Usually nothing interests me less than distribution deals, but this one caught my eye. Yamaha, the only synth and instrument maker I know of that also makes jetskis, has partnered with our favorite French synth geek-gurus, Arturia. Arturia’s products, from its Moog-endorsed analog emulations to the Storm synth studio, will now be distributed here in […]

We hear a lot about studios in software, but the “studio in a box” concept lives on. Yamaha’s new portable digital audio workstations integrate a mixing console, recording, effects, and mastering — and they hook up to USB 2.0, so Yamaha’s clearly thinking of these as companions to your computer, not replacements. You can check […]

Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog: buy a new PowerBook, Power Mac, or Xserve, and Apple will drop the price of Logic Pro from $1000 to $500. I’ve been impressed by performance on the top-end Power Mac G5 and current generation PowerBook G4, so it sounds like a good deal — if you’ve got the cash […]

Remember when people singing bad covers of rock songs was called karaoke and didn’t involve a national television audience? Oh, for those more innocent times. Now we’re subjected to one musical reality TV show after another. The latest combines The Apprentice and Survivor (same producer), with American Idol; bands compete to be the lead singer […]

Be vewy vewy qwiet — I’m hunting Widgets. Yes, widgets are all the rage these days. Between Apple’s Dashboard, included with Mac OS X Tiger, and Konfabulator, which just became free for Windows and Mac and has morphed into Yahoo! Widgets, nary a desktop shall be without little floating things. The idea isn’t entirely new […]

I asked for more truly useful music widgets, and did reader Justin Maxwell ever respond — a huge list of stuff here:BPM Widget Tap tempo and get BPM Audio Calculator BPM conversion milliseconds (as observed here previously Chord Reference Another guitar chord reference, with especially slick graphics ittyBittyMIDI My favorite of these — monitors incoming […]

Cris (aka atariboy) sends us Theremin emulators for your PDA — it’s theremin to go. Cris writes: Pete Moss ThereMini (US$10): This guy has a Theremin emulator with MIDI out, no less! For PalmOS on his Palm software page. Got a PocketPC? check out Clanger. (Free) You can even change the tremelo rate and decay […]

Numark has posted full details of their US$399-list iPod DJ mixer on their site; check out the product details and specs, or see their PDF product overview and FAQ. Yes, those controls work on the iPod, the dock charges the Pods, and you can upload music onto the iPod via USB. No, there’s no new […]

Still like your recorded media removable? A 1GB MiniDisc is just US$7 — meaning you can stock up on them a lot more easily than you can CompactFlash cards. While previous MiniDisc recorders suffered from fidelity loss and timing issues due to their ATRAC compression, new Hi-MD recorders use standard uncompressed PCM. Sony has two […]

Windows users have been begging me for more coverage, but here’s one for the Apple crowd, nonetheless: Apple has updated both its iBook and Mac Mini. The across-the-board change is more RAM: Finally, every Mac they sell comes with 512MB of RAM. (They don’t deserve any slap on the back for that; the previous RAM […]