In today's O'Reilly Digital Media feature, Jochen Wolters talks about a transformative music technology experience—watching singer Don Lewis play a Roland VP-550 vocoder keyboard. "It was the most uplifting start into a trade show day I ever had," Jochen told me. Jochen put a link to a YouTube video of Lewis in the article, but I've embedded it here for...

You've no doubt heard that EMI announced this past week that they'll be releasing higher quality DRM-free songs at a premium price per download, starting with a limited term exclusive on iTunes. There's a lot of buzz about the implications of this announcement. One important question is whether the other three major labels will follow suit (all the labels renew...

NPR did a clever demonstration on Morning Edition this week. To illustrate how much money the 2008 presidential candidates raised last quarter, the announcer played a music clip—one beat of a song for each million dollars. Of course, NPR can't show graphs on radio, but for me, the audio "visualization" was much more visceral than seeing a bar graph. One...

Electronic Musician has an article up called Twelve under a Hundred on inexpensive VST synthesizers: lo and behold, my Neumixtutrautonium plugin made it! (The list is not an absolute top 12 just a list of the free synths they tried and liked the best.) This is despite all my best efforts: after someone complained about some minor detail in the...

Fox news reports that the sons of the Beatles (specifically, Julian Lennon, Dhani Harrison, Zak Starkey, and James McCartney) are recording a new CD together that will kick-off a global tour in early 2008. Music featured on the tour will be a combination of their own new music as a group, and of course lots of Beatles tunes. The name...

Ever since I started my podcast, I've been searching for ways to improve the quality of the voiceover, and today I finally made a breakthrough. Realizing that every show has been slightly better, I analyzed the changes I'd made along the way. Changing mics made a big difference; the Rode Podcaster I'm using now puts out better highs and lows...

Over on O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony blog, 3D audio developer Keith Weiner describes what happened when select Second Life players got hold of his positional audio technology: They used it to perform live music for each other. I've been involved in developing this technology for almost 10 years. I know intimately its architecture and components. I worked through the process of...

Grant Richter of modular synthesizer manufacturer Wiard has called for the module-buying public to become less conservative about the kind of front panel material used. "If the public could change their perception of how a synthesizer module must be constructed, we could have a renaisance unlike anything in the past. The single most expensive component in a synthesizer is the...

YouTube has just launched its new TestTube site, which allows you to test out beta features that haven't been fully deployed. One of these new features is "Replace Audio", allowing you to sub out the audio track of your YouTube video with a licensed track. Here's how to do it:...

Most synthesizer module circuits have much of their real estate occupied by a few common functions: Power supply regulation and decoupling components Input buffers, using op-amps, perhaps with AC coupling components Output buffers, using op-amps Signal converters: dozens of kinds of voltage-controlled resistor-ish functions (for example, using transconductance amplifiers, diode or transistor configurations, vactrols, etc.), and voltage to current converters...