Dangerous-Looking Japanese Speakers

From French-language site Akihabara News: what's a pair of speakers without a nice megaphone on top? I like it, and it looks like it may well be connected to the actual speaker, but this is only a start: can it rotate, too, like a giant Leslie cabinet without the cabinet?

Dierdre: French Electronica Vocalist Breaks Out

Dierdre, formerly singer with Ekova, is now lending her sultry French vocals to a fantastic, diverse solo debut called One. It's just hit the playlist at CDM HQ and sounds fantastic; check out a wealth of links for more information from The Suburbs are Killing Us (currently my favorite listening-to-music blog). Check the North American […]

BetaBugs and Other Free Plugins and Hosts Roundup (Windows)

Hey, kids, you know what time it is? It's Free, um . . . Wednesday. In which we try, mostly unsuccessfully, to keep up with the ongoing flood of free audio stuff for Windows. BetaBugs has added BugPass (bandpass filter which can double as a notch filter), and Moneo (deconstructs a stereo signal and remaps […]

Airfoil: Any App’s Audio to Airport Express

Rogue Amoeba, those virtuosos of routing audio in any Mac OS X app, have released Airfoil, their new application for routing audio from any Mac app to Aiport Express — not just iTunes. (The app was originally going to be called Slipstream, as we reported here.) Finally, you can listen to BBC Radio 6 from […]

Circuit Bending: Reed Ghazala on Free Learning, Teaching

Circuit-bending, the art of creating new instruments from old ones by creatively 'damaging' them with what would normally be no-nos (like short circuiting them), is spreading. Noah Fleischman of Roil Noise wrote in to talk about the resources that had been helpful to him getting started, a letter CDM published February 5. Circuit bender Reed […]

Stanton’s Pretty New Turntables

Digital interfaces and such aside, the turntable is clearly here to stay — having outlived the casette tape, it now looks like it will outlive the CD, too! (Watch out, computers — you could be next.) With sales booming, isn't it time for a design that looks a little more, how shall we say, 21st […]

DJ Mixer Features iPod Connection

After Numark's introduction of a USB DJ mixer, I was immediately excited to read in the fine print that Stanton's added an 'iPod connection' to its "soon-to-be-shipping" RM.404 and 406 4-channel DJ mixers. These are the same mixers with very-cool red backlighting on knobs, via Stanton's Illumiknobs(TM) technology. Wow, the iPod thing really is happening. […]

HP to Develop iPod-style DJ Player/Instrument

We've been saying for ages Apple needs to develop a music player for DJs. Jason O'Grady has been saying it for two years. Well, Apple, HP is likely to beat you to the punch: The owners of the Playlist club in London (which features a night for iPod DJs just like APT here in NYC) […]

Inside Mac Radio: iPod, Mac mini and Mac’s Future

My friend Scott Shepard has a great lineup for this week's Inside Mac Radio Show. There's a  theme: think iPod + Mac mini + OS X = bigger Mac market share. Apple's iPod Czar Stan Ng talks about the much-better battery life on last week's new iPod revision and how Apple plans total world domination […]

MadPlayer Handheld Music Maker, Other Toys

Just listening to music? Now that's a little dull. Kevin of prog-Celtic band The Nettles points us to the MadPlayer, a handheld music toy that features an algorithmic music generator – beat/groove generator, a mic/sampler, karaoke, and Internet access for sharing or connecting to your Mac or PC. Some pros have even picked it up […]