With New York City close to breaking its all-time record heat record of 101 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s over 38 degrees Celsius), non-renewable energy costs soaring, and Con Edison unable to deliver reliable electricity, it seems like an odd time to be advocating electronically-powered music. It must be time for solar power. Via Rozling on the […]

I got a chance to work with the inexpensive (US$99) but high-quality library of acoustic drum kits for Reason, Reason Drum Kits, in a brief review for Keyboard Magazine. You can read the full review online. What most impressed me was how cleverly the samples were integrated with Reason: Via what Propellerhead calls â€Å“hyper-sampling,â€Â? you […]

Perfectionism is the enemy of productivity, in music making, in blog posts, and in forum messages: Less activity in the forums … because there’s no “off-topic” forum We know you’re out surfing in this beautiful summer weather, or, erm, trying to prevent death by heat exhaustion here in the newly globally-warmed United States (101 in […]

Director Joseph Kahn lives in one crazy world. It’s a world in which sci-fi, comics, pop culture, and movies implode on one another into an insanely mashed-up mixup of media, delivered with a strong dose of digital effects. (Holy metaculture, Batman!) If anyone could save music videos, Kahn is your man. The Korean creative’s latest […]

Director Joseph Kahn lives in one crazy world. It’s a world in which sci-fi, comics, pop culture, and movies implode on one another into an insanely mashed-up mixup of media, delivered with a strong dose of digital effects. (Holy metaculture, Batman!) If anyone could save music videos, Kahn is your man. The Korean creative’s latest […]

Welcome starving visualists! I know there’s plenty of you reading this. Well, perhaps not starving, but you’d definitely like more pocket money so you can buy some of the cool stuff you’re seeing on CDMo or CDMu. You’ve got plenty of original material right? Now all you need is a way for that material to […]

Ed.: While we slave away on some bigger feature stories to come — just you wait, once we’re, erm, done programming — Jaymis brings us a roundup of all things goodness. Bon Appetit! -PK Hack your Point and Shoot Further to my Enough Megapixels/DIY time-slice rig idea: How to wire a Canon A80 for cable […]

Love mayhem? Love metal music, throttled all the way up into a “War Cry”? QWERTY keyboard ain’t quite gonna cut it. You’ll want to build your own airplane throttle force feedback controller to transmit MIDI. Hint: it might help if you’re a skilled artist and sculptor in the Visual Arts MFA program at the University […]

As musicians, it matters to us, I think, how music is consumed and distributed. Dave McLauchlan of the Windows Media Devices Group at Microsoft had plenty to say about the technologies that drive their devices. As a member of the team behind PlaysForSure, though, he also had some mythbusting to do on the Zune front. […]

Portable music player technology isn’t as simple as it once was. With digital music files have come new restrictions from the music labels on how music is played and transferred, as well as discussion of various specifications for connecting devices to computers. In a June 16 story on Platform-Agnostic Drag-and-Drop Music Listening, I suggested lovers […]