A friend wrote, "Each year my brother and I tend to exchange bizarre sound-making devices at Christmas. Until I get back to being an active musician, my connections to the sound world are rusty at best, and I don't have 'the coolest new thing' at my fingertips. Can you suggest something crazy that you might have come across in your...

Remember when getting your music on a CD was the Holy Grail? Here's something even retro-hipper. The free Says-It Cassette Generator will instantly mock up a downloadable cassette-tape graphic for you in a variety of styles. There's a lot more at the site, including the wonderful Church Sign Generator, but the guilty pleasure of seeing your name on a vintage...

For the third year, sound designer Gary Garritan has released a free collection of Christmas songs recorded by musicians who use his software instruments. This edition features arrangers and composers from as far away as Iceland, Italy, and Slovenia. And interestingly, it showcases Garritan's new big-band instruments as well as his earlier orchestral ones. In a friendly touch, there's even...

The path from song idea to polished master recording is long and complex, so it's good to see more companies producing tutorial DVDs. Keyfax NewMedia has been in the business for a long time, driven by founder Julian Colbeck's wit and music-technology expertise. (One of Keyfax's first DVDs, for the Yamaha Motif keyboard, actually outsold the Motif itself.) I've known...

One of the great things about working for O'Reilly is that I get to check out the latest books. Yesterday I got a PDF copy of iPod: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition, by New York Times Circuits writer J.D. Biersdorfer. My mission: to extract some of the tips and present them in HTML so you can see them too....

Browsing through my Funny folder today, I came across this bizarre press release from 1999: TOKYO — Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. will market a digital still camera that supports the 340-Mbyte Microdrive introduced by IBM Corp. earlier this month. Microdrive will enable a digital still camera to store over 10,000 frames of VGA pictures, or 7.5 minutes of JPEG...

At nine feet long, the IK Multimedia StealthPlug guitar-to-computer interface is possibly the skinniest way to go digital. The StealthPlug is a cable with a USB plug on one end and a quarter-inch guitar plug on the other. In between, there's a little arrowhead that converts the analog guitar signal to digital and the computer's digital signal back to analog...

The new 1.10 firmware update for the Edirol R-09 WAV/MP3 recorder reportedly makes it the world's first SDHC- (SD High Capacity) compatible stereo field recorder. (See our review.) SDHC memory cards break the 2GB barrier and offer increased data transfer speeds. Roland has certified the new Panasonic RP-SDR04-GJ1K 4GB cards for use with the R-09. 8GB cards are expected...

Funny comment over at the Analog Industries blog, where they delight in criticizing pretentious playing: I think I will officially enunciate [Chris] Randall's law: I = 1/Cm The interestingness of the music is inversely proportional to the complexity of the custom MIDI controller. That cracked me up, but I'm always saddened by the vitriol in some of these critiques....

At every trade show, there's one product everyone says you have to see. The gadget that kept coming up at last month's AES conference was the Core Sound TetraMic. This tiny microphone contains four capsules arranged in a tetrahedral pattern to pick up sound in the Ambisonic format. Basically, the mics together encode front-back, left-right, up-down, and level information...