Yes, the Raapie.nl website is over. To make people move from Raapie.nl to Melodiefabriek.nl I wrote a long text, a little history so to speak. Just a few highlights, although there is so much more to write about; it was hard to choose. Raapie.nl was a weblogger website and a very popular and personal one. I started it 5 years ago…
But now’s the time for Melodiefabriek.nl to grow on us :)
2000
Most of you might remember that back in 2000 I started Raapie.nl to write about Reason.
Reason was the first application I really felt was easy to use and worked great on a PC. After using Cubase for years on a Atari1040st, I was never having the same feeling using Cubase VST on a PC. It crashed a lot, something it didn’t do on the Atari. Did the PC suck? Sure, Windows ’98 was half-lame operating system. I hated it! But I soon moved to Windows2000. This was a major step. Windows2000 and Reason were a rock solid combo.
I bought Reason as soon as it was available. Yes, version 1.0 that is. So I started Raapie.nl. Peff.com (a ReBirth user, which I never was btw) was already there, but not much else. I started writing about Reason and created a few Refills for free. (These free Refill I now give away on a CD-rom called Freezer)
When I was working for a multi-media company called Madocke, I composed a song for Esa-Estec which was used on a touchscreen presentation at a fair in Paris. That track I created in Reason and Esa loved it.
2001
In 2001 I started a newsgroup at Yahoo, called prop_reason which is still alive today and has over 1100 subscribers! With a group of people of that list we created the popular All Sub Refill, a Refill which only included Subtractor patches. This was an idea of my friend Eric (Reason.Fan), who was one of the first Reason-users who showed me some really cool ideas about what could be done with Reason’s Subtractor and NN19 sampler.
Sound On Sound magazine mentioned the prop_reason maillist and gave me nice credit for creating my free Acetone Refill.
I came in contact with sounddesigners of powerFX and AMG. They liked my work as a free Refiller and powerFX told me that they got a lot of referrers from the Raapie.nl site. So it was good for everyone! And fun :)
2002
I remember Andras (PinkNoise Studio) and Eric (Reason.Fan) asking me if I was interested in starting a new site for Reason. Sure I was interested! That resulted in ReasonBanks, sounddesign website for Reason only. ReasonBanks became a huge success. We had lots of visitors from day one. And it’s still very succesful among many Reason-users. At ReasonBanks we are not only selling Refills, we give away many Refills for free too! For example the Analogue Monsters series is extremely popular.
I also remember that my free Refills were downloaded many, many times. It needed more than 30 gig datatraffic each month. So thanks and respect to Jamie of Vocodex and Eric of Reason.Fan for web-hosting these files! Although I gave everything away for free, still some people were asking for more. A lot of the crackers asked me about illegal copies of Reason. And when I told them I couldn’t do anything for them, some of them still thought they needed to convince of being some sort of wacko, half-lame guru. I need to say this made me feel differently about the whole thing from time to time. Raapie.nl needed to be fun.
I was very happy when Dutch artist Spinvis e-mailed me to tell me he loved my free Mellotronic Refill.
2003
In 2003 I started my own company for music and sound design under the Melodiefabriek moniker. At the time I believed that Raapie.nl could be considered as my hobby-site and Melodiefabriek was the professional one. So I tried to keep both up to date, which wasn’t easy.
2004
Obviously one of the best things that happened in 2004 was being asked to do professional sound design for Reason 3!. Together with Andras and Eric we worked really hard to make great sounding patches. I was 100% focussed when doing the job and created some of the best patches I have ever made. We recieved fantastic reviews from the other sound designers; many A’s and AA’s ;)
2005
I used a beta version of Reason 3 for my work for Heineken, just at the end of the sound design project for Reason 3. This was a bit tricky, but it was the best test I have ever done for Reason. I found some really strange bugs that way and most of them were solved before I finished the composition job for Heineken.
Recently I decided to start using WordPress instead of ASP on Windows2003 server. Open Source felt better, using PHP with MySQL. The Open Source community is very generous and helpful. The .NET counterpart is very much money driven, something which feels a bit strange because open standards like HTML, XHTML, XML and CSS are really making the Internet grow fast and maintain easy access even for people who are using older computers with Linux for example. And people who like to create something new, using these open standards. Open Source doesn’t prevent innovation, it’s exactly the opposite, it helps innovation.
This also means that Melodiefabriek gets updated daily in a way which is simple to maintain. It is already more interesting than Raapie.nl ever was. There are many things which needs to be improved, but I am very happy now being able to focus on Melodiefabriek. For Reason I will write In-Depth articles and I will give away free samples from time to time.
I am not at all only interested in money. I am a big fan of Creative Commons and the general idea of; when someone would like to use my work for non-commercial purposes; use it, share it, tweak it and remix it! But you should give me credit for it. This resulted in my music being used a lot in podcasts. Almost daily I recieve info about some track of mine being used in a new podcast show. This is nice promotion and works both nicely for me as a composer as well as for the people looking for music to use in their podcast shows. And this doesn’t prevent my music from being used in commercial podcasts either or commercial usage in general. For commercial usage people simple need to contact me and I will work out a special license for the event. As most of you might know, I am starting a Licensing Agency based on Creative Commons under the name of DiSfish which will be perfect for artists to get their music podcasted, radio-streamed and licensed for film and television.
So there you go no more Raapie.nl … although it’s still my nickname ;)
