Once again, virtual instrument maestro Gary Garritan has compiled a collection of Christmas carols recorded by his customers. You can download all 19 MP3s plus cover art to make your own CD (or iTunes covers) from his Xmas page. I'm grabbing them right now with the handy Firefox extension DownThemAll. This year, Garritan's core software orchestral and band instruments are...

Sony just unveiled an affordable version of its $2,000 ultimate handheld recorder, and we just got our review unit. Which features do you want us to scrutinize?

Sometimes the best way to overcome annoyances is to embrace them and make them your own. To protest the way rampant commercialism has corrupted Christmas carols, O'Reilly author Michael W. Dean recorded "God Rest Ye Merry Bonzo." This "perverted Xmas music" mates a drum loop from Led Zep's "Bonzo" Bonham with vocals, bass, sleigh bells (!), and an e-mailed guitar...

I feel a little like Bob Moog today — or maybe Adolphe Sax. While Googling for one of my articles, I discovered a musical instrument called the Battino: You play it by whacking a wooden ball with a hammer, causing the ball to tumble across some pegs and strike a bell. "The balls make a pleasing clickety-clack sound as they...

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....

Name a wildly popular entertainment technology that suddenly perished because its stewards didn't innovate. Here are your clues: It was introduced in the '70s. It became more popular in the '80s and hugely popular in the '90s. By the turn of the century there were 9,000 titles available.

With 486 comments at last count, our discussion on the Zoom H2 handheld surround recorder is teeming with questions and tips. One of the latest struck me, because I'd been wondering about this myself. Reader Lee Wong wrote: Help! Does anyone have a schematic they can share for making a really small, portable preamp so I can stick my Soundman...

I see Visual VST/i Programming: Synthedit is out now. I haven't sighted it yet, but it includes some of my custom SynthEdit modules, so it is quite fun for me. SynthEdit is a shareware application for PC that is a kind of modular synthesizer; it gained a lot of traction early because it had one killer feature in particular: you...

I'm just back from my 14^th trip to Texas to participate in one of the Fat Man's amazing digital media conferences. This one was called Project Horseshoe, and dedicated to "solving game design's toughest problems." If history holds, this improbable but beloved conference will have far-reaching results.

For anyone immersed in the digital music space, the past couple of weeks have brought some shifts that are reasonably seismic in nature relative to the shifting balance of power from record labels to artists. Here's a summary of some the most recent (and significant) activities to highlight what's going on: Oct 1st -- Radiohead upsets the apple cart by...