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 […]

Let’s play a game. Here’s how it goes: I read a headline, you feign surprise. “Sony-BMG engaged in widespread payola.” “Sony-BMG settles in case regarding payments to radio stations.” “Radio groups refuse to comment.” (see Digital Music weblog or your local paper) Okay, well here’s one that brings a little surprise. According to Billboard Radio […]

Several sites are reporting that M-Audio has introduced a new 88-key stage piano, but it’s not new: in fact, Ken “King of Keys Hardware” Hughes from Keyboard Magazine has a great review of the ProKeys88 from Keyboard’s July issue. Ken’s verdict: a great keyboard, an incredible price (street around US$600 from what I can see), […]

While image technology has leaped forward, headphones and hearing aids still resemble 19th-Century tech. A show opening this week in London brings together designers seeking to change that. Ideas on view include glasses with built-in earphones that let you listen directionally to whatever you’re looking at, and “goldfish” earphones that repeat whatever someone said in […]