's a quick and convenient site with a huge sound effects library that will keep growing for years and years. Customers can easily and quickly buy sound effect files and then download the purchased files any time they want to from within their user account. Customers can buy larger amounts of "Credits" before buying sound files, thus saving up to 40% off stated prices. Once a file is purchased, you can download your sound file as well as a printable tax invoice from within your account area.

Contributors are welcome to participate with their own professional quality sound files. See "Contributors" at the bottom of www.1SoundFX.com for details.

And finally, each week there are 5 new professional sound effect files to download completely free from the "Free downloads" section inside your Account area.

Welcome one and all, to 1Soundfx.com !

All the best,
- Bjorn

Help me name this track!

Hello folks,

I've been working on a new music track over the past few days, and the result can be heard below (this is a 95% finished version, a few minor tweaks may still be done...). My problem is that I can't think of a name for this track! So I'm asking you people to help me name it.

Additionally, I have two slightly different versions. The first version (Drums type 1) has some rather electronic/spacey drums whereas the second version (Drums type 2) has a slightly more organic/live style drum track. Please be sure to let me know which one you prefer!

This track was produced with two guitars (one electric and one acoustic) and the rest is 100% software. No hardware synths were used for any sounds. The main the soft-synths used are Novation V-Station, IK Multimedia Sonik Synth 2, Spectrasonics Atmosphere, Pentagon and SONAR's built-in "DropZone" synth.

Type your title suggestions in as "Comments" to this blog post, or post them on my Facebook wall (My Facebook profile is here), or even email your suggestions to me -- just as long as I get to see your track name suggestions, I'll be happy! :-)

On an entirely different subject, I have an update regarding my CD "Dreamstate" from 1995. This CD is now completely sold out from my own personal stocks. They have 16 copies in stock at CDBaby.com. Those are the last 16 copies ever. No more copies will be made of this CD will be made. When those 16 last copies are sold from CDBaby.com, the album will become a "download only" album forever.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading! Here is the Flash player with the two versions of the new "As of yet untitled" track:

Various news and new music from Bjorn Lynne

Dear friends around the world,

It's been a long time since I posted any real news about my music and upcoming releases, and I'm sorry about that. Trust me, I haven't been lazying around. :-) I have been very busy with various music licensing deals, my music publishing company Lynne Publishing and, of course, I've been producing some new music.

Although I have no specific plans for a new album release just yet, I'm starting to build up a good number of tracks in at least two different genres: (1) Progressive electronica, like Colony, The Void, Beneath Another Sky, and (2) Upbeat, melodic, techno-trance, more like the Amiga-scene music with a lot of patterns, sequences, synth lines and arpeggios.

Below you can hear my latest creations. I used a long time on "Solar Winds" and this is the style of music that will be on my next "progressive electronic" album. "Koloss" will probably also be on that album. If anybody has any suggestions for album title, or suggestions for album cover artwork, please send them to me. I'd love to see/hear your suggestions.

"Perpetual Flux" is an example of my more demo-scene like music of which I also hope to release an album this year. I've already posted a few other tracks in this style earlier, including "Supersymmetry" and "Tempest Drive". I have about 7 or 8 tracks in this style that I'm satisfied with... and one or two that I'm not really that satisfied with and will probably be "shelved".

"Funkwah" is something I started and finished in a single day. It was meant as a light hearted escape from my larger musical projects. It's just a little tune, made for licensing through my stock music library. It won't be on any album.

Either way, I hope you'll enjoy my latest creations. I spend a lot of time with "admin" these days but I do still enjoy composing and producing music. I'm now almost entirely software-based, having got rid of a lot of my outboard music studio equipment. I'm now working almost exclusively with my RME Fireface 400 Firewire sound card, SONAR v7, three guitars and bass guitar, a bunch of software plug-ins and, of course, my trusty old Kurzweil K2500 keyboard which I'll never get rid of. They'll have to pry it from my cold, stiff hands... :-)

I have a couple of holidays coming up. Next weekend I'll be in Manchester UK with a couple of mates to visit pubs, a football game and a stand-up comedy show. A real boys weekend. :-) Then a couple of weeks after that I'm off to the Canary Islands (off the coast of Africa) for two weeks with my wife and daughter. It's good to get a break from the long, dark Norwegian winter.

As ever, thanks for taking the time to read this and to listen to my creations. I hope you're enjoying them. I'm very much looking forward to being able to announce a new CD (or even two!) some time in 2009.

All the best,
- Bjorn

PS: Hook up with me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Bjrn_Lynne/503781394

Bjorn Lynne launches series of one-hour Ambient music albums

Dear friends,

From time to time over the past few years, I have been composing and producing a long, continuous album of ambient/relaxation music. This has been done partly to provide a music track for my "Nature Sound Series", which is a series of hour-long nature sound recordings (slow waves, rainfall, forest ambience, etc).

For the first time, this music is now available without the nature sounds -- as pure ambient music albums.

There are 6 albums available, and each one plays just over 60 minutes continuously. Each album is made as a single, long track. However, each long track is not simply a bunch of repeated notes and lines over and over again. Each one contains a fair bit of variation and exploration of various ambient moods.

The titles are as follows -- follow the links to hear a 10-minutes sample of each album.

• Amazon Evening
• Under the Sea
• Tranquil Landscapes
• Image Reflections
• Endless Oceans
• A Journey Within
  

Should you be interested in these albums, they are available to download in MP3 ($8 each) or in lossless FLAC format ($10 each) from the Bjorn Lynne download-shop.

Nature Sound Series:

As I mentioned, these same musical recordings are also available mixed with sounds of nature. They go under the artist name Nature Sound Series (which is another of my pseudonyms). The Nature Sound Series CD's are not available to buy through my personal website, but they can be bought through CDBaby.com, both as physical CD's or as MP3 downloads. Specifically, you'll find the Nature Sound Series CD's here:

• Relaxing Seaside (with music)
  
• Relaxing Rain Ambience (with music)
  
• Mountain Stream (with music)
• Windy Wasteland (with music)
• Evening Crickets (with music)
• Tropical Ocean Surf (with music)
• Amazon Evening (with music)
• Forest Ambience (with music)
• Campfire Night (with music)

All the best,
- Bjorn

All Bjorn Lynne & Divinorum albums now available as FLAC downloads

Hello folks,


I have to say "due to popular demand" -- which means that more than 2 persons have asked me about it! ;-) -- I have now made nearly all my albums available to purchase and dowload instantly as lossless FLAC files from my download-shop. They are also still available as MP3 downloads. Both versions (FLAC/MP3) also include high-res images from the cover artwork, so if you want to print your own CD cover and make yourself a real CD that way, you can do that. The FLAC versions cost $2 more than the MP3 versions.

Albums now available as FLAC/MP3 downloads:

Bjorn Lynne: "Irish & Celtic Instrumentals"
Bjorn Lynne: "Quiet Places"
Bjorn Lynne & Adam Skorupa: "Undercover"
Bjorn Lynne: "Beneath Another Sky"
Bjorn Lynne: "Soothe"
Bjorn Lynne feat. Eco-Mcz: "Statement"
Bjorn Lynne: "Return to Witchwood"
Bjorn Lynne: "Colony"
Bjorn Lynne: "The Gods Awaken"
Bjorn Lynne: "Accelerator"
Bjorn Lynne: "Wolves of the Gods"
Bjorn Lynne: "Revive"
Bjorn Lynne: "Wizard of the Winds"
Bjorn Lynne: "Decade"
Bjorn Lynne: "The Void"
Bjorn Lynne: "Witchwood"
Bjorn Lynne: "Dreamstate"
Bjorn Lynne: "Montage"
Bjorn Lynne & Seppo Hurme: "Hobbits & Spaceships"
Bjorn Lynne Relaxation Music Series: "Amazon Evening"
Bjorn Lynne Relaxation Music Series: "Under the Sea"
Bjorn Lynne Relaxation Music Series: "Tranquil Landscapes"
Bjorn Lynne Relaxation Music Series: "Image Reflections"
Bjorn Lynne Relaxation Music Series: "Endless Oceans"
Bjorn Lynne Relaxation Music Series: "A Journey Within"
Divinorum: "Power Liquids"
Divinorum: "Talisman"
Divinorum: "Isms"
Jogeir Liljedahl: "Out of Silence"
Jogeir Liljedahl: "The Wanderer"
Bjorn Lynne: "Worms World Party - Original soundtrack"
Bjorn Lynne: "Worms Armageddon - Original soundtrack"
Bjorn Lynne: "Phoenix - Deep Space Resurrection"
Bjorn Lynne: "Worms 2 - Original soundtrack"

For more information or to purchase any of these albums in FLAC or MP3, please go to the Bjorn Lynne download-shop.

Buy 2, Get 1 free - on all Bjorn Lynne & Divinorum CD's until end of 2008 !

Dear friends,

I'd like to tempt you with a special limited-time offer on my music CD's. From now until the end of the year, I'm giving away one extra CD completely free, for every 2 CD's purchased from my personal CD-shop: http://www.lynnemusic.com/cdshop.html

I ship CD's all over the world, and although admittedly, the postal service is quite expensive from here, it works out to a really great deal if you buy 2 and get 1 free. You can also buy 4 and get 2 free. Or buy 6 and get 3 free... and so on.

Why not use this as an opportunity to grab some unique Christmas presents, for yourself or for your friends and family?

The offer is for ALL CD's listed on this page: http://www.lynnemusic.com/cdshop.html and the offer is good until December 31st at 23:59 your time.

If you have any questions or just a friendly word or two :-) Feel free to email me any time at the address posted at my contact page (Please note that my old/previous email address bjorn@lynnemusic.com is no longer in use).

If you don't hear from me again before the Christmas & New Year holidays -- let me take this opportunity to thank you all for listening to my music throughout the year, and to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I have plans for two new album releases in the new year! But first -- I'd like to sell some of the CD's I already have here, so come on, use this opportunity to get yourself a deal! :-)

All the best,

- Bjorn Lynne

Three new music tracks

Dear friends,

I have composed and produced three new music tracks since the last time I posted something here. You can hear the tracks below. They are all in totally different styles, so I hope you'll enjoy at least one of them. :-)

I like to work with different styles of music, this way and that -- I always have.

The first track listed below is China Temple Morning which started as a simple arpeggiated bell pattern which just sort of "happened" on my keyboard the other day. I've purchased a new software synth called Omnisphere from Spectraconics and I'm using it for several of the sounds in this track. This track was finished very quickly; I did it all in one day from 08:30 until about 23:00. :-)

The next one is Blue Sky which is just a "nice and easy" sort of instrumental soft-pop track, or pop/ambient crossover. I wanted to make something that would be good as background use for media, video, film, presentations, etc. mostly with the idea of licensing it through my stock music library. I try to combine synthesized sounds with acoustic guitar for a softer feel. In the last part, a subtle electric guitar also comes in. I never use "plug-ins" for these kinds of guitar parts, because I find it takes me a lot longer to fiddle with the settings to get it to sound close to a guitar sound, than it takes me to simply pick up the guitar and play it into a microphone. Much quicker. :-)

The third track Tempest Drive is quite similar in style to some other "upbeat electronica" tracks that I've been making over the past few months. It's not exactly techno, not exactly trance, but something like energetic electronica, I guess. In this track I'm using some sounds from the Top Production Samples CDROM that I made and published myself, a few years ago. I still find myself using sounds from that CDROM from time to time. I know the sounds well and keep coming back to them. Also present here are some other synth sample loops and three instances of the software synth plug in z3ta+.

Anyway, the tracks can be heard in the player below. I hope you'll enjoy them, and like all my other tracks, they can be licensed for Royalty-free use in media production through my music library website, www.Shockwave-Sound.com

All the best,
- Bjorn

Get your own Flash MP3 Player

New email address for Bjorn Lynne

After using the address bjorn@lynnemusic.com for about 8-10 years, and having the address posted publicly on the web site for most of that time, this address now receives as much as 2,000+ spams each day. Even with pretty hard spam filtering, some of it is coming through to my email inbox and is quite an annoyance... so, it's with a heavy heart that I have to let go of this email address.

My NEW email address is:

I'm trying to thwart the spammers a bit by posting it like this, instead of in plain text.

Asian-pacific domains -- scam or genuine?

Today I received a rather interesting email from a Chinese domain name registration company. The company wrote to me and claimed that "(company x)" had applied to register the Asian-pacific versions of the domain names to which I own the .com domain.

Specifically, I own shockwave-sound.com and the claim was that (company x) had applied to register the domains shockwave-sound.cn, .com.cn, .asia., .hk.cn and .tw.cn. Additionally, they said, (company x) had also applied to register the "internet brand name" shockwave-sound.

The email went on to say that, as the owner of shockwave-sound.com, I had the right to "dispute" the attempted registrations by quickly registering these Asian-pacific domains myself. I could do this through this company, and that would effectively put a stop to (company x) being able to register these domains.

I answered back that I was obviously interested in protecting the Asian-pacific versions of my domain name and also this "internet brand name" which, I have to admit, I've never heard of before.

The Chinese domain registration company then sent me a registration form in which they are inviting me to register shockwave-sound.cn, .com.cn, .asia, .hk.cn, .tw.cn for $30 for 1 year, and also to register my "internet brand name" shockwave-sound, for $100 per 1 year. They are saying that I can fill in the form and register the domain names with them within 5 days, to ensure that (company x) does not take these domains and take the "internet brand name" shockwave-sound.

The way I see it, there are two possibilities: (1) This is a genuinely helpul company who want to help international domain owners make sure that their brands/domains are not registered to some dubious/competitive company who wants to "take" their domain names and their "internet brand name", OR, (2) this is a very sneaky ploy by a Domain Registration company to sell me .cn, .hk etc. domains, perhaps at a overblown price, that they they would not normally be able to sell to me because, well I just wouldn't normally be interested.

Does anyone have any comments or suggestions?

Help me sell my music and make a few bucks doing it

As many of you will know, my music work in the last few years have been more and more aimed towards selling music tracks for commercial use, not so much for personal-listening use. Like most other musicians, I started noticing around the year 2000 that it was getting more and more difficult to sell CDs to “consumers” (i.e. to individual people who buy the music just to listen to it), so I started to venture into the world of “music for professional use” (i.e. selling it to people and companies who want to use the music in a media project).

I’ve had some success with this over the years and I now have a music catalogue consisting of about 3,000 music tracks – that includes my own compositions as well as tracks by other musicians that I work with. These are sold through my site www.Shockwave-Sound.com and for the 8 ½ years that this site has been online now, it has enjoyed a steady increase in traffic and sales.

Anyway, to my point. I would like to invite you to help me to promote this web site, and in the process, make a 10% commission on any sales that you generate. The system is simple, like other Affiliate programs. You make a link from your website (or from your Blog or even from your Facebook page etc.) using a unique link code that I give you. If somebody clicks on that link, my site knows that the user came from your link. If this person ends up making a purchase, you will be paid 10% of the purchase sum. Even if the user doesn’t place an order right away, but comes back to my site any time within 7 days, you will make the 10%.

So…. If you are interested in helping me to sell my music to commercial users more often, and make a 10% earning while doing it, then please respond to this email and let me know. I will make a unique link for you to put on your web site.

Please email me at the following address for your unique web link. (I'm sorry I have to hide the address in a graphic like this, but it's necessary, to thwart the spammers' web bots)...:

New music track: "Let's Go" in MIDI & MP3

Hi folks,

I just wanted to send a little note to say that I’ve posted a new General MIDI track on my web site. The track is called “Let’s Go” and I guess you could say it’s kind of “game music pop”. :)

General MIDI isn’t exactly “cutting edge” technology any more, but there’s a surprising number of people still listening to and enjoying MIDI tracks. These days, mostly when I add a new General MIDI music track, it’s because I’ve already composed the tracks using “real” instruments and it’s then a reasonably quick job for me to make a General MIDI version of the same composition. So anyway, you can hear the new MIDI track now, it’s called “Let’s Go” and can be heard at my MIDI Music page.

Should you wish to hear the same track in it’s original form with guitar etc., you can hear it at http://www.myspace.com/bjornlynne (it’s one of the tracks featured in the music player on that page).

It's nothing big or groundbreaking, but I hope you'll enjoy it. :-)

- Bjorn

An article about YouTube Safe Music

I wrote an article for Shockwave-Sound.com about how to properly credit music use in YouTube videos and how this relates to performance royalties. Should you be interested in reading it, head on over to this page at Shockwave-Sound.com.