Entries tagged with “audio production” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

For the past 13 years, I've traveled to Texas to join the "premier interactive audio think tank," Project Bar-B-Q. There, great minds from Dolby Labs, Karma Labs, Open Labs, Microsoft, Intel, DTS, Dell, and more plot the future of music on computers. Here's our latest report.

Electronic Musician and Mix magazines just launched a wonderful little site compiling a bunch of articles about the Beatles and their pioneering use of music technology.

Ya gotta love gadgets. As a tech reviewer, I get to check out quite a few, but in this new blog series, I'll highlight some of the gear I've bought — with my own money — that's performed especially well. Following a utility-belt theme, I'll focus on gadgets under $100. The first item in my list, though perhaps too big...

One of the most popular segments at my recent self-publishing workshop was about podcasting. Here are some of the production tips I shared, plus ones I didn't have time to mention.

Rick Sammon's blog about photographing thousands of snow geese reminded me of an e-mail I got a while back from a world-champion duck caller. He was looking for a digital audio recorder. Here's what I suggested.

Creating an audio-only version of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" gave me a huge lesson in sound design - a process more analagous to songwriting than I realized...

Please excuse this title, but I need to convey a point: sometimes, it is too easy to be “computer clean” when it would be better to be “humanly messy.” In this case, I’m talking about track automation, and the fact that most people depend on mouse-driven automation curves - even when they don’t do justice to the music.

Whether you use audio to sell cheese, catheters, or to warn the world about epidemics, there’s an effective process for creating the right sound for your audience. I start with some detective work.

Guitarist and programmer Lucas Gonze made an interesting observation about my new experimental Web audio player. Although it's clunky compared to his work, he focused instead on its "cool new ideas" and how they evolved.

As part of today's feature article on making movies out of still photos, Michael W. and Debra Jean Dean whipped up this funny demonstration of good and bad background music. It contains five brief examples. See if you can figure out why each helps or hurts the presentation. Debra Jean reveals the answer after each segment. I burst out laughing...

Clicking an MP3 link is annoyingly unpredictable. Will the file blank out the page? Will it start to download? Will it throw an error? You never know. So, inspired by Del.icio.us Play Tagger, I whipped up this one-click Web audio player.

At last year's NAMM show, Korg told me it plans to take over the world with its KaossPads. These slick X-Y touchpads now control everything from effect processors to mixers. I reviewed the current flagship, the KP3 KaossPad, for Electronic Musician last year and had a blast playing its synth sounds. So I was intrigued to read on Create Digital...

I just downloaded the new Miro player (formally Democracy Player). It's very nice, seems to organize videos reasonably well, is free, multi-platform, open source and includes features I believe all video players should provide. But, when I got to checking it out, I was disappointed with the audio quality on many of the videos featured on Miro's Getting Started page....

Seasoned recording engineers often audition their mixes in mono to check for phasing problems that might occur on the mono speakers in TVs and PA systems. Collapsing a stereo signal to mono also gives you another perspective on how well sounds are blending. But because I run audio straight out of my computer into powered speakers or headphones, I've never...

Two weeks ago, Apple introduced iLife '08, the latest version of their multimedia software bundle - and that means a new version of the impressive GarageBand audio software. Of course, impressive is a strong term, but I would definitely apply it to a piece of software that gives you powerful and easy-to-use recording, mixing, and editing tools as one fifth...

It's the summer of 2007 and it's a bit daunting to pick a point in time to think back on. Where to begin a recap of my exposure to what had been referred to as multimedia? In particular, how did I get here from my original intent of being an electronic music composer? From the start, all things electronic were...

It is my honor and privilege to announce a breakthrough in audio technology, a miracle of modern science, and the most important thing to happen to game music since MIDI got promoted to General -- introducing the Homunculonic Aestheticator, an interactive audio mixing engine with real-time Haptic Applicators, capable of producing multiple adaptive soundtracks encoded with True Human Emotions™, using...

Executive Summary: The easiest-to-use voice processor on the market, with more bang for the buck than anything I've ever seen. The 230 is versatile, valuable and powerful and replaces a rack full of gear. It will help almost any podcaster create big voice-overs with a minimal learning curve and an affordable price.

I've just released a new SynthEdit module with about 80 different low pass filter configurations, plus some high pass as well. RJ_FILTER3 is available from the syntheditusers group at the YAHOO groups site, under the files/modules. Other recent module news: Chris Kelly has released a whole new module library (good luck on getting any info anywhere): some info on the...

There's plenty to love about this software. You can automate more than 150 parameters, use customizable shortcut keys, it has a great interface with lots of graphical metering, it allows you to easily create A/B comparisons, allows the use of undo and history to get to and from your favorite tweaks and you get all of it in 64-bit glory that mimics the sound of tube-modeled devices.