I get lots of email from new podcasters. And without question, one of the main complaints I hear relates to noise. People using small digital field recorders to record their podcasts seem to have particular problems with noise. In most cases, these are simple environmental noise problems like unbalanced AC power sources, air conditioners, fans, fluorescent lights and other environmental factors can ruin your recordings. The fix is usually simple.

Summer NAMM-watcher Mark Vail just sent me a link to the gorgeous TonePort KB37 from guitar-processor manufacturer Line 6. In fact, it's a guitar processor with keys and a 24-bit USB audio interface. In a world of square, gray MIDI controllers, this guy really stands out. And the audio I/O looks pretty flexible. You get two mic inputs with...

On the topic of "I'm not your friggin' test department," I'd like to submit my first example of proof that products I suspect are being released with "bullet-point features" that have never been tested even once. Example One: Vox Valvetronix: The Wonderful Amp With the Useless Direct-Out Feature That Turns The Amp Into a Bass Drum Mic The Latest in...

The technical quality of most vlogs and podcasts today are... in a word... yucky. It's tiring reading about the advances in multimedia on the web only to find, time and time again, pathetic production values in podcasts and vlogs (Scoble POV.) Apparently authors care little about their message since most are riddled with distortion, clipping and uneven volume levels...

Dear Member of the High-Tech Audio Industry: Please. Stop thinking about performance and features for a second: focus on "does it work or does it crash?" If you are under the impression that your testing staff is doing a good job of addressing this problem, then --you are very likely living in blissful ignorance, or --you are in an industry...

There are lots of opinions about the right kind of mic for podcasting. In this post I want to cover some of the secondary factors that should go into selecting a mic.

I had a fascinating meeting recently with a relatively new colleague (to me) -- though apparently many in my circle have known him for years. Alan Howarth is a notable film composer, sound designer, and technologist. Perhaps best known for scoring all of the "Halloween" films, the original Star Trek film, "Hunt for Red October", and many others -- he's...

Mix magazine has an intriguing interview with Gina Fant-Saez, who has written a number of popular articles for the O’Reilly Digital Media site. (Her controversial tutorial about setting up a laptop music production system, "The Ultimate Portable Studio," has been the #1 Google hit for "portable studio" for the last year.) In the Mix interview, Gina shares more details about...

For fans of analog synths, especially of vintage EMS synths, here's a few clips I've found. (No guarantees the links won't disappear, sorry!)...

I ran into my old buddy Pedro Vargas last week; he's now a Director at SanDisk. Pedro and I (and many of our colleagues) are part of what I had been terming "the 10 year club". Those of us who had been pioneers in the earliest days of digital music -- only now it's been closer to 15 years. Hard...