Inked imagination

 Accept and learn from criticism I believe the old saying goes, there are no wrong answers. Well, that’s wrong. Of course there are wrong answers! It’s the yang to the yin: You aren’t going to know or understand what the right answer is if you don’t stumble upon the wrong answer. It’s probably odd to suggest that there is a wrong way to draw a manga or comic, when it’s such a subjective genre in and of itself. But as you go along your artistic journey, you’re going to encounter times when you work on a piece of art, take a step back, and you (or someone else will) say, “Well, that didn’t work at all!” It happens. Not everything you create can be a touchdown. There will always be instances when you throw an incomplete pass or worse yet, fumble the ball. (You can probably tell that football season started at the time of this writ￾ing.) I think, more than anything else in this book, that ground rule needs to be established because (hopefully) that will help you as you try to push you...

 The Idea Behind Panel Layers You can think of a panel layer in Manga Studio as a page within a page. Each panel layer acts as its own page file, with the ability for multiple image layers, just like the main page. Rulers, guides, and other tools that you would use on the main page can all be used within a panel layer. Only the section of the page covered in the panel layer can be shown at any time. This helps focus your attention on the one part of the page. What’s more, each panel layer is independent of other panel layers. So, anything you work on can overlap onto a different panel layer, and the other panel layer isn’t affected by it. You may see the scribblings from the other panel layer, but the art on the current one is untouched. The idea here is to give you the freedom to really go crazy with your drawing. Need to draw the entire body of a character in a scene to make sure the half that will be seen looks correct? No problem. Anything you draw that you don’t want to show c...

 Figuring Out Why a Track Won’t Play Sometimes, you might receive a track in your inbox or see it on a playlist — but it just won’t play. Why can other people seem to play it but not you? This playback problem might be happening for a number of reasons: ✓ Unavailable track: If you try to send someone a track from your own MP3 collection, you aren’t actually sending him that track — just a link to that track. Spotify tries to match the track from its own streaming catalogue so that he can play it. If it doesn’t have the track, your recipient can’t play it unless he also has it stored in his local files. A message may appear encouraging you to import the file in order for you to be able to play it. ✓ Country restrictions: Spotify’s current record label agreements mean that if you send tracks to friends in other Spotify countries, it’s possible that they may not be able to play those tracks and vice versa. Spotify’s official blog says that the restrictions “are a legacy from...

 How Get Satisfaction works Whenever there’s a bug you want fixed or a missing feature you’re after — or you just get stuck trying to do something — simply go to the Get Satisfaction forums and submit a question. You can also submit an idea for Spotify’s devel- opers to consider, and other people can vote for whether they like your idea. For example, at the time of writing, close to 1,000 people want gapless playback in Spotify (where there’s no pause between songs), and almost 500 people are wishing for an easy way to report problems with the music (such as instances when bands that have the same name appear in the same artist stream). People can follow threads, or posts related to a particular topic, to keep up to date — replies to a topic can go straight to your e-mail so that you don’t need to keep checking the site for the answers. Oh, and if you absolutely love Spotify, you can choose to flatter everyone working there by clicking the Give Praise button and typing a f...

 Examining the origins of Spotify websites You can have a lot of fun discovering all the Spotify-friendly websites and tools out there. I’ve found that many of them started off in order to fill a certain need. For instance, Kieron Donoghue developed ShareMyPlaylists.com after he discovered there was no easy way to get other people to check out his songs (this was way before Spotify introduced social features; you can read an interview with Kieron in the sidebar “Behind the scenes at ShareMyPlaylists.com,” in this chapter). And Gigero, featured in the section “Gigero,” in this chapter, started off as a university assign- ment to create a web service, according to co-creator Filip Engberg. He and his former classmate Robert Åberg, both from Sweden, created Gigero after realizing there was no service that showed upcoming festivals in an intuitive way. To make it easy for people to dis- cover new music, they also decided to insert Spotify links to all artists attending...

 Examining a Playlist’s Anatomy Playlists you create are all stored in the fluffy Internet cloud, on Spotify’s servers — the large, always-connected computers that host content. So, if you log into a friend’s computer that’s running Spotify, you can access your play- lists at any time (as long as your friend is in one of Spotify’s launch countries, or you’re a Spotify Premium customer and allowed to log in from anywhere in the world). Despite playlists being stored centrally in the cloud, your experience with them may differ slightly, depending on whether you’re online or offline, the country you’re in, or the computer or device you’re using. Here, I outline dif- ferent playlist features and situations you may encounter: ✓ Synced playlists: Playlists I’ve already synced to my computer for offline listening (a Spotify Premium feature; see Chapter 16 for more on how to use it) have a symbol next to them shaped like a green circle with a white down arrow inside it. I know tha...

 Zapping tracks with Shazam Shazam is a genius way to identify a song that’s playing using your mobile phone. Right now, I’m in a cafe. What better way to test Shazam than to see whether it knows what music is playing here? I certainly have no idea. I whip out my phone, open the Shazam app, and touch the screen to start recording the chilled- out electronic music that’s beating out of the speakers — a process that takes about ten sec- onds. Shazam — my app recognizes the music that’s playing and displays it on screen within a few seconds. It’s by an artist called Zeb, whom I’ve never heard of — but that’s the point of this magical, well-established app. Turns out that the track is part of a Chill Out Cafe compilation album released by an independent Italian label called Irma Records — all background, coffee- drinking kind of music. That’s something new I learned today! Shazam uses special digital fingerprinting wizardry to identify (or tag) the track from its impres...

 What is Ogg Vorbis? Spotify uses a music format called Ogg Vorbis (www.vorbis.com), which sounds like something from outer space, to stream tracks to you. Ogg Vorbis is a free, open-source format that developers can use on a commercial or noncommercial basis. You can’t play them in anything other than Spotify because Spotify restricts them for copy-protection purposes. Ogg Vorbis has several benefits over MP3 – for the same level of audio quality, you get a far smaller file size than with an MP3 because Ogg is more efficient at compressing data, so you use less disk space on your computer. Ogg has a variable bitrate, depending on the audio levels of the track – the file takes up only as much room as necessary to get the highest fidelity sound it can. For example, it knows that a few seconds of silence in a track can be com- pressed more than a section of song featuring vocals and instruments. But why the out-of-this-world name, Ogg Vorbis? It’s a combination of og...

 Figuring out Terms of Use The world of music licensing is complicated enough, let alone the world of streaming digital music. Royalties need to be sorted out and licensing agree- ments regarding streaming music rights need to be struck in every country in which Spotify operates. Advertisers need to get on board, too. That’s why, although digital music is an immediate product with minimal overheads, it took years for Spotify to launch in the U.S. There are also legalities surrounding the use of the content that you listen to on Spotify — you, as a subscriber, need to stick to the Terms of Use. When you first register and install Spotify, you need to agree to the terms before you can start using it. Spotify’s terms are updated every now and again (usually when new features are introduced), and when this happens, you have to accept any significant changes to the terms when you log into the updated software. You can access the terms by clicking a link that appears on every Spo...

 Streaming at premium quality Are you tempted by Spotify’s top-tier ser- vice, Spotify Premium, mainly because of its top-quality audio offerings? Then you’re in luck because the desktop application on your computer gives you the option of streaming at a far higher quality, or bitrate, than standard accounts: 320 Kbps (kilobits per second), com- pared with 160 Kbps for non-Premium accounts. For more on bitrates, see Chapter 2. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that not all tracks on Spotify have been converted to 320 Kbps yet; it’s an ongoing process. There’s plenty of debate about whether the layperson can actually tell the difference — and with data caps on broadband usage becoming standard, the premium bitrate can chip away at your monthly limit. Most people who use regular speakers or listen to music through a computer or earphones are unlikely to appreciate a distinct difference with the track quality. But plenty of audiophiles do care. You can’t currently t...

 The tunes, they are a-changin’ “Spotify promises to get people excited about music again, and the result will be a new golden age of music — more people discovering and listening to more music than ever before.” Those are the influential words of Sean Parker, co-founder of the infamous yet pioneering music-sharing service Napster, which let people swap the music on their computers with anyone who wanted it. Unlimited songs, for free, at people’s fingertips and on a scale never seen before. Sounds familiar, right? But with the original Napster, artists weren’t compensated for their work. And all the while, record labels had no idea how to embrace the service. They sued it from all angles, forcing it to shut down and reopen in a stripped-down form. Sean was unable to realize his vision for the company as a revolutionary way to swap music with friends (Napster has since relaunched completely and is owned by U.S. retail giant Best Buy). Now, a decade later, Sean can ...

 Comparing Spotify with YouTube? YouTube, owned by Google, is a big way for people to discover new music these days. YouTube is free and absolutely chock-a-block with music, and it also provides revenue and promotional opportunities for artists. Despite it being a video-based medium, it actually has many similarities to Spotify. I’ve discovered tons of new music thanks to YouTube — and continue to do so. If you’re in a band, you’ve probably relished the exposure YouTube can bring to you — just like the old days of MySpace, when acts like Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys found fame on the back of uploading some tracks onto their MySpace pages. But because anyone can upload stuff, music quality on YouTube is hugely variable, depend- ing on who’s uploaded it. The playback on YouTube isn’t quite as instant as Spotify, either, and you can’t easily create or share a lot of playlists. If I find an act I like on YouTube, I sometimes go to Spotify to see whether Spotify o...