When a local elementary school produced a play about the California Gold Rush this spring, I volunteered to help with the audio—and got surprising results....

My response to David Battino's post on dealing with USB dongles: Yeah! I suggest they stop using dongles! Seriously, I don't understand the recent resurgence of copy-protection dongles. While the nominal reason is to prevent copies, I feel that what dongles do is prevent many potential users from evaluating and purchasing the program. Let's face it: Not everyone can afford...

As I receive more high-end audio software for review, the copy-protection dongles have been multiplying annoyingly. Swapping them in and out as I launched various programs and plug-ins was becoming a hassle. In one case, a program crashed the computer when I inadvertently quit it while its dongle was unplugged. Thanks to a tiny USB hub I picked up at...

I've been listening to Moments From This Theater: Live, a wonderful album by the great Memphis/Muscle Shoals songwriters Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. It's just the two of them, accompanying themselves on acoustic guitar and electric piano, recorded at 1998 shows in Ireland and England. They play classics including "Dark End Of The Street", "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man",...

GDC, formerly known as the Computer Game Developers Conference, starts in earnest today, and there are scads of audio presentations. Although I’m not a gamer, I always come away from the conference with fascinating insights on the differences between “linear” and interactive music. For instance, in a game, the composer is often more akin to a sculptor than a painter,...

MP3.com just published an interesting article on optimizing the battery life of digital audio players. The article concluded that copy-protected Windows Media Audio tracks knocked several hours off the playback time on each tested player. Savvy readers then pointed out that because WMA is more highly compressed, it naturally requires more processor power to play back. A more conclusive experiment...

For over 50 years recording artists have been bound to one primary system for their careers -- involving getting signed to and distributed by a major record label. Since the Internet age kicked into high gear, the playing field has been leveled. With avenues like dedicated band web sites, iTunes, and MySpace, artists are finding more ways to connect directly...

The QWERTY keyboard is a tricky interface for music-making, but many inventors have come up with equally tricked-out ways to overcome its limitations. Here are a few of my favorites. I’ve long been a fan of Mixman, which turned typing into synchronized grooves. But simply triggering samples doesn’t allow much expressivity, so the company eventually designed its own input controller,...

A few weeks ago, I upgraded to MythTV 0.19. For the most part, the upgrade is worthwhile, though I've had a few problems. On the plus side: My favorite addition is the signal strength meter. Adjusting the antenna with previous versions involved setting the antenna in a trial position, watching for half an hour, and counting the number of picture...

Looking to do more with FireWire audio on Windows? CEntrance has released a free beta version of its universal audio driver. Among the features are device aggregation (which lets you use multiple FireWire audio interfaces with a single program) and multi-host capability (which lets multiple programs address a single interface). Those were among the top requests from developers at last...