Latest music technology PodPosts...

Yes, it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for – the awesome Podcomplex PC Tweaking Guide that has brought so much joy to musicians and non-musicians alike is finally available for you to download and take home today… and best of all, it’s completely free!

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Excluding Lig Lury’s, the fourth editor of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who has yet to return from his extended lunch break, the longest-running (in the sense of being the most often-sampled) break ever is probably the ‘Amen Break’. This is an extremely common and quite simple rhythmic syncopation that was (probably) first recorded in the track ‘Amen Brother’ by The Winstons in 1969…

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Although the blogroll on this site does link to some very interesting and contemporary music technology resources, it is probably more useful to have such links structured in categorical arrays. As such, I have implemented a long-overdue links page which provides direct access to plenty of quality content…

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Today is the official birthday of the Podcomplex Music Technology Blog – it’s been a year now since I wrote my first post here in September 2006. Although I only began posting regularly in March 2007, I think I’ll take this opportunity to highlight some of the main stories that have featured on these pages over the past twelve months…

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A 37-year-old man out jogging near Vancouver, Canada suffered a broken jaw, second-degree burns and burst ear drums when his iPod headphones conducted a lightning flash into his head…

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It seems like an obvious progression, but San Francisco’s Doppelganger has created a music-oriented virtual world that takes the music discovery aspects of sites like Last.fm/Pandora/Hypemachine and combines them with the visual depth of online worlds such as Second Life…

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If there is such a thing as a silly spectrum, the following items would certainly be easily detectable on it; however, these devices are actually somewhat unusual ways of analysing and visually representing an audio spectrum…

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The advent and development of Web 2.0 brought a huge amount of musical metadata into the public domain, and this in turn sparked off a number of interesting data visualisation projects. I previously posted on Lee Byron’s Last FM listening history chart, but a recent report at Smashing Magazine covers some other sites that take raw data and present it in new and sometimes pulsating ways…

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Audio watermarking is the process of encoding information into audio that will uniquely identify that recording. A successful audio watermark must be robust, inaudible and unique – a difficult set of criteria to achieve, but that is exactly what Activated Content have done. Their watermarks are effectively undetectable by ear, remain unaffected by compression or re-recording of the source, and each recording can have its own identifier…

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As our data storage devices grow ever larger (in capacity) and smaller (in size), it may come as a surprise to some people that the humble analog cassette tape is still trundling along in the background. Although sales of music cassettes were down to 700,000 last year, from a high of 442 million in 1990 (RIAA), it is estimated that North America will continue to manufacture 22 million blank cassettes per year over the next several years…
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