Portable music player technology isn’t as simple as it once was. With digital music files have come new restrictions from the music labels on how music is played and transferred, as well as discussion of various specifications for connecting devices to computers. In a June 16 story on Platform-Agnostic Drag-and-Drop Music Listening, I suggested lovers […]

In our last episode, I was assembling my fantastic new portable Shuttle PC in glorious comic book form. I got as far as booting Ubuntu Linux off a CD, but obviously I wouldn’t want to stop there. Next steps: getting the onboard NVIDIA RAID working, and making a lean, livable Windows XP install I won’t […]

Propellerhead has just unveiled three updates, Reason 3.05 for Mac, and ReWire 1.7 and an updated REX library for Mac and Windows. The big story is native compatibility of Intel-native Macs for Reason, but that’s not the only story. Just about everyone will benefit from the new versions, on PowerPC and Intel Macs, and Windows […]

Ever suffered garbled audio on Windows and couldn’t figure out why? Driver settings were likely to blame. Audio on the Mac is now essentially plug and play; I don’t remember the last time I even touched an audio driver setting other than to switch from one device to another (switching between devices also works better […]

Ah, “undocumented features.” Here’s my least favorite MIDI and audio “feature” in Windows: since Windows 2000, the operating system imposes an arbitrary limit of ten 32-bit audio (wave) and MIDI device drivers on the system. These are actually 10 driver entries in the Registry, so you don’t have to have 10 USB keyboards to hit […]

Last week, the largest consumer technology show in the world descended on Las Vegas, CES. And what did we get? Well, basically, a lot of boring announcements, a few fairly cool portable media devices, lots of non-shipping Skype devices, and Bill Gates telling us things we already knew about Windows Vista. Afterwards, we had lots […]

Let’s cut straight through the marketing-speak on the Intel’s new notebook platform. As usual, Intel is likely to give its new platform a confusing name that sounds like a pharmaceutical product (Centrino?), and will make weirdly vague feature claims, like the new platform will be “better at running music.” (If they meant running Cakewalk SONAR […]

AES used to be an insider’s show for audio engineers and academics, but that’s not the case any more. Now, with the audio industry pumping out new products, it’s a show to watch for new gear. (For the uninitiated, that’s AES as in Audio Engineering Society, the folks who gave us, among other things, the […]