New NIN album offers GarageBand files

Having previously made master tracks available on his website, Trent Reznor is offering a bonus DVD with Nine Inch Nails' newest album release, Y34RZ3R0R3MIX3D (Year Zero Remixed), that includes every track from the original Year Zero in multitrack sessions. The files are all pre-formated for both Garageband and Ableton Live, and are generic WAVE files sampled at 16 bit/44KHz. Y34RZ3R0R3MIX3D's bonus DVD also comes with a demo version of Ableton Live so that fans can immediately start mixing if they don't have access to Garageband. The new album is also being offered as a digital download, and as a five-sided vinyl set, neither of which come with the master tracks. Y34RZ3R0R3MIX3D is available now for $20.

The multitrack recordings are designed to allow Garageband users to remix any of the tracks on Year Zero, as part of a social experiment that Reznor came up with. His original design was to allow users to remix and post online any work that they have done with his samples, just to see the depth and breadth of creativity in the community. Current legal hassles, however, are slowing the implementation of the idea, which he hopes to have resolved in the coming months.

"Several years ago I persuaded my record company to let me begin posting my master recording files on nin.com, in order to see what kind of user-generated content would materialize from my music," Reznor said. "I had no agenda… the main reason I did it was because I thought it was cool and something I would have liked to do if it was available to me. A lot of really fun stuff started to happen….communities developed, web sites were created, even traditional radio got in the game and began playing the fans' mixes. I felt the experiment, despite not having a specific purpose, was a success. So much so that we're now releasing a remix album that includes some of this fan-created material as well as the actual multitrack master files for every song from my latest record, Year Zero."