Music Artists Can Add Multimedia to their CDs for FREE

Let's say you are a member of a small rock band, and you just released a new CD.
You built a web site, but web site content is available for everyone, and you want to motivate people to buy your CD. Why not turn your CD into a multimedia experience by using CDizz?

You probably have recording session photos you might be willing to share with the people who buy your music, or you might want to tell people about what every song is about or what were you doing while the drummer thought about those weird lyrics.

You can add any unofficial* material to your CD with the free CDizz Player. And your fans can add their opinions, art and other creations as well. Wallpapers, photos, Information, Animations, Trivia Pops and a lot more.

*As the copyright owner, you may also want to add some official content that will be automatically downloaded when CDizz users will play your new CD. Official content may include Lyrics, Karaoke, Chords, A link to your website or to an online store that sells your CD. Official content is not free, but it's a well spent marketing expense. (And if you can't afford it yet, you may still use the unofficial options)

And what if you are not really in a band, and you don't know anyone who released a CD?
In that case you can just download the CDizz Player, slide your favorite music CD into the CDROM, and share your creativity with others.

CDizz Player is Freeware, and can be downloaded here. Tags: CDizz, Candizz, Entertainment, Music, CD, Software, Lyrics, Karaoke, Chords, Animation, Audio, Multimedia.

Don't fight battles you can't really win.

Sony got a lot of bad publicity lately, trying to fight piracy and ending up with making a lot of people angry (by messing up with their computers' OS) and losing a lot of money.

This is exactly what we are talking about. Don't just fight the pirates, give something to your loyal customers. This is what CDizz is all about.

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CDizz Player is Freeware, and can be downloaded here. Tags: CDizz, Candizz, Music, CD, Software, Sony, Rootkit, Multimedia.

Cracking CDizz

It appears that a serial number / keygen crack for CDizz player is available for download on the net. (We got a whole page with two links)

I tried to download it (600k for keygen and 44k for the entire cracked version of CDizz) and got two files. After looking at them (without executing) I deleted them because:

CDizz is FREEWARE!

Which means they are either viruses, trojans or just malware.

It's still rather amusing, though. :-) Cracked us up. :-)

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CDizz Player is Freeware, and can be downloaded here. Tags: CDizz, Candizz, Music, CD, Software, Virus, Trojans, Multimedia.

Make Candizz™, not War! A Good Advice to the Music Industry

Everyone knows that the music industry woke up one day to realize that the internet changed the way people consume music. Their first response was “STOP! Thieves!”. Their second response was lawsuits against Napster, against people who downloaded music, and then against companies who developed technologies that could be (and actually were) used to violate copyright laws (and to cause loss of income to the music industry).

Do you know what is the biggest problem of music companies when they try to compete with MP3 files?
Here are a few options:

1. MP3 Files are free while CDs cost money
2. It may take at least an hour to go to the music store, look for a CD, buy it, and go back home to listen to it. It takes less than 5 minutes to download your favorite song, and you can do it in the middle of the night and in your shorts.
3. If you want to listen to songs from several albums, you need to change CDs every few minutes. With MP3 you can keep only the songs you want.

While all these problems do exist, the biggest problem is simpler: The quality of the product is practically the same, and at the end of the day, you don’t get much more when buying the legal copy over downloading an MP3 file.

But maybe people who buy legal music should get more? Aside from a nice jewel case with a CD cover, all sorts of bonuses are sometimes offered to music customers: from books to posters, very few titles include a multimedia track while others offer access to a password protected web site. The problem is that this is raising the CD price, and it’s not really available for most CDs.

Here comes the “Candizz” part. Candizz are little multimedia elements that can be added to a music CD when it’s played with the CDizz Player™. Animations, lyrics, chords, karaoke, images, reviews, trivia pops, games, artists news etc. This gives new life to old CDs and adds an internet based visual “envelope” to the music experience.

If record companies won’t go there, the music fans may do that by themselves. Adding Candizz is easy. Some fans like creating images based on music you hear, why not share these creations with other fans who own the same CD? Other fans can review a new CD release and other fans take pictures of themselves when they attend a concert. All this material will be accessible once you pop-in the right CD.

Music companies don’t have to be portrayed as the bad guys, they can easily become the good guys simply by rewarding loyal customers who actually went to the store and bought a CD. Even if the last CD they bought is 10 years old, it will certainly be profitable for them to be able to offer these customers fun and games along with a coupon for a concert or even just news about upcoming releases.The CD is not dead. How many CDs do you have at home? More than a few, probably. How many CDs are you willing to throw away because you ripped them to your computer? I’m guessing not many, and rightfully so. It’s too early for the CDs to go to waste.

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CDizz Player is Freeware, and can be downloaded here. Tags: CDizz, Candizz, Music, CD, Software, Lyrics, Karaoke, Chords, Animation, Audio, RIAA, Multimedia.

Candizz

When we developed CDizz, we tried to find a suitable name for all the downloadable goodies that the users can download, create or share.
Lacking a better name, we settled on the term "plugins" which was not exactly quite right, but got the general idea across.

Today we found what we think is a better term: Candizz

It sounds tasty, it has the CDizz sound (and letters) in it, and in general we like it.
(Single: Candiz)

Now we have to implement the change into the next version, update the web site, the help file etc.
Shouldn't take that long...

Those Software Listing Sites

When our latest version was ready, we followed a list of thing we needed to do. Aside from the regular compiling / documenting / updating the release notes etc., there is always the matter of updating the internet*.

* I'm not talking about our own web site, this is obviously a must (adding a news item, updating the download link, notifying the forum). I'm talking about the other places where CDizz is listed.

Up until now, since we did want to have an altername download site other than our own website, we looked at the different mega-software-sites and chose freewarefiles.com which was a very good choice. It took them less than a couple of days to check CDizz out, add the listing, generate an icon from the screenshot we provided, and then we appeared at their site as "Featured Software" in the Audio / Video section, which was quite a joy for us (We are so easy to please sometimes).

But this time they were actually ULTRA fast, and verified the update in less than 2 hours. Wow. Shortly after that we noticed that CDizz got their editors pick as well, and so we now had a shiny new icon to add to our web site.

We decided to add CDizz to a few other listings. Soon enough we got another icon, this time from softpedia which guarentied that CDizz has no adware, no spyware and no viruses attached to it. This was also (proudly) added to our site.

Since we are fans of tucows (for almost 10 years now), we decided to add an entry to TuCows as well and see how many cows we'll get. We will have to be patient, though, since it takes more than a month for the tucows people to have a good look at a new submitted program. There is a long queue, so I don't really blame them.

I've also submitted an entry to boingboing.net , but it seems that it didn't make the cut. (Assuming that since they are looking for news, they won't wait that long to publish something. Or will they?)

Write a Review - Get Linked

If you have your own blog, We'd love it if you try out the CDizz Player and write about it in your blog.

If your review is informative and fair, we'll add a link to your review on this blog.


Here are a few rules, just to stay on the safe side:

1. You need to write a post that's mostly concerns CDizz (mentioning it in one line at the end of a long post won't get you a link).

2. Your post needs to be fair. We don't mind criticism, but don't be nasty just for the sake of it. Write on your personal experience or thoughts about the software or concept.

3. You need to put a link in your blog to www.cdizz.com or to this blog (so people will know what you're talking about)

4. If you revise your post, if your blog contains offensive material or even without explaining, we are not obligated to link anywhere. This is on our sole descretion.

5. If there are too many posts / reviews, we'll probably stop adding links (and we'll write to you about it in this blog)


The software is available for free over here. Let us know if you write something.

Tags: CDizz, Music, CD, Lyrics, Karaoke, Chords, Animation, Audio, Reviews, Software, Multimedia.

Version 0.97 Build 19 released

And it was a tough one.
Since the initial release we received a lot of responses, requests and comments about CDizz. We tried to implememnt as much as we could and it took us a while, debugging and adding small improvements until we had a decent release candidate.

All this was done while moving to a new server (which has it's own configuration problems we had to deal with)
Yaron also added several tutorial pages that should help new users with creating content.

The next step will probably be multilingual support, which really needs addressing at this point.

What are you waiting for? Go on and download the new version.

Crushed Bug

Yesterday I talked (using messenger, obviously) with one of the CDizz beta testers who had a problem after uninstalling and re-installing CDizz.
He got an error message when he tried to connect.
I seemed that there was a bug in the new server (due to moving to a new SQL system) that prevented new users from being recognized properly by the server, which gave them limited functionality.

This was going on for several days now, which was rather upsetting to me. Especially since it took me less than 5 minutes to fix it.
But it's a good thing we have such great users, so THANKS OOGGI.

Moving to a new web server

Since we expect some growth, I though this might be the best time to upgrade our server.

I started to shop around for a dedicated server. There are almost too many options out there, and new terms to learn. It took me almost two days to focus on the server host to go with, and it was godaddy.

I have some domain names of my own for several years now, and I moved between registrars, and currently most domain names are registered via godaddy, so I was a bit reluctant to have my hosting there as well (I believe in getting different services from different sources). But their price was OK, and they seem stable enough, so they were a strong candidate.

I called their customer support / sales phone number. It's always a good idea to do that before you buy a product. I asked some questions which were answered in a reasonable way (Not too technical), and I also got an additional discount since on the price that was listed in the site, so that was a good thing to have as well.

Tomorrow the new server will be ready, and I'll start transferring the files and check that all the scripts work properly.

Installation day, I call it.

Featured

When we released our software, we looked for an external site that will list and (hopefully) host our distribution file.

We checked several options (download.com, tucows.com etc.) and finally decided on freewarefiles.com which were very fast in reviewing and publishing the software.

We also had a nice surprise when the decided to name CDizz "Featured Download" in the Audio/Video section (It's currently still there).

I think it's good and promising feedback.

What is CDizz?

Sometimes it can be hard to explain exactly what your software really does. Every time we try, we tend to focus on different issues. Here is the current description of CDizz, in a form of questions and answers:


What is CDizz?

CDizz is based on the idea that audio CDs should bring more to the music experience. The CDizz Player adds dynamic content to Audio-CD titles. CDizz can turn ANY CD into a multimedia experience.

The CDizz Player uses legal, purchased CDs as a key to download CD specific content: Images, Lyrics, Karaoke, Slideshows, Coupons, News, Guitar Chords, Animations, Pops and much more.

CDizz is FREEWARE, and is totally safe to install or remove.


Original Content Sharing

CDizz users can upload new content and rate content to enrich everyone’s experience:

• Review a CD
• Tell a story about a song
• Upload a photo that reminds you a song
• Draw and share inspired art
• Write alternative lyrics to songs
• Learn how to play a guitar by entering chords. Watch the fingering while the song is being played.
• Create Animation clips related to a song, or just enjoy a flash game.
• Trivia information popping in little pops windows.
• Get Artist news and info

With CDizz, music enthusiasts have a new way to communicate.
CDizz includes timing tools for Karaoke, Chords, Pops, Slideshow and SmartIntro.


Other Services

Your CD collection has something new in it, and if you’d like, you can setup a page that lists the CDs in your CD collection.
You can grade any CD, Track or content. Each user has a rank, so heavy users and authors’ votes count for more.


Can CDizz fight piracy?

We believe that the focus in fighting piracy should not focus on threatening music customers, but rather making the legal music product better by giving more to loyal customers.

If illegal files offer the same quality as legal audio, there is no positive incentive for people to do the right thing.

CDizz gives something extra to people who went and bought music CDs.

It also offers artists and labels a unique way to communicate with their customers by providing official content and news, so everybody wins.

We are very concerned about copyright issues. All submissions are reviewed before they are published, and there is a reporting tool if something slipped through.

CDizz Player is Freeware, and can be downloaded here. Tags: CDizz, Candizz, Music, CD, Software, Lyrics, Karaoke, Chords, Animation, Audio, Multimedia.

We've decided to open a blog about CDizz Development

I'll tell you all about why I decided that, and what CDizz actually is, but this will have to wait.
In the mean time, here is a link to CDizz.
Just stare at this link for a while, and when you're tired, click on it for more information. ;-)