Dave Smith Instruments originally planned only to tease their upcoming drum machine exclusively in a banner at the NAMM show: no word outside the insider trade show. Not in the Internet age: word of a new product from synth legend Dave Smith and drum machine/MPC legend quickly had blogs and forums abuzz. Dave Smith himself […]

HD4Indies’ Mike points out the Canon HV20 “Compact HDV Camcorder”. It’s has an HD (1920x1080p) CMOS sensor, records HDV to DV tapes, and sports an HDMI out for uncompressed capture. Mike likes the look of it for a “learner camera”, to me this looks like an ideal unit for tethered shooting of visuals, studio shoots […]

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 […]

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’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 […]

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; […]

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 […]

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, […]

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.

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.