O’Reilly Reviews Zoom H4 in Hawaii: Good, with Quirks

We’ve been watching Zoom’s upcoming, unannounced $199 H2 recorder, seen at NAMM. The H2 has the advantage of price and flexible mic patterns for its built-in mic. But its shipping, larger sibling, the $299 H4, may be a better choice, depending on your needs. The H4 has basic 4-track operation, built-in effects, X/Y-pattern mics, and […]

Pricey Computers and Cheap Glitch-Making Thrills

Gadget sites usually stay away from pro audio, but a no-compromise, three-display, $11,000+ Core 2 Extreme BTO PC from Altium can apparently get even Engadget’s blood pumping. Maybe they need a bigger machine to edit podcasts? Since we prefer cheap thrills here, look instead to Dan Nigrin’s just-released Major Malfunction plug-in for Ableton Live. (Mac/Universal, […]

DVGuru is Gone, But Their Content Lives On

DVGuru’s Randall has announced that today is their final day of operation. They will be sorely missed. A quick glance at my Bloglines subscription tells me that 340 people are going to have a little hole in their feed tomorrow. Their content has been a great mix of news, howtos and interviews. Fortunately it’s all […]

Great Book Endorsement

There are some strange sites out there. This one, found via Google Alerts, apparently is a Russian site designed to lure readers looking for illegal downloadable PDFs of books. As it happens, the page for my book seems to be stolen from the Amazon.com description; there’s no pirated copy of my book available. (Too bad; […]

Pirates and Knitting

High-end audio products maker SSL doesn’t just have their eccentric product manager do sales pitches in pirate talk, says Music thing. The whole company has Pirate Friday and uses “Arrgh-Harrgh” as their sales shout. Cool, but I want to find an audio company that pretends to be deadly ninjas. In meatspace, tonight I’ll be in […]

28 Free Gig Posters in 28 Days: CDM’s Designer Nat Plans for a Busy February

Have a gig coming up? Need a rocking poster to publicise said gig to the wider community? You should check out Nat’s 28 Posters in 28 Days Poster Challenge! You know you’re going to get a great result, because Nat designed this here website, and CDMo, and the forums. You should get in quick, however, […]

Windows Vista Launch: Bill Gates on Daily Show

Peter has been busy on CDMu looking at Vista Compatibility. Unfortunately, some of us aren’t on cool PR lists and getting free copies of Vista at product launches, so it might be a while until I setup a Vista system and start testing things out. In the meantime: Bill Gates on the Daily Show.

Zillion-Keyed Keyboards, New Musical Layouts, and Microtonal Gadgets

My God … it’s full of keys! While the black-and-white piano-style keyboard layout remains the standard, designers still look for ways of reinventing pitch in music controllers. Sometimes the aim is to make it easier to play harmonies (top) … and sometimes it’s 211 keys-per-octave microtonal mayhem.

Soundabout Preview: Always-present Mac Audio Utility

AudioEase previewed a new utility at NAMM that integrates with your Mac to provide ever-present sound file previewing, editing, and sample utilities. (Thanks to our readers who picked up on this in Barry Wood’s NAMM Oddities.) Soundabout has a lot of tricks up its sleeve: It provides waveform previewing, auditioning, and selection tools. It integrates […]

NAMM: Barry Wood’s Legendary NAMM Oddities for ’07

It wouldn’t be a winter NAMM music trade show without the galleries of musical curiosities that are Barry Wood’s NAMM Oddities. Barry’s finds range from the unique and useful to the utterly baffling. Many of the techno geek toys aren’t strictly new, but they are strictly strange and unusual. And there’s plenty of evidence to […]