Steinberg just revved its Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) standard to version 2.2, delivering support for 64-bit Windows systems. "The ASIO 2.2 SDK provides software engineers with a complete set of tools for creating ASIO-ready host applications and drivers," says the press release. Developers can supposedly download the SDK at www.steinberg.net, but I couldn't find an obvious link. In the meantime,...
How do you transfer audio files that are too big to e-mail? In the past, I've FTPed files to one of my Web sites with Dreamweaver and then e-mailed the recipient(s) a download link, but that was cumbersome. If the file needed to be private, like a conference-call recording about corporate strategy, I'd save it as a password-protected zip...
During a break at this year's Foo Camp, Tim O'Reilly's intense technology conference, I noticed a surprising contraption on the lawn....
The new issue of Make magazine features a tutorial I wrote on embedding a MIDI data detector in a tiny Japanese monster toy. I took a bunch of photos for the article, along with two videos. You can see one video on the Make site, so I thought I'd share the other here....
To me, CDs are still a better value than compressed audio files. And as the wonderful CD Baby online store demonstrates, there's still a lot of room for innovation in how they're sold. A while back, I wrote about a song I really liked, Gary Jules's cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World." Unfortunately, the album containing the song was...
Izotope has released a new version of its Vinyl plug-in, bringing crackly phonographic ambience to otherwise boring audio files near you. The new version features support for Intel-based Macs, 64-bit Windows apps, and Pro Tools 7. And it's free. So if you've ever wanted to "automate wear, dust, scratches, warp, mechanical noise, electrical noise, and the year of [your] record...
Intrigued by Scott Bourne's review of Synk Audio Musicbed DV, I watched the screencast on the developer's site...and got even more interested. Musicbed DV is a Mac program that generates soundtracks, but what struck me was the controls it offers: They're labeled with musician terms, not engineering ones. Instead of knobs and envelopes for quantitative aspects like level, panning, and...
I got a call today from a producer with a bunch of audio files that wouldn't open. Because he'd made the files in Mac OS 9, I suspected they didn't have filename extensions. So I sent him this little drag-and-drop application I'd made with AppleScript when I ran into a similar situation. Simply copy and paste the code below...
A while back, I wrote about some slick tempo-detection software. A week later, Erica Sadun reported on a utility she was using, and complained about how long it took to analyze songs. The developer of that program just wrote to explain that compressed music files like MP3s must be expanded before they can be analyzed, and that takes time. Curious,...
Whoa. I was recording a great-sounding hardware synth last night and noticed that my USB audio interface was picking up some digital grunge. Today I tried using the Mac G5's built-in audio input instead. Not only was the sound cleaner, I found could crank the input latency down much farther before getting glitches. For years, the computer audio mantra has...
