Good morning, campers!

These are the Sunday Reads for March 3rd, 2013.

• Seduced by ‘perfect’ pitch: how Auto-Tune conquered pop music (Verge)
• ‘Mongolian Bling’ rappers swing to their own beat (LATimes)
• RadioLab Podcast: Speedy Beethoven (RadioLab)
• A Mac user’s view of the Chromebook Pixel (Technovia)
• The Musicians Guide To YouTube Marketing (MusicThinkTank)
• Downloaded, Feature Documentary About the Rise & Fall of Napster (LaughingSquid)
• Avid Under Investigation by US Law Firms On Behalf of Avid Shareholders (SonicScoop)
• Everything You Need To Know About The Piracy-Battling Copyright Alert System (PopSci)

Good morning, campers!

Espresso coffee with a dash of frothy steamed milk, and this bouquet of HTML links.

Just.Perfect.

These are the Sunday Reads for February 17th, 2013.

• Top 10 Instantly Recognizable Guitar Riffs (Fender)
• Loudness and Metering (Part 2) (Designing Sound)
• I Dream of Wires – a documentary about the modular synthesizer (SoundOnSound)
• Can You Learn To Like Music You Hate?(NPR)
• Diplo Says 2013 Is the ‘Year of Musical Fusion’ (Rolling Stone)
• BBC Attacks the Open Web, GNU/Linux in Danger (Computerworld UK)
• Saving The Sounds Of America (NPR)
• Cableguys Will Modulate Everything – Now Get a Free, Powerful Pan-Shaping Plug-in (CDM)
• How To Use SoundCloud + Dropify For More Facebook Fans, No Download Fees (Hypebot)
• Tick tock: why timing your Mac hardware upgrades makes good sense (GigaOm)
• Diplo, Skrillex, and A-Trak launching new YouTube music channel ‘Potato’ (Verge)

Oh boy this reverb scene is getting mighty convoluted!

This in my inbox: Native Instruments just introduced Reverb Classics, offering two reverb plugins that recreate the sound of two of the most sought after reverb units in history. The plugins were created in collaboration with Softube.

Good morning, fellow propeller heads.

Make sure your refills are timely.

These are the Sunday Reads for January 20th, 2013.

• Amazon’s Move Against Apple Signals Greater Focus On Music (WaPo)
• Apple Is Looking For Creative Writer To Help Siri Evolve (MyNameIsSiri)
• Popcast: New Owners for Vintage Hits? (NYT)
• The Life And Death Of The American Arcade (Verge)
• Google’s Media Barons (Harper’s)
• Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie (NYT)
• Review: iZotope Insight (Essential Metering Suite) (SonicScoop)
• A trip down memory lane: The Apple Lisa and Apple IIe turn 30 (Ars)
• Mac Setups: Audio Production Hackintosh with Triple Displays (OSXDaily)
• Bringing YouTube to Sundance and Sundance to You (Youtube Blog)
• I’ve Heard That Somewhere: ‘Glee’ Covers ‘Baby Got Back,’ And It Sounds … Familiar (NPR)
• Testing Mixed In Key’s Analysis Of Song Danceability (Hypebot)
• Enormous Online Library Catalogues 150,000 Animal Sounds (PopSci)
• How Apple Killed an iTunes Competitor (Slashdot)

Now this is fun, me thinks. You can drag audio files straight into the Messages application on OS X Mountain Lion. I tested this a while ago with a 58 Mb stereo .WAV file of some drums, and the file got converted to a mono MPEG-4 .M4A AAC file, at 22050 Khz – with a filesize of 662 Kb.

Lossy as hell (!!!), but still pretty cool.

A fistful of links, what else?

These are the Sunday Reads For January 6th, 2013.

Andreas Hegenberg, maker of BetterTouchTool, tweeted this this morning:

Yay, I was accepted for the #LeapMotion developer program. This will be fun to integrate in BetterTouchTool leapmotion.com

— Andreas Hegenberg (@boastr_net) January 6, 2013

Mitchell Nordine is a 21 year young music producer, programmer and composer from Melbourne, Australia, currently studying a Bachelor of Music Industry at RMIT.

His new year resolution:

Welcome to the future! Happy 2013! I’m pretty sure this is the first New Years Resolution that I’ve ever really dived into… And I’m really flipping excited for it. Today I’m launching the Daily 10 Sample Series – Every day of this year i’ll release 10 HQ samples right here for free!

This just in: Waves just introduced a synth.

From Waves:

Introducing Element: The first ever synthesizer from Waves. Powered by Virtual Voltage™ technology, Element is an analog-style polyphonic instrument engineered to deliver the fat, gritty sound of the classics, with all the precision, flexibility and control of contemporary digital synths.

No coffee quote this time. It’s all about popping bottles these final days.

These are the Sunday Reads for December 30th, 2012.

Happy New Year everyone!

• The Week In Music: What To Stay In From The Cold And Read Now (NPR)
• Reflecting On EMI, An Industry Giant Felled In 2012 (NPR)
• Tim O’Reilly’s Key to Creating the Next Big Thing (Wired)
• Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain (NYT)
• BENT: The Google Moog Mini-Doc (Youtube)
• Better Than Human (Wired)
• Windows VSTs on the Mac? Yes, We Can (CDM)
• Vic Flick’s Riff Captures The Sound Of James Bond (NPR)
• From lame to Lion—the 12-year evolution of OS X (ArsTechnica)
• Google, Kurzweil, and the Information Transformation Age (HuffPost)
• 3D Printed Record – 600dpi into 11kHz with Processing and ModelBuilder (CreativeApplications)
• Mad Science and Pop Hits (NYT)
• 50 Must-Read Pro Audio Articles from 2012 (ProAudioFiles)
• Recording Impulse Responses (DesigningSound)
• YouTube strips Universal and Sony of 2 billion fake views (DailyDot)

Winter chill bonus:

The horrors of an avalanche (and the beauty of really amazing online journalism) (BoingBoing)

Working with Logic Pro – or any DAW for that matter – will involve copying and pasting regions to make an arrangement. And with that, a lot of time will be wasted once those copies need to be replaced by fresh copies after the original region was changed. The bigger your arrangement gets, the more time this will cost.

Something was missing this Sunday.

Here are my late Sunday reads for December 9th, 2012.

• Dave Brubeck: Beyond ‘Take Five’ (NPR)
• Does Your DAW Have The Jitters? (Synthopia)
• AirHarp, The Instrument You Play Without Touching Anything (Pop Science)
• Jay-Z Shows ‘Where I’m From’ in New Documentary (RollingStone)
• Control Music Synthesizers With Gestures Through This Arduino-Based Saucer Called ‘The UFO’ (TechCrunch)
• Every Audiophile Review Ever (BoingBoing)
• Calvin Harris On Dance-Pop As A ‘Futuristic Experiment’ (NPR)
• New book about The KLF (and their Doctor Who connections) (BoingBoing)
• Eddie Van Halen deconstructs his collaboration on ‘Beat It’ (CNN)
• TapeDeck 1.5 Launches – Retro Mac Audio Recorder (SonicScoop)

Sunday, Console Classics day. How dare they release new stuff on our resting day?

Waves, working together with Abbey Road Studios, just released new plugins of two console classics: the REDD.17, which still belongs to Abbey Road Studios, and the REDD.37, of which Lenny Kravitz (who fearlessly released a mono record in 1992) is a proud owner. Waves ‘meticulously recreated the color, character and tonal complexity of the original desks’.

Good morning!

Click, sip, click, sip.

These are my Sunday Reads for December 2nd, 2012.

• Who Picks The Music You Hear At The Mall? (NPR)
• Music Review: Justin Bieber at Madison Square Garden (NYT)
• Beastie Boys Fight Baffling ‘Licensed to Ill’ Sampling Lawsuit (Spin)
• Crash Course in Analog Tape Machines (Mix)
• Popcast: Parsing the Music (and the Psychodrama) of Rihanna (NYT)
• The long-playing saga of Columbia Records (WaPo)
• Riffing on the highs and lows of the sonic landscape (LaTimes)
• TONE2 Unveils Rayblaster – Impulse Modeling Synth Explores New Territory (SonicScoop)
• Dr. Drum, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Con… (Analog Industries)
• Spider Silk Inspires Beautiful Music (Wired)
• On a lighter note: Elephant Plays Piano (BoingBoing)

Twas the month before Christmas.

With the turkey fully digested and Black Friday behind us, here come the Christmas deals. Plugin Alliance – a union of some of the best-known international audio companies, is early this year. Starting December 1st, Plugin Alliance will offer discounts of up to 60% on their best selling plugins, every day until December 25th.

There must be something for everyone, with so many plugin companies under one roof: Brainworx, Chandler Limited, CharterOak Acoustic Devices, Neve Custom Series 75, Elysia, Maag Audio, Millennia Music & Media Systems, Noveltech Audio, SPL, and Vertigo Sound.

First up on December 1st, for controlling transients: SPL Transient Designer. List price $199, get it for $89.

See this page. And no, there’s nothing behind the other doors, yet…

Good luck!