Chatting on Indaba by Matt P.

 As far as I’m concerned, any site worth it’s salt needs to have a Chat!  All the best ones do – GMail, Facebook – and now you can add Indaba to that list! While I’m sure you’ve grown accustomed to Chats being all over the interweb these days, I wanted to make sure you know how easy it is to use the (relatively) new chat feature here on Indaba!

The first and most blaringly obvious way to Chat on Indaba is by clicking on the Chat tab on the home screen.  I won’t belittle you by posting a screencap of the button - just know it’s at the top of basically every page on Indaba, and you’re golden!  Once you click the Chat button, you’ll get the following page:

Here you can join a public chat – the lobby is always open, and will give you a place to hang out with other Indaba members, and other public chat rooms will show up here as well.  Under ‘See Who’s Online’ you’ll see which of your Indaba contacts that are available to chat.  Lastly, you can create a public or chat room of your own if you’d like.

The coolest part of the Chat feature here is that there are other places you can initiate a chat with an Indaban outside of the Chat page!  When you are searching for people on Indaba, and you see a green strip saying ‘Online’ under their profile picture, click on the green stripe and you will be given the option to chat with the person right there!  Same goes for the green stripe over a profile picture on someone’s profile or in a session.  Just mouse over the green stripe and you’ll be given the option to chat!

And when you finally get to chatting, the window is pretty self-explanatory.  Just type in what you want to say and press enter and you’ll be chatting away in no time.  Enjoy!

Entering a Contest on Indaba by Matt P.

For all you new users out there, the contests here at Indaba are a pretty big deal!  Right now, there are FOUR contests available for you to enter on Indaba, and we thought it’d be nice to give you guys a little refresher on how to enter.  In the past we’ve offered the separated tracks from songs by Mariah Carey, Third Eye Blind, and K-OS to be remixed and re-imagined by you guys, and the winners received incredible prizes.  So not only do you get a chance to (virtually) work with incredible artists, but you could also get some cool swag, cash, or placements out of it!  Win win?  I’d say so.

But before you get hired as John Legend’s in-house remixer, you should probably figure out how to enter Indaba contests.  Click on the Contests link under the Community tab on the home page, then select the contest you’d like to enter (Note: the contests that give a number of days ‘Remaining for Entries’ to the right of them, are the ones you can still enter).  Near the middle of every contest you should see this button:

If you’re not a member of Indaba Music, not signed in, or you’ve already entered the contest, you should see some variation of this button but if you make sure you click on the blue, rectangular button on the contest page you should be fine.  NOTE: If you haven’t entered the contest by clicking this button, you will not be able to download the contest tracks.  You may only preview them at the top right of the contest page.

After you click the ‘Enter the Contest’ button, you should see two buttons:

You can always click the ‘Previous’ button at the bottom left of the page if you need to return to this page.

For those of you who clicked on the Use Indaba Session Console button, you can click the ‘Create a New Mix’ link to the top right of the mixdown player to begin your mix.

 If you’d like to add tracks to be mixed on the Indaba Session Console, click on the ‘Tracks’ tab and select the ‘Upload File’ link at the top right of the list of tracks available to be mixed.  The contest uploader only accepts MP3, 16-bit WAV and AIF formats, so make sure your tracks are all in those formats.  Once you’re done with your mix, create a Mixdown in the Indaba Session Console, and it will appear in the mixdown player on the Mix & Submit Entry page.  You can preview your mixdown on the player, and if you’re happy with the result, select the Submit Entry button to submit your entry to the contest.

If you selected It’s Cool, I’ll Use My Own, you’ll find the separated tracks to be downloaded.  Select the Download button to the right of the tracks or audio pack you want to download.

Remember, downloading files for Contests and/or Featured Sessions does not count towards your monthly bandwidth. Yay!

Once you’ve completed your mix, click the blue Next button at the bottom of the page to get to the Mix & Submit Entry page, and upload your mix.  Once you’ve completed your mix, click the blue Next button at the bottom of the page to get to the Mix & Submit Entry page, and upload your mix.  Again, the uploader only accepts MP3, 16-bit WAV and AIF formats, so make sure your mix is in one of those formats.  Once you upload your mix, you can preview it by clicking the blue play button to the left of your entry.  Make sure to press the Submit Entry button so your entry appears in the contest submissions page!

Well that’s basically it, so feel free to go crazy in the contests now that you know everything you need to know to enter!