O'Reilly's Linux Dev Center just published a fairly technical discussion of how the various Linux audio subsystems work. For those who just want to boot up and play, we've run several Linux audio articles, including: Resurrect Your Old PC for Music—with Linux Review: Fervent Software Studio-to-Go Inside a Luxury Synth: Creating the Linux-Powered Korg OASYS Inside Pandora: Web Radio That...

We're currently wrapping up a review of a high-resolution digital audio recorder for O'Reilly Digital Media. This handheld marvel records in Super Audio CD (SACD) format, and our reviewer has been gobsmacked by the audio quality. UPDATE: Here's the review. The Korg MR-1 records at 64 times the CD sampling rate, using 1-bit converters. Because SACD burners exist only in...

This is cool: Simply adding &loop=1 to a YouTube <embed> tag makes the video loop forever. Check it out with this short clip of a Pong-playing watch from Make magazine. (Be sure to click the small play button below the video, not the big one in the center.) Despite just writing an article on hacking embedded videos, I never thought...

Why put an iPod on your waistband when you can sport a bulbous red guitar effect instead? The pioneering digital kidney bean of tone now comes in a battery-powered version called the Pocket Pod. Five inches wide yet loaded with 300 digital effect presets and a guitar tuner, the Pocket Pod retails for around $129....

I guess I've been reading Make too long, but when I wanted to hear Internet radio in the spare room the other day, I quickly devised this wacky solution: The Apple AirPort Express receives the Wi-Fi music signal from iTunes, converts it to analog, and then injects it into the old boombox through a car cassette adapter. The belt raises...

Podcast producer Daniel Steinberg has a unique audio editing technique: he uses a Wacom pen controller in one hand and a Countour Design Shuttle controller in the other. I asked him to write a tutorial on his system, which obviously works well because he cranks out a huge amount of high-quality material. We hope to have it online soon. In...

Soundsnap.com launched yesterday with 30,000 free audio samples. As far as I can make out, the sounds are both free to download and royalty-free, so you can use them in your own commercial music productions. Like the popular Freesound Project, the Soundsnap site has audio and waveform previews, so you can see quickly if you're getting an individual drum hit or an entire groove. Unlike Freesound, Soundsnap has simple licensing terms and a clean layout.

I've been playing with the Cepstral speech synthesizer, which offers a unique twist: You can buy individual voices at bargain rates. The standard voices cost just $29.99, and the special-effect ones, which I find have more creative potential, are just $6.99. The synth runs on Windows, OS X, Linux, and even Solaris, and sounds at least as good as the...

Hello, viewers! I've been sharing audio online for years, but just discovered an amusing way to generate a talking-head video. At Gizmoz.com, you upload a photo and record a sound bite, and the service converts them into an animated 3D face: I used my basic USB headset mic to record the audio above. First I had to right-click the screen...

A translator sent me a sound file today, wondering how I would transliterate it to English. The sound is for an upcoming Japanese toy you jab with a tiny sword. Like a pistol in Russian roulette, the toy eventually explodes; this sound is what you hear each time you plunge in the blade: Sword Jab Sound (28KB WAV) In Japanese,...