I've been listening to Moments From This Theater: Live, a wonderful album by the great Memphis/Muscle Shoals songwriters Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. It's just the two of them, accompanying themselves on acoustic guitar and electric piano, recorded at 1998 shows in Ireland and England. They play classics including "Dark End Of The Street", "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man",...

GDC, formerly known as the Computer Game Developers Conference, starts in earnest today, and there are scads of audio presentations. Although I’m not a gamer, I always come away from the conference with fascinating insights on the differences between “linear” and interactive music. For instance, in a game, the composer is often more akin to a sculptor than a painter,...

MP3.com just published an interesting article on optimizing the battery life of digital audio players. The article concluded that copy-protected Windows Media Audio tracks knocked several hours off the playback time on each tested player. Savvy readers then pointed out that because WMA is more highly compressed, it naturally requires more processor power to play back. A more conclusive experiment...

For over 50 years recording artists have been bound to one primary system for their careers -- involving getting signed to and distributed by a major record label. Since the Internet age kicked into high gear, the playing field has been leveled. With avenues like dedicated band web sites, iTunes, and MySpace, artists are finding more ways to connect directly...

The QWERTY keyboard is a tricky interface for music-making, but many inventors have come up with equally tricked-out ways to overcome its limitations. Here are a few of my favorites. I’ve long been a fan of Mixman, which turned typing into synchronized grooves. But simply triggering samples doesn’t allow much expressivity, so the company eventually designed its own input controller,...

Looking to do more with FireWire audio on Windows? CEntrance has released a free beta version of its universal audio driver. Among the features are device aggregation (which lets you use multiple FireWire audio interfaces with a single program) and multi-host capability (which lets multiple programs address a single interface). Those were among the top requests from developers at last...

After getting annoyed by the way MP3 links work—blanking out the browser window or triggering a download dialog instead of simply playing music—I whipped up a JavaScript hack called “Build a Simple MP3 Player for Your Site.” That article has become one of our most popular, and we now use the technique throughout the O’Reilly Digital Media site. Several readers...

Like microscopes, audio editing software can reveal amazing new worlds within everyday sounds. Check out “Winnoise,” for example. It’s a three-minute song made by manipulating Windows error sounds. I particularly like the way the artist looped portions of the Microsoft Sound to create a sustaining pad, and that he needed only basic commands from the lowly Windows Sound Recorder to...

Nicholas Bentley replied to my post How Digital Production & Distribution Are Making Things Worse For Musicians, Not Better with a link to his very interesting article for INDICARE on the Rights Office distribution model.

Need a creative kick-start -- or a royalty-free soundtrack? Try some of these algorithmic music programs.