Last night, without any sort of planning ahead, I just decided to launch a new Sinch TV. I’m not exactly sure how I pulled it together… I think the allergy medicine must have had something to do with it. But by about 1:30am we had a new site.

We’re still in the process of adding all the stuff we had on YouTube and we’ll hopefully have some brand new stuff as well. Bear with us while we get everything worked out. It’s been like 2 years at this point so I’m sure you can wait another week or two.

The new site is built on two services/applications that we would recommend to anyone:

• Wordpress: an open source blogging platform

• Viddler: a video sharing site.

This site (Sinch.net) is actually built on Wordpress, so it’s probably nothing new to anyone who pays attention to that sort of thing. And we’ve actually had a few of our videos on Viddler for a while now, but never really made it a point to let anyone know.

Why the move from YouTube? Well, to be honest, the fact that I found a Wordpress theme specifically made to work with Viddler videos had a lot to do with it. But it’s also (I think) a superior site to YouTube in a couple of ways, mostly centered around the commenting features. Also we can upload much larger videos than YouTube allows.

If you’re looking for something more immediately noticeable, you can add comments to specific points in a video. You can’t do that on YouTube. So, now if you want to comment on Mike’s ball shaking technique, you have that ability. This also means that you can comment on our videos without leaving our site, even though they are just embedded videos coming from Viddler. To comment on a YouTube video you have to click through to their site and use their controls.

And the second cool feature we like is the ability to record video comments without leaving our site. If you have a web cam, you can just click “Record or Choose Video” underneath the comment form and record your own video responses to our videos. You can do something similar on YouTube, but again you’d have to leave our site to do it.

Note: Apparently there’s a bug in the theme I used that prevents the videos from showing up on some pages in Safari. Until we get it worked out, you can try another browser or check out our videos directly on Viddler

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The New Sinch.net Forum

Check out the new Sinch.net Forum! All the content is the same and your account with still work fine, but the forums now fit in with the new site design and they’ve been upgraded to a new version of the forum software, PHPBB 3.0

We’ve made a few changes, getting rid of the Announcements forum and moving the Suggestions forum into the General area, since they weren’t being used that much. From now on all announcements can be found at the top of the General Sinch Discussion forum.

If you haven’t been to the forums in a while or never even checked them out before, now is a good time. Here are some recent discussions going on:

• The Sinch Sound Share Project
• New Album / New Album Title
• Best of 2007
• Early Anticipation
• the sinch.net messageboard music recommendation tree
• Post them vidz here!

Jump into one of those or start your own.

SinchArmy.com

If you followed our previous announcement about the launch of the brand new SinchArmy website, you might have been surprised to find that your ass got Rick Rolled. If you were observant enough, you would have found a link to the actual website further down the page. If you didn’t, it’s understandable. Most people’s first reaction to a Rick Roll is to just close the page right away.

As of April 2, the Rick Astley video has been removed an http://www.sincharmy.com now points to the right place. All the features we mentioned before still apply, so there’s a ton of stuff to do there. Sign up for an account and tell us a little about yourself. Upload some photos, videos or music. Add other Sinch fans to your friend’s list. Leave me a comment. Start your own SinchArmy Blog. Things are just getting started.

A few people were a little confused since this is the second time we asked people to “sign up.” The last time, it was just a form on our site that emailed the answers to us, so we do have everyone’s information, but for this new site you have to actually create an account. Having everyone signed up will make it a lot easier for us to communicate with you, and more importantly, for you guys to communicate with each other.

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I’m not gonna lie and say that we now have all the time in the world but, starting today, we have a new SinchArmy website. It’s sort of like Facebook but for Sinch fans. You can create and customize a profile, upload photos and videos, comment on stuff, write your own blog, create groups (Australian Sinch Fans for example) and “a whole lot more.”

So, uh…. what are you waiting for, private? Get in there and give us 20.

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We’re still not technically in the studio yet, but most people would agree that what we’re doing right now could be considered “pre-production,” so I’m firing up the old “Studio Journal” category again.

So far we’ve been just been writing. We record everything we do, so we can go back and listen and make notes about where Mike fucks up so we can give him shit about it. It gives us something to do besides writing the next great American rock album of all time. We’re up to somewhere around 9-14 new songs, depending on how you define “new” and “finished.”

Actually none of them are really finished (even the ones we’ve played live already), but they’re getting pretty close. As you can see in the following photo, we have a lot of stuff written up on the big board.

New songs. Old songs. Arrangement ideas. It’s all there. You can practically hear the new album just by looking at this photo. Here’s another shot of the arrangement board for a new song called “Targets on the Range”:

That’s some groundbreaking shit right there. A, B, A, B, then an OUTRO! In the middle of the goddamn song! An OUTRO! I won’t even tell you what’s crossed out there either. You might die just from hearing about it. When you finally hear the actual song you’ll shit your pants either way, but just be thankful we didn’t leave what we had in there. It most certainly would have killed you all.

There’s no telling when or where this new material might appear. Not exactly the news you want to hear, I know. We’re planning on being in the studio over the summer. That may actually happen sooner or later than we’ve planned. You know how it goes.

For now (and in case you can’t read Mike’s sloppy handwriting in the photos), here’s a pretty-much-up-to-date list of new song titles:

1. Instructions: How To Die
2. Greenlight
3. Gods & Profits
4. Shine
5. One More Time
6. Speaking in Code
7. Novelty
8. Over Medication
9. Easier Said Than Done
10. Targets on the Range
11. Pancake Day
12. I Told You I Was Sick
13. 3 P’s
14. Hershey Squirt

Until next time, I’ll leave you with a couple more photos taken at a recent rehearsal. You can view the full set here.

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Are you the kind of Sinch fan that’s always pushing your friends to listen to our music? We hear that from a lot of people and we’re finally able to give a little bit back. So, now instead of just working for free you can actually make money by helping to sell our music!

We’re proud to announce the Sinch Affiliate Program!

That link will take you to the E-junkie Affiliate sign up page. Register for an account and you’ll get unique links you can use to send people our way. If they buy something, you’ll get credit to the tune of 10% of the selling price. That’s $0.99 for our full albums and $0.49 for our EPs. It also counts towards our new package deals, so for those you’ll make even more.

On top of the affiliate percentage, we’ll be keeping an eye on who’s helping out the most. I can’t say exactly what the benefits will be at this point, but we’ll definitely be taking care of anyone who sends a lot of people our way.

You can post your affiliate links on your own website, Myspace profile, Facebook page or any other place you can post stuff online (forums, etc). You can even just email the links directly to anyone you think might be interested.

So, get your account created and see what you can do. I’ll say right up front that we really appreciate anyone who takes the time to do this. I know our fans have been helping spread the word for years, so it’s about time we let you guys get something out of it.

Let us know if you have any questions or need help with anything.

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Up until now this whole Sinch thing has pretty much been a one-way street. We make music and you guys listen. We’ve received a few things from fans over the years: an acoustic version of a song here, a piece of artwork inspired by the band there… but we’ve always wanted more than that. So we finally got around to doing something about it and set up the Sinch Sound Share Project.

How it works is pretty simple:

1. We release packages of sounds/samples from our music on ccMixter.org
2. You download them
3. You use them in whatever way you want (as long as you’re not selling the result)
4. You upload the result to ccMixter
5. Everyone listens.
6. ???
7. Profit!

We’re really excited to see what everyone can come up with. Whether you know your way around Pro Tools or have never touched a piece of audio software in your life… give it a shot. You might be surprised.

To kick things off, our very own Mike the Bass Player did a remix of the first song we’ve released the sound files for, “Cutting All Ties” from the Subdivisions EP.

Listen to Mike’s remix here.

In classic Mike fashion, it’s not working how it’s supposed to but you can still get to the file with that link so you should be OK. It should be available on his ccMixter page, but for some reason it’s not. As you can see there are no uploads even though according to his profile, he “has 1 remix.” Classic.

Anyway, you can find all the downloads along with links to audio software on the Sound Share Project page.

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As I said, we’ll be adding more features to the site, and are really trying to get the actual content coming out at a more regular pace. There are two new features on the site right now that I want to give some more attention to:

• The new Sinch Music Store
• The Sound Share project

As you can probably tell by the title of this post, I’m gonna be talking about the store for right now. But definitely check out the Sound Share stuff. We’d like to get as many people involved as we can. We’ll be posting more about it soon, but it’s up right now and available for your remixing pleasure.

So what’s new about the store?

Well, first of all, thanks to the new site design, it looks a bit nicer. But more importantly, we’re using a new hosted service called E-junkie for all of our digital downloads. The old store was a php application that we had to install (and maintain) on our own site and it just required too much of our time to keep up with. If you personally had any issues with the old store (links not working, etc) you know what we’re talking about.

We’ve also tried to make things a little easier to find. All our releases are on one page, and for the ones that you can’t buy directly from us, we’ve provided links to a bunch of places where you can find them.

To celebrate the new store (and since we don’t have any new releases to sell yet) I thought we’d have a little grand opening sale. We put together a couple of different package deals so you can pick up a couple of our releases (or all of them) at a much lower price than buying everything separately:

The Grand Opening Sale!

Featuring:

• The Double EP Package
• The Old School Package
• The BIG Package

All sales in our store go directly to the band and the money is used for stuff like equipment, studio time and Jager Bombs. So if you want to see a new album any time soon…

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It’s still a work in progress, but we finally got it to a point where it was usable so we figured we might as well let everyone start using it. We have plans to add a lot more to the new site, including a lot of the content that (for the time being) is missing. Stuff like the FAQ, Inspiration pages, Lyrics and mp3 downloads haven’t all been moved over yet, but we’re working on it.

The newest addition to the site is the brand new Sinch Music Store!

It’s been completely redesigned and is built on a new download service which should fix some of the problems we were having with the old one.

As always, the money from the stuff you buy here goes directly to the band. And we’ve also included links to other sites where you can buy the stuff that we can’t currently sell ourselves. Moving forward, everything that we release will be available in the new store, directly from us!

There’s some other new stuff floating around, but we’ll let you find it on your own. And if there’s anything in particular you really want to see on the new site, please let us know.

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Anyway, I just wanted to officially mention our two upcoming shows here on the blog. I should have done this sooner, but I’ve been overwhelmed lately with the amount of places I end up posting our shows (our site, Myspace, Purevolume, Upcoming, etc.) so some of them slip through the cracks.

The first one is this Friday night (Nov 2) at the Moose lodge in Doylestown, PA.

And then after that we’ll be playing our first ALL AGES show in a really long time (Nov 24, to be exact) at Siren Records, also in Doylestown, PA.

As always, you can grab the code on our Myspace page it you want to repost these flyers or send them to your friends.

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I just posted a new Flickr set of last week’s show. It’s not as good as being there, but I know for a lot of you it’s the only option right now.

We’re playing tonight at The Horse. This will be our last show for the next month or so. Don’t miss it (if you’re in the area, of course).

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