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If you make a process easy enough, you can change the world. In 1995, two MIT graduates set out to make music-making easy. Now millions of people play their product, and the inventors are releasing the developer tools for free.
The idea that you own your music is a MYTH, promulgated by the record companies to ensure their continued profitability! But soon, all that's going to change, because Cloud services will dramatically change the way you listen to music.
Green Technologies and Interactive Audio are two fields not generally considered related, but a new trend may change that: "Generated Sounds for Electric Vehicles", aka "EV Audio", aka "CarTunes". When I first heard that "electric cars are so quiet, manufacturers want them to make noise", I had a strong memory flashback to 1995, when I was contracted to produce my first ringtone (Fur Elise for Sprint PCS). At the time, I thought "mobile phone plays melody when it rings" was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard of; now, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. If you think audio personalization of your cellphone is an important statement of your individuality (as many do), imagine how much more important personalizing the sound of your car will be!
Ableton's Live is one of the top music creation and performance platforms out there. It is a complete music suite with instruments, sound management and a performance interface. It is used by DJs, bands, and hobbyists. At a cost of several hundred dollars Live is within reach of most tech-savvy musicians. This fall Ableton is releasing Max For Live, an API of sorts. Max For Live is going to introduce a new generation of musicians to (visual) programming. And I don't think that they'll stop at playing around with the Ableton Live controls.
Project Bar-B-Q is a great place to discover tomorrow's audio technology, so I was intrigued when someone on the mailing list mentioned the new Kerchoonz K-box portable speaker. Could "gel audio technology" really deliver unprecedented bass from a tiny box? The short answer is yes.
Cakewalk has been reprogramming PCs into music studios since the days of DOS. Today, CTO Noel Borthwick explained the deep, technical details of how the architectural changes in Windows 7 will help (and sometimes hinder) audio processing.
Former O'Reilly web producer Justin Watt just made a surprisingly cool video by combining still photos with a soundtrack made in Looptastic, a $5 iPhone app. (There are also free and 99-cent versions.) Justin used FFmpeg (also free) to sequence the still images, overlay the soundtrack, and render the movie.
Here's a super-easy way to play multiple movies in the same area on a webpage. No JavaScript required, and it works on iPhone too.
Zoom packs a staggering number of features into its audio gear. Here are a few that were surprisingly useful when I had to record some magazine and radio demos.
A radio DJ who runs her set from iTunes asked me if I could modify one of my fade-out AppleScripts. She wanted to end a song on demand and make iTunes crossfade into the next song on the playlist. I...
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