This first O'Reilly Digital Media blog by a 14-year veteran developer of musician software invites you to meet the musicians hiding in your computer, ready to help you compose and arrange your own music.

A quick overview revealed the size of the task: I would have to produce about 4 hours of music, skit material and ambient sound to properly set the mood. In five days. With no wiggle room.

NaNoWriMo challenges participants to write a complete 50,000-word novel from scratch in 30 days. Now why on Earth would you want to put yourself through such an ordeal? There's really only one reason.

It's Halloween again, and what better way to set the mood than with a new soundscape album from Mark Greenfield, aka Darwin Chamber? Thanks to intelligent, computer-aided composition, it's much more immersive than the standard serving of ghost moans, melodramatic laughter, and werewolf howls.

My brother asked me how to record a yoga session...given that the instructor moves around a lot during the lesson. After several emails it turns out that there was no video. Which changes everything. So I writes back as follows: Wait a minute, no video? Get an H2, it has a little handle you attach to the bottom. Build a...

Is Time Machine all I need you need to stay operational on a daily basis? I think it comes pretty close. But, I took a look at additional options to keep me and my Macs operational on a daily basis.

You can find some great stories at the Audio Engineering Society show. This one bordered on the legendary: A photographer snatches a $2,500 digital audio recorder from the jaws of death.

One member of the "Trio of Album Artwork Utilities for iTunes" that I wrote about three weeks ago was CoverScout. Because there were some minor "misunderstandings" between this software and iTunes 8, I was expecting an update that would fix these issues, and that update came out last Friday. Little did I know, however, that the developers were working on a new major release of the software, as well!

Back in the days when I used to write on the Apple Discussions Forums under the pseudonym of Mimi — I know, I know —, the Mac OS X Installer was a rather sorry mess. Today, it's a fine piece of updating goodness, save for one particular weakness: it does not automatically download and install updates on a freshly initialized...

In my Photoshop class yesterday at PhotoPlus Expo in New York, many of the attendees were there to get information for a big decision: whether or not to upgrade to Photoshop CS4. I showed them the entire workflow with CS4 -- from downloading images to finishing off the best of them in Photoshop. As I suspected, many did not realize...