It takes hold of the best of us. It creeps up on us when we least expect it. It sucks our musical inspiration dry. It stops our songwriting career progress dead in it’s tracks. I’m talking of course about laziness. How do we as songwriters and musicians battle the urge to stay glued to the couch?

Today, I am happy to introduce the first official Serve The Song video screencast. It’s a short video showing you how to convert a loss-less audio file to a high-quality mp3 file using iTunes. The goal is slim down the file size of a song file while maintaining as much sound quality as possible and encode a 320 kbps mp3 file. Included in this post is additional information on mp3 file size, and how mp3 compression works.

This idea has bounced around my mind for years as a dedicated songwriter, musician, and composer. How do people with no musical training hear music? It sounds like a strange question at first, but I believe they hear music from a totally different perspective. As a musician myself, I can only guess what that perspective may be like. In this post, I’ll cover how we as songwriters, musicians, audio engineers and producers hear music. And then I’ll make an attempt to guess how non-musicians appreciate music, and how it may be quite different.

In honor of today’s official iPhone 3.0 announcement, I’m going to delve into the techy / geeky side of things here at Serve The Song. I recently came across a great review of two iPhone apps for mobile audio recording. The two iphone apps are iTalk and Speakeasy and the review comes from Cool Hunting (Thanks @Hypogene!). These apps can be great for songwriters who need to lay down a quick idea when they’re away from their home recording set up. iPhone users, you can now rest assured you won’t lose those songwriting ideas when they come to you while you’re out and about.