News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
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January each year sees Apple observers focusing on Macworld San Francisco but just down the road in Anaheim, one of the biggest music product trade shows in the world kicks off at nearly the same time as Macworld. NAMM is the show that any gear-obsessed musician would love to attend at least once in their lifetime – I know it’s on my to-do list. Well over eighty thousand attendees are expected this year and there’s plenty of new music gear being announced. Here’s an entrée:
CME are a well known manufacturer of USB MIDI keyboards and they’ve announced the release of the ultra-thin M-Key. It has 49 velocity sensitive, semi-weighted keys and has an assignable slider and joystick. There are two pieces of softwar bundled with the M-Key. The Samplitude application is PC only but Arturia’s Analog Factory SE is very Mac-friendly and contains some superb sounds to boot. Launch pricing is $99 US so it’s likely to be an economical option if a USB keyboard is on your shopping list. CME’s Australian distributor is likely to have stock as soon as anyone else so keep an eye on their site.
Olympus are best known for their cameras but they’re well and truly in the audio field. The Olympus LS-10 is a portable stereo audio recorder that will record in WAV, WMA and MP3. It has 2 GB of internal memory plus an SD card slot so you’ll have significant recording time available and up to 12 hours operation is claimed on the two AA batteries powering the unit. Transfer of data to your Mac is via USB or an SD card reader if you have one. Steinberg Cubase LE 4 is supplied as part of the package as well. Estimated retail price on the LS 10 is $399.99 US. If you’re a sucker for higher-end portable recording options, this is an attractive new entrant.
Check in at our Macs and Music forum for ongoing discussion of announcements coming out of both NAMM and Macworld on the music front.
A young guy with this modification of John Lennon's famous "Imagine"printed in white on an Apple classic black T-shirt is high fiving hisfriends who have just produced "Lotus-eaters", a short music video warning of the dangers of unthinking submission to seductive technologies. They did this in less than 24 hours using the facilities of the new John Lennon Bus, being shown at Macworld Expo 2008 in San Francisco, after its re-launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in LasVegas earlier this month. (The concept has been in existence since 1998).
Martin Levins | Jan 17, 2008
Now that the Blu-ray Disc versus HD-DVD stoush has been declared a non-starter (without the market ever really having much of a say in it) does that mean that the future of content delivery has been decided? Hardly. Battles are still raging on a number of fronts and few surrenders are to be found. Concessions, however, are many. For example, 20th Century Fox has released a number of DVDs in the USA which include "digital copies" of the main content. This may seem an odd sort of terminology since the DVD itself is a digital copy. But the emphasis in that terminology should be not on the word "digital" but on the word "copy". The "digital copy" is a version of the film optimised for use on devices like Apple TV and iPod touch. I specify those devices because, in the case of Fox at least, the copy is still protected by Apple's FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) technology, just as if it had been downloaded from the iTunes Store. Which means it won't play on any non-Apple devices.
Matthew JC. Powell | Feb 22, 2008
Apple is reportedly contemplating, for its iPhone customers at least, a change to its iTunes business model that would allow customers unfettered access to the iTunes Store. It would fund this by adding a premium to the price of the devices, and that premium would then be divided between the major music labels based on their market share. Up until now, Steve Jobs has been vigorously opposed to similar models offered by other download providers. The problem is ...
Matthew JC. Powell | Mar 20, 2008
I received a fascinating URL the other day for The Food Lifeboat . It’s a site that lists the basic food requirements you’ll need to live at home if a pandemic like bird flu hit Australia. Aside from my sometimes obsessive interest in contingency planning (yes, I filled my bath full of water just in case for Y2K), it got me thinking about music technology and surviving on the bare basics. Like most musicians who use their computer as a central part of the creative process, I’m damn effective at accumulating gear.
David Holloway | Apr 7, 2008
