Back in January, Harmonix launched the tools necessary for artists and personal music-lovers to create their own tunes and sell them to the world.

The Rock Band Network

The Rock Band Network Store opened today with more than 100 initial tracks from bands like 3 Inches of Blood, Jonathan Coulton, Steve Vai, of Montreal, Flogging Molly, Lacuna Coil and many, many more.

“The response to and interest in the Rock Band Network has been even greater than we originally expected,” said Alex Rigopulos, CEO and co-founder of Harmonix Music Systems. “We’re very excited about the number of bands and labels who have geared up to participate in the Rock Band Network, as well as the number of enthusiasts who have signed up to participate in the Peer Review and Playtest processes.”

Every song was created using the tools Harmonix provided, users will make 30% of the total take and the songs will be exclusive to Xbox 360 for 30 days before releasing on Wii and PS3.

Calling all digital music enthusiasts, Harmonix and MTV Games today opened the Rock Band Network for users to upload and eventually sell their tunes to living room rockers.

Announced back in July, the Rock Band Network allows anyone, anywhere to create and upload their tune to the soon-t0-be Rock Band Network Music Store, and take home 30-percent of the take.

Now, the song-creation process is not easy, and it’ll cost you between $50 and $100 for an XNA membership to even begin, but I guess, if you’re good, you could make some money?

"We are excited to democratize the Rock Band platform and expand the music discovery experience to the greater music community with the Rock Band Network," said Alex Rigopulos, CEO and co-founder of Harmonix.  "We believe this will be great for fans, music lovers, bands and the music industry as a whole."

Have a look at the Rock Band Network Official Page for tons more information, including a step-by-step introduction to the service, and what it’ll take to get your song published.

We’re living in a broadband, super multimedia, HD video streaming world, and you need network architecture to back that up.

Network attached storage is all the rage now, too. With everyone buying notebooks and netbooks and streaming their Netflix to their Xbox, here are four routers we like that have the most modern security, wireless speed, storage and multimedia features for your 21st century digital life.

NETGEAR WNDR3700
$159.99
Pros: The WNDR3700 balances advanced features like the latest Wi-Fi standards and powerful security options with relative plug-and-play ease for the less technically minded.
Cons: Price may worry some. Quality is an investment.
The final word: It’s the best on the list. Plug it in, configure it, and it will always be there for you.

LINKSYS BY CISCO WRT610N
$179.99
Pros: The WRT610N is great for advanced users who want to customize their system.
Cons: The price is a concern, and novice users might get confused.
The final word: If this is your first time buying a router, pass.

D-LINK DIR-685 STORAGE ROUTER
$229.99
Pros: The D-Link has onboard storage and doubles as a digital photo frame.
Cons: Price. You’re paying for that digital photo frame.
The final word: It’s a great gadget, if you like gadgets.

BELKIN N+ ROUTER
$119.99
Pros: The Belkin is easy to use, relatively inexpensive, and powerful, with the ability to add a storage device.
Cons: None.
The final word: This is a fine choice for the 21st century multimedia family.

The day has come for all Comcast High-Speed residential Internet customers: You officially have a usage cap.

The “customer-defined” usage limit is 250GB a month. Comcast‚ says it’s “an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis.”

They include in their Terms of Service that this roughly constitutes:‚ 
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* Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);‚ 
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or‚ 
* Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).‚ 
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Comcast also released some of their current customer usage data, which puts the average residential Internet traffic downloads at 2-3 GB a month.

You should‚ notice some key word usage in the statement, that will be coming as a bill stuffer, as harmless and not worthy of another glance. “Managing the network is essential as Comcast works to promote the use and enjoyment of the Internet by all of its customers. The company uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards. Comcast tries to use tools and technologies that are minimally intrusive and, in its independent judgment guided by industry experience, among the best in class.”

The italics are mine. With such mitigating word usage, Comcast is trying to drive the point to it’s docile customers that it’s doing this for your good, and the good of the network.‚ 
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To all the Comcast customers who just check their email,‚ you won’t be reading this unless it’s forwarded, and‚ you‚ won’t care about the limit.

To the people who read news and emails‚ and visit Myspace or Facebook, you might think about it for a second, but disregard it.

For the users who email, social network, game online and download, a notice about this usage cap will hold more weight.

Finally, there’s the Comcast customers whom utilize the Internet more efficiently and can do all of the activities above while running a P2P agent in the background. These users know exactly what it means to them.

So why should anyone who doesn’t live on the Internet care? The speed of technological advancement dictates that pretty soon, this “massive” usage cap will become a noose we so quickly placed on ourselves. With the advent of not only high-definition video on demand, and digital downloads, there are a score of other‚ programs that‚ use the bandwidth while people just check their email, or just check their networking sites.

Even websites have become more content rich. Heavy text news sites have become a multi-media room. What 56K once could handle is‚ a neanderthal-like usage now with higher speeds becoming standard. As Internet speeds rise, and our daily lives connect more to the Internet, the usage cap will seem more and more stringent.‚ 
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“Though the proposed cap is relatively high, it will increasingly ensnare more users as technology continues its natural progression,” said Free Press Research Director S. Derek Turner.‚ 
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For those Blast Magazine readers live on the Internet and are worried about what would happen if you crossed the line, don’t worry. “As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage.”

“If a customer uses more than 250GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use. At that time, we’ll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily.”

For now anyway, although the Internet is abuzz with future network shutdowns and or including excessive bandwidth usage fines, all of this is on top of the confirmed diurnal network bandwidth-throttling practices that Comcast got in trouble for.
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For the non-Comcast customer, all this should be a red flag. Comcast clearly states in their ToS that, “The need to engage in network management is not limited to Comcast. In fact, all large Internet service providers manage their networks. Many of them use the same or similar tools that Comcast does.” Comcast is‚ leading Internet service provider, so it’s only rational to expect other major ISPs to follow suit, especially if they see any Comcast practices as a “success”.

Enjoy the gallows.