"In a world..." voiceover legend Don LaFontaine died yesterday. After watching a few brilliant YouTube videos of him in action, I thought I'd download them for posterity. Fortunately, I'd just found an excellent tool for that.

I just set up my best-sounding podcast playback system ever, but there was one problem: I missed the first ten seconds during the time it took me to hit Play and then scamper down the stairs to the kitchen. AppleScript and speech synths to the rescue....

While editing a podcast in BIAS Peak 6 recently, I was disturbed to hear the audio distorting even though the peak levels were below 100%. Turns out the culprit was a stealthy slider.

Film composer Mark Isham has written zillions of elegant soundtracks. Now he's posted some rare cues (including one of my favorites) in a slick online player. The technology has some interesting twists — and you can use it for free.

At the suggestion of my friends at Open Labs, I've been using Reaper rather than Nuendo lately, and I have yet to encounter the slightest disappointment. This is big news coming from me. My production schedule demands that I change sequencing/recording software very reluctantly. When I have to produce music, sometimes it's got to be, like, 20-30 tunes in a...

My favorite electronic instrument this year is the Korg Kaossilator, a pocket-size synth with built-in loop recorder. I bought one after spending some quality time with it during a magazine review. But what really loosened my credit card was a secret hack I discovered during fact-check.

When half your population can't read, the spoken word becomes crucial. The Literacy Bridge project is designing a portable voice recorder that third-world populations can use to share news, history, and educational texts. In addition to recording and playing back audio, the Talking Book Device (hardware specs PDF) has buttons for basic interactivity — think quizzes and branching. Furthermore,...

On February 11th, 2008, my life changed. It started out like any other Monday: I got up, made coffee, checked the news and Doonesbury, then logged into the network to get my mail ... and BLAM! Microsoft Acquires Danger

Did you know you can enjoy six-channel sound from iTunes? All you need is a decoder, six amplified speakers, and this squirrely software trick.

I'm in hardware now! Well, firmware at least. I posted a little comment to the electro-music.com DIY synthesizer forum about using FSK (Frequency Shift Keying) as a synthesis method, and Scott Gravenhorst took the idea and implemented it as an 8-voice, dual oscillator polyphonic synthesizer-on-a-chip using an FPGA (Field Programmable Gatorade)! How cool. He has posted some audio. I had...