This is so great: an online database of free, user-submitted, Creative Commons-licensed sounds, with audio and visual previews for all.

Musicians have been showing a special empathy with the tragedy in New Orleans. Here are two ways you can help out financially and musically.

Cool Gadget Alert: Lots of companies have slapped microphones onto portable recorders. Here’s a high-quality mic with built-in RAM and a bunch of slick features.

Forget the tired “smiley curve” or the all-faders-on-stun settings most people use on graphic EQs. After this music fan posted his “perfect” EQ curve for iTunes, a recording engineer made it even better by turning it upside down.

Imagine podcasting live inside a super-powered robot suit while trigger-happy tourists shoot at you. You’d probably be on this amazing site.

Bob Moog asked me for directions once. Which was pretty ironic, seeing as he blazed the path in my field, electronic music. Then last year, we had an even funnier exchange that points up why this amiable inventor (who died Sunday at 71) was so well-loved.

A member of the Plasq programming collective muses, “What if computers talked out loud to each other? What if we could learn that language?”

I get amazing requests from people who read my how-to articles, but this was one of the funniest. And it has practical applications for podcasting as well.

While configuring my shiny new Mac for music production, I discovered two free graphics programs that made the process much easier.

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2005/05/18/ds2.html I’ve been getting lots of mail about my enthusiastic review of the Olympus DS-2 stereo voice recorder. Several readers wondered what I thought of the WS-200S, a smaller, higher-capacity model that came out shortly after I finished the review. Well, because I really liked the DS-2 but found it a tad too big for my (admittedly overcrowded)...