That's all it is. Links to recordings of hard drives crashing. If I have to explain why that's cool, then I can't. If not, then I don't have to....

Heading out the door to a laptop jam session today, I eyed my chunky little MIDI keyboard, but even it was too big to fit in my backpack. I ended up typing out melodies and chords on the computer keyboard itself. Not very expressive. What you really want is velocity-sensitive, piano-style keys along with pitch-bend and modulation controls.

What's probably the easiest, cheapest, and most flexible way to add an audio player to your site just got a whole lot better. Yahoo Media Player version 2 launched yesterday, adding a bevy of new features, including faster load time and support for several new audio formats beyond MP3.

Creating an audio-only version of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" gave me a huge lesson in sound design - a process more analagous to songwriting than I realized...

Yes. Software can help a musician uncover talent he doesn't realize he has.

It's the enduring creative mystery: You're noodling along on your instrument, stumble on an amazing lick or chord progression, and then something interrupts (phone, doorbell, power outage) and you forget your burst of genius. Where DO all the lost riffs and solos go?

One of the cleverest new products I saw at AES last month meets that challenge head-on. The Line 6 BackTrack is a palm-size recorder that's always listening. The basic line-in model costs $99, and a model with a mic (see photo) costs $149.

Please excuse this title, but I need to convey a point: sometimes, it is too easy to be “computer clean” when it would be better to be “humanly messy.” In this case, I’m talking about track automation, and the fact that most people depend on mouse-driven automation curves - even when they don’t do justice to the music.

Late last week Apple Corps Ltd (business entity for The Beatles) and MTV Networks announced that there will a new 'music-making game' based on the Beatles catalog released in the second half of 2009 -- and loosely based on the functionality of Rock Band. MTV owns Harmonix Music Systems, the company behind Rock Band. The new Beatles title will be...

Learning to write good melodies is a great place to start. Let another composer provide the chord progressions and accompaniment for you, so that you can focus on nothing but a new melody.

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.