Music Software

Answers to Spotify questions

A follow-up to yesterday's post about Spotify, which is poised to become my new favorite online music service. Because the company is based in Europe (headquarters in London, R&D in Stockholm), we missed one another because of the time change, but the company got back to me with some answers to my questions late last night.

First, Spotify's unavailability in the U.S. isn't only because of the complexities of music licensing, but also because the company wants to make sure it can scale reliably in its home market before expanding overseas. Fair enough--one of … Read more

Spotify could become the best music service ever

I've been reading good buzz about Spotify for several months now, but the noise seems to have reached a fever pitch with recent coverage by music industry blogger Bob Lefsetz and Sunday's announcement that the new U2 album, "No Line on the Horizon," is available on Spotify in several European countries right now--a week before its official worldwide release date of March 2.

Some quick background: the promise of Spotify is music, on-demand, from any computer with an Internet connection. Which sounds a lot like Rhapsody, Napster, Microsoft's Zune Pass, or any other of the … Read more

Innovative USB-recording interfaces at NAMM

I didn't imagine there was much room for innovation in USB-recording interfaces, but at the 2009 NAMM show--the annual convention for buyers and sellers of professional music gear (read: music gearhead paradise)--a couple of companies introduced some new takes on this very prosaic, but necessary, piece of gear.

For the uninitiated: A recording interface is the bridge between your musical output and your computer. You attach it to the computer, then plug your instrument (or multiple instruments, or output of a mixing board) into it, and voila. There are countless types of interfaces at all levels of price and complexity, but for home musicians who just want a quick way to get their musical ideas down on their hard drives, an inexpensive USB interface is the way to go. M-Audio is probably the best-known brand at this level, although Tascam and Edirol (part of Roland) are somewhat common as well.

… Read more

Van Halen meets Songsmith

This is for those of you still recovering from the viral video promoting Songsmith, Microsoft's new reverse-karaoke program that lets you sing into a computer microphone, then creates a simple backing track comprised of synthesized piano and drums.

David Lee Roth. "Running With the Devil." Backed up by Songsmith. Listen here, and you'll never be the same.

In spite of all the scorn Songsmith has gotten in the last few days, mainly because of that painful advertisement, I think it's a pretty cool piece of software. I don't know if it's worth $30--a … Read more

Too lazy for Pandora? Try Slacker

Correction: as a commenter pointed out, you can in fact create stations on Slacker based on a favorite artist or song--you select "Find Music," then search by artist or title and it will build a station around your search. I thought this feature was missing on the iPhone app. Now, you cannot customize those stations by adding "seeds" like you can on Pandora, nor can you use the Fine Tune feature to tweak them, but the basic idea--stations based on a particular artist or song--is available. My bad.

Slacker released its radio app for the iPhone … Read more

Free trial version of Sonar 8

A digital-audio workstation is probably the most important purchase an audio engineer has to make--it's the command and control center for your entire computer-based recording rig, and you'll be spending most of your time in it.

Unfortunately, pro-level DAWs are complicated pieces of software, and everybody's got their own opinion about what's best--ProTools is widely considered the industry standard, but I know several experienced engineers who don't like it at all.

Because of its complexity and importance, choosing a DAW is not the kind of decision you can make from reading reviews alone, or … Read more

Microsoft's online chief holds music search patent

When Microsoft hired Qi Lu to run its online business last week, the company trumpeted the fact that Lu holds 20 patents.

Patents are far from rare at Microsoft--many developers and researchers hold them--but the online business has typically been led by people with a business or marketing background. That hasn't been working out too well, so it's putting a geek in charge.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer's Microsoft reporter, Joe Tartakoff, did a little digging on Tuesday to uncover exactly what kinds of patents Lu holds. Most interesting to me, one of them relates to music.

Specifically, … Read more

New bundles would make Sonos unstoppable

I've been a fan of the Sonos Multi-Room Music System ever since I saw it in action at a neighbor's house a couple summers ago. There's no other solution that gives you such easy access to so much music in so many places in your house, whether that music is stored on your computer or delivered via partnerships with Internet music providers like Last.fm (owned by CBS, which also owns CNET), Pandora, or Rhapsody.

Recently, Sonos sent me a system to test out with their new free iPhone controller (more about that later), and I came … Read more

Eleven years later, 'Zaireeka' is within reach

In 1997, when the Flaming Lips released Zaireeka, I'd been following the antics of their leader Wayne Coyne pretty closely.

His Boombox Experiment, which involved 40 boomboxes and an equal number of nearly identical cassettes, was a great demonstration of how music is an actual physical presence in a room. As an audience member walked among the boomboxes, the sound changed. That's the power of acoustics, which is often ignored by gear freaks but is absolutely critical in everything from recording to live performance to setting up your home stereo correctly.

Zaireeka--the word is a combination of "… Read more