Music Software

Record with your heroes

Correction: The original post implied that the Church is no longer active. In fact, the band has been touring and putting out albums continuously for almost 30 years, and Tim Powles is still their drummer. Apologies for the mistake.

Modern musical technology makes the world smaller.

Example: Seattle band Half Light are big fans of Australian art-rock band The Church. [Disclosure: I played bass with another incarnation of Half Light in 2004 and 2005 and am still friendly with the band.] Americans of a certain age probably remember The Church's 1987 hit "Under the Milky Way," but … Read more

Vista and pro audio

Last fall, Steve Ball, Microsoft's program manager for sound in Vista, posted a blog entry explaining some of the reasons why Windows audio can be glitchy. (That was supposed to be "Part 1" of a series; we're still waiting for Part 2.)

Today, Guardian writer Tim Anderson picks up the thread with an article called "Why Vista Sounds Worse." In addition to citing Ball's blog posting, he talks to the CTO for Cakewalk (a division of Roland that makes consumer and professional audio software) and an engineer at Steinberg (which makes the popular … Read more

Qtrax: No music yet

Correction: I originally posted that Qtrax uses MusicIP. According to a PR representative from that company, Qtrax has no deal with MusicIP--the companies have talked, but no deal has been signed. Apologies for not double-checking all my facts.

I was finally able to get the Qtrax 0.2 beta client, and it's clearly based on Songbird.

Songbird defies easy summarization: it's an open-source project, based on the Mozilla platform, that intends to ease the creation of digital media apps. The basic app is a straightforward music library organizer and player (some of Songbird's founders worked on Winamp), … Read more

Yahoo tool eases music playback from personal Web pages

If you often link to music files from your personal Web page or blog, and have some control over the code on that page, Yahoo's got an interesting tool for you. With a few lines of very simple Javascript code, you can add small "play" buttons that link to specific songs. When users click those buttons, the Yahoo Media Player launches, letting visitors play the song without leaving your page. There was a previous iteration of the Player, but it worked only on Yahoo Music and linked only to music files from Yahoo's own site.

How does it work? Judge for yourself--these are two songs from old bands on which I played bass (so I have at least a plausible claim to partial copyright). I simply followed the instructions here and here (to insert album covers). Click on the small arrows (after the page break) and they'll play right within the Yahoo Media Player at the bottom left of the page. (Worked for me on Firefox on Windows XP, your mileage may vary!)

Click the 'Read More' button below to listen to the tracks.… Read more

Nokia Music Store

Update: a spokesperson from Nokia contacted me and let me know that, despite what the booth staffers told me, Nokia has "not announced plans or a timeline for the U.S. market" regarding a music store. So we'll have to wait and see.

I stopped by the packed Nokia booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to get an update on the Nokia Music Store announced over the summer. It's already online in the U.K. (PC only), with a library of nearly 3 million songs.

The Web-based store looks fairly standard. But according … Read more

Gates and Guitar Hero

Tonight, Bill Gates gave his last CES keynote before retiring from Microsoft. (Prediction: he'll give a keynote again, but probably not next year). Though entertaining and occasionally educational--Windows Live Photo Gallery got some well-deserved spotlight time for its panorama feature--there wasn't much about digital audio in it.

However, the final set piece featured a Guitar Hero III battle between Gates and Microsoft Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach. Each brought in a ringer--Bach got a Guitar Hero championship who shredded the introduction to Guns N Roses "Welcome to the Jungle." Gates, never to be trumped, … Read more

LG Voyager and Verizon V Cast

At CES a day before it opens, and although I've been able to sneak into some of the exhibition halls with my press pass, security's wised up and closed the others off to all but people setting up. So I spent a few minutes in the Verizon-sponsored portion of the press booth playing with LG's Voyager 10000, a would-be competitor to the iPhone. They're asking $300 plus a two-year contract commitment--that's $99 cheaper than the least-expensive iPhone, but the Voyager comes with much less memory (this one had 300MB on board), so you'll have … Read more

Waiting for Pacemaker

Announced back in May, the Pacemaker sounds like an amazing gadget: a 120GB portable music player that functions like a portable DJ mixing table. Essentially, it plays two tracks at once and lets you crossfade between them, plus play with effects like looping and pitch bending. Check out the Flash demo here.

There's also a software application, the Pacemaker Editor, that functions like a traditional music player and library manager (think iTunes, Windows Media Player, or WinAmp), only with support for creating mixes. It's coming out in December, according to the Web site.

Well, today's the last … Read more

10 predictions for 2008

I've always preferred prognostication to nostalgia, so rather than replay the best of 2007, I'll use these late December doldrums to make 10 predictions for the coming year. Some editors will warn you that this kind of list is suicide--it's too easy for everybody to look back a year later and see where you were wrong--but it hasn't hurt Cringely, so here goes. In no particular order.

DRM will die. The trendline is clear--Apple's been selling DRM-free tunes on iTunes since May, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store has three of the four majors signed up, … Read more

Recording in Garage Band

It's intellectually lazy to divide the world into two types of people, but when it comes to using computers to create music, it seems to be true.

The first group are what I'd call digital music enthusiasts. They compose almost exclusively at a computer, using a MIDI controller and/or sounds from a wide variety of third-party digital sources--loops from a program like ACID, beats and virtual synthesizers from a program like Reason, short samples that they recorded themselves or spliced from another source.

I'm a member of the second group, the reluctant analog dinosaurs. We came … Read more