The poster created in the tutorial can be found below. FYI: I don’t claim to be a designer  

Once again, we turn to Google for an amazing tool. I’ve done several surveys for both general business and music business interested folks. I’ve used Google forms to create the surveys and when doing so, have asked if people want to learn how to create and use a form similar to what they are filling out. And surprise, it remains one of the most popular topics.

Here is a video showing how to setup your first Google Form. Of course, you will need a gmail or google apps account. But that takes no time and is one of the most valuable tools you will use.

Watch the video and then, if you wish, go to test the form out.

If you have questions or comments, leave them here on the website or send an email to one of the email addresses listed in the video.

This video shows how the Google Tasks and Google Calendar work together.

Reverbnation.com is one of the most useful tools at a musicians disposal. Sharing music, videos, images, and tools to add players, calendars, and mailing list to websites and to Facebook, make it an essential website.

One of the features you should become familiar with are TunePaks. Tunepaks are customized list of songs you can send via email, instant message, or on Facebook. You can create multiple Tunepaks and use them as needed to send to fans or to members of your band or team.

This video shows you how to create a tunepak and modify song order. Then I demonstrate the Tunepaks by putting the link into my browser.

Here is the Tunepak I created in this video:
http://www.reverbnation.com/tunepak/2952473

The iGoogle or Google Apps start page (newly available) give you a way to organize your various applications and see an overview of your business at a glance.

This quick video shows how to setup your iGoogle dashboard and gadgets – windows to your gmail or google applications.

Enjoy!

Google Chrome lets you set startup tabs, which is very helpful, but I knew of no way to accomplish this with Firefox. Saving the tabs when you close is not really a solution since you have to make sure you close Firefox with the tabs in position.

Then I discovered this:

Put the URL’s for the tabs you want to open, separated by a pipe character “|”, in the homepage field under Tools->Options->General, and voila!!! It opens those tabs when you start the program.

Here is an image of the option screen. Click to open a larger version.

So what is in my “Homepage field”

http://www.google.com/|https://mail.google.com/|https://docs.google.com|http://www.google.com/calendar/render

This opens my IGoogle home page, my gmail, my documents, and my calendar. Perfect for starting a productive day.

Music Supervisors also require that your songs are tagged with meta data (descriptive data about the song).

MP3Tag is a free utility you can use to tag your mp3 files. Using mp3tag you can tag multiple files at one time – convenient for tagging data that applies to multiple songs, like, all songs in an album, your name as an artist, your website in the comments, etc.

Here is a short tutorial video of mp3 tag.

You can download mp3tag at:
http://www.mp3tag.de

When you record your songs, many pieces of recording software do not save natively as mp3 files. But even when they do, it is often not the most desirable format.

Typically, .WAV files are uncompressed and of higher quality than mp3 files. So when you want to burn a CD of your songs, save the file as a .WAV file. When you want to upload the file to the Internet, convert it to an mp3 file.

After converting it to mp3 file, you will want to “tag” that file as well. I will have another tutorial and utility for doing that.

For now, take a look at how to use FormatFactory to convert .WAV files to MP3.

Download FormatFactory by visiting:
http://www.pcfreetime.com/

Please let me know how you like this tutorial and any questions you might have. Also, let others know as well.