Who said all soft synths have to look, work, and sound the same? For better or worse, Gaugear’s interface is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Gaugear is one of the gems that appeared along with the 5.1 update to Native Instruments Reaktor. (“5.1” to most developers means a bug fix or two, but Native Instruments […]

Well, I was joking the other day that it’s too bad Silicon Alley, the popular name for New York as tech center, isn’t still thriving. Apparently, I’m wrong. The New York Times today reports Silicon Alley is again on the rise, fueled partly by the Web and blog publishing. So, clearly, that means upstart music […]

A lot of audio interfaces have come and gone here. My favorite remains my trusted MOTU 828. Why? It has rock-solid drivers that have never caused trouble on Mac or PC, and it sounds terrific. Unfortunately, it’s also rather big and heavy as a full rack-space unit. That’s why I’m excited to see MOTU is […]

I’m still partial to saving up cash for a full-featured, full-sized tablet, but in case you haven’t been watching discussion on my last story on the new Ultra-Mobile PC platform, there are some interesting musical uses for a portable tablet: Portable notation: This one’s the biggie. The UMPC is more than capable of running notation […]

As reported here way back in January, Moog Music has been widely expected to introduce a major new product at Musik Messe. Now, Moog is kicking the hype into full gear, with a tantalizing image that suggests (drum roll please) a ground-breaking new product that has a knob! And this knob looks, well, much like […]

The hilarious send-up of educational films that was Look Around You: Music was only the beginning. BBC comedy show Look Around You has its own fantastic website filled with still more goodies. And it gives us a much clearer idea of the future of music technology than, say, a teaser from Moog. Readers have been […]

Did you opt for a laptop over a tablet when you bought your latest mobile PC? You can’t really be blamed. Tablets tend to offer less performance for the money, and hit the middle or worse overall on key audio benchmarks like processor speed, hard disk, and I/O. But you’ve also missed out: unlike a […]

This dead-on send-up of British educational programming takes a look at the world of music and music-making, from that music you young people like so much (“the Bensons, or the Ombudsman”) to the “Harrington 1200” music synth shown here, which you’ve probably never seen “because it costs almost a thousand pounds.” (Boy, would that you […]

Anyone trying to follow announcements out of the Intel Developer Forum this week can be forgiven for developing a headache: One Day. Four Keynotes. Infinite Leaps. [Intel.com] Infinite leaps? I think maybe Intel’s going a little nuts now that they’re working with Apple, headquartered on Infinite Loop. (Only Apple would name their office drive after […]

Todd Hartmann writes to say he’s updated his MIDI splitter / transposer utility, built in Java for Windows, Mac, and (if you know what you’re doing) Linux. Plenty of other tools can do this, but Todd’s tool is free, cross-platform, portable (you can take text-file preferences with you), and — here’s the cool part for […]