Once again, America's biggest musical instrument trade show was an amazing mix of futuristic technology, fabulous performances, and freaky products. Here are some of my favorites, starting with portable audio recorders.

After a full year+ of writing about Mac apps here, I took a look at which ones I still use. The process of going through my old blog items and figuring out which apps I use frequently, infrequently, and nearly-never was an interesting one. Here's what I found...

Today is the Mac's 25th birthday. Watching this YouTube video of Steve Jobs pulling it out of the bag in 1984, I was amused to see how sound has been part of this computer from the beginning. The speech synthesizer comes in around 2:51. It sounds like FM synthesis; anyone have more details?

For the first time in years, the Mac has been widely publicised as being used in a governmental setting. For the Mac community, this can only mean great things are afoot, regardless of the technology choices made by the new administration in the long run. Indeed, while it is no secret that governments and governmental agencies have dabbled in Mac...

Between committments at Macworld at the Moscone Center I wandered over and indulged my dome photography habit by photographing the dome in the Westfield shopping mall in downtown San Francisco. I believe the dome itself is antique, but it's placed in an entirely modern shopping mall. Cameo, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. It's easy with most domes...

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.

In a very tough environment, where consumers (supposedly) aren’t spending and high-end products don’t get bought, Apple just took industry analysts’ projections out to the proverbial woodshed and gave them a good old fashioned whupping.

I took a quick look at the free ClamXav anti-virus software for OS X last month. However, I didn't have any malware to test with it. Well, I found my archive of captive test malware and tried it out with ClamXav.

At the recent MacWorld expo, Apple made some key announcements around iTunes that many of us have been anticipating for awhile. Namely, they are removing anticopying restrictions from iTunes, which will allow consumers to freely move the songs around between their PCs, mobile phones, and other digital devices. This is not a big surprise in that consumers have voiced anti-DRM...

In the comments to my near-desaster story of last week, several readers suggested I should have a look at a utility called AppleJack. In hindsight, I cannot tell whether AppleJack would have been able to fix the problems that caused my Mac to refuse me access to my main user account. I sure wish, though, that I had it installed so I could at least have given it a try.