Technology is great, but my favorite portable music creation device is still manuscript paper. Unfortunately, that’s usually meant giant notebooks and/or ungainly stacks of loose-leaf music paper. Reader Joshua Schnable brings good news: one of the best notebook and sketchbook makers in the business, the legendary Moleskine, has released a gorgeous 8-staff music notebook: Moleskine […]

Below: Podcasting in GarageBand. Can’t handle suspense? Here’s a hit: get ready to run Logic on your superfast Mac laptop, podcasting on GarageBand to your iLife Website by no later than March. Consider this story spoiled. CDM’s Lee Sherman is reporting to us live from inside the Macworld Expo. If Apple has anything of note […]

Macworld is always the highlight of the Mac year, and today was no exception. Apple’s keynote focused on the broad consumer market, but there was still plenty of good news for Mac musicians and audio pros. (Plus a few question marks, as usual.) Here’s CDM’s quick take:

Okay, benchmarking geeks, here’s a word problem for you: Apple’s iMac with a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo is twice as fast as the old iMac with a 2.1 GHz G5. How does it compare to a Power Mac? Hard to say, especially since only some apps are native on the new chip, but here’s […]

Can catching a power cord on a laptop destroy it, by tugging your machine across the stage and crashing to the ground? You bet. I’ve had a few “tripping over my PowerBook cord” moments of my own, thankfully none of them resulting in major disasters. So it’s some comfort that, among Apple’s more hyped announcements, […]

Open Labs is slowly teasing out the specs of a new portable music device called the MiKo, promising a complete portable workstation for everything from DJing to music production to VJing and . . . podcasting? The company won’t make a full announcement until the NAMM trade show later this month in Anaheim; in the […]

“But can it hold a tune?” Now it can: Billy writes to tell us that the homebrew drum machine PSP Rhythm, previously PSP Rhythm Composer, has added a host of new features. Not only can you turn your Sony PSP game machine into a drum machine, but now via “parameter locks,” a la the Machinedrum, […]

It’s not every day a major gaming company releases a game that’s also serious interactive art and a unique way of creating music. But that’s exactly what Nintendo of America is doing today, bringing the strange and beautiful music art game ElectroPlankton to the US. (See Nintendo’s game page, press release.)

Sure, there are basic stereo audio editors built into most multitrack audio apps, but for most of us, nothing can replace a trusty stereo waveform editor and batch processor. In that spirit, my review of Peak Pro XT 5 is up on Macworld.com: Peak Pro XT 5: Sound-editing software bundles great restoration, mastering, and CD-creation […]

Open Labs is slowly teasing out the specs of a new portable music device called the MiKo, promising a complete portable workstation for everything from DJing to music production to VJing and . . . podcasting? The company won’t make a full announcement until the NAMM trade show later this month in Anaheim; in the […]