I went to a movie in the SF Bay Area over the weekend, and paid $9.75 for my ticket (ouch!). But of course concert tickets are a much more painful hit to the wallet (these days they range from $65 to $300 plus -- double ouch!!). And of course if you're in Cleveland and your favorite band is performing in...

There's plenty to love about this software. You can automate more than 150 parameters, use customizable shortcut keys, it has a great interface with lots of graphical metering, it allows you to easily create A/B comparisons, allows the use of undo and history to get to and from your favorite tweaks and you get all of it in 64-bit glory that mimics the sound of tube-modeled devices.

The new issue of Make magazine features a tutorial I wrote on embedding a MIDI data detector in a tiny Japanese monster toy. I took a bunch of photos for the article, along with two videos. You can see one video on the Make site, so I thought I'd share the other here....

Another one of my long-time colleagues (and active collaborators) is Gerd Leonhard, a well-known visionary in digital music and media, media futurist, and author of the bestseller "The Future of Music" (Berklee Press). Back in the dotcom heyday when I first met him, Gerd was the CEO of LicenseMusic.com -- a company focused on making cleared music available to music...

To me, CDs are still a better value than compressed audio files. And as the wonderful CD Baby online store demonstrates, there's still a lot of room for innovation in how they're sold. A while back, I wrote about a song I really liked, Gary Jules's cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World." Unfortunately, the album containing the song was...

The first rule of good cable buying is simple. Don't go cheap. Good cables cost money. Spend it. You don't always have to buy the most expensive cable at the music store, but never buy the cheapest either.

Audio podcasts are the perfect accompaniment to my long, once-a-week commute to O'Reilly HQ. If I can find shows that are relevant to work, even better, because I feel like I'm gearing my brain up for the workday rather than stressing about the traffic that's keeping me from the things I have to do when I get there. (And did...

I've had an ongoing argument with whoever will listen that computer software controls and widgits are lame, and that the infinite potential in the graphic desktop has gone virtually untapped. We see the same old boring icons, files, folders, knobs and sliders year after year. Sure these widgits and metaphors are easy to learn, but so is the use of...

During the last few months, I've had the opportunity to record two titles for the folks at Lynda.com. It was a great experience for me, and it opened my eyes to a world I had known little about. I knew Lynda, of course, from the heyday of web graphics. She was, and still is, the expert when it comes to publishing rich media on the web. But I had no idea about the depth and breath of her online training business.

I've decided that given my stock in trade is my rolodex, periodically I'm going to do blogs on some of my esteemed colleagues. We'll start here with Dave Ulmer, who is most definitely a member of the "10-year+ Club" I alluded to in an earlier blog (fellow pioneers in Digital Music). About 10 years ago, Dave was at Adaptec forming...