17 inch Macbook Pro January 2009

The new January 2009 17 inch MacBook Pro, 6.6 pounds, under an inch thick, features a lightweight aluminum unibody, and up to 8 amazing hours of battery life. The curved illuminated keys are fitted to your fingers, and the trackpad is also the button—entirely clickable, with pinch, scroll and swipe, and configurable by you! 

320GB hard drive standard, optional solid state drive, up to 8 gigs of memory, processor up to 2.93 GHz. Glossy screen, matte optional, USB2, firewire, built-in camera, DVD read-writer, ethernet, wireless, all the standard things.  

HD-video-ready, sensationally improved color gamut—60% better, hotter contrast, game and video-production level Nvidia processor, glass display, More software than you will ever use, including the updated iLIfe 09, also has the extremely cool magnetic powercord standard, and greener than ever.

Samson G-Track, the talented USB microphone

Some of us are suckers for do-everything devices. Here’s an interesting one. The Samson G-Track USB large diaphragm studio condenser microphone.

Samson G-Track USB Condenser Microphone and Audio Interface with Cakewalk Sonar LE

But it’s not just a microphone. It’s also an audio interface and mixer, so you can input a live vocal, plus a line-in from another instrument which has standard 1/4″ or RCA output, such as guitar, or bass, or keyboard. Or instead, two instruments. That’s two-two-two channels at once!

Not only that, you can adjust the gain for both instruments with the smallish knobs on the side of the mic.

And not only that, it has a built-in headphone jack, for no-latency monitoring. It comes with a desktop mic stand, swivel stand mount, USB cable and all the cables needed to connect any musical instrument with 1/4″ or RCA plug. It includes Cakewalk’s Sonar LE for Windows, and it just works with GarageBand. The ultra-cool shockmount is worth adding, for looks alone.

Some people complain about the sound quality of USB mics. While not equivalent to highpriced studio mics, they can actually sound better than some old fashioned mic/preamp/audio-into-the-computer setups. For songwriters, podcasters, everyday use, and sheer convenience they are terrific. And while the G-Track is somewhat heavy and unwieldy with all the cables and controls, probably not a stage mic, for laptop work on the road or for the studio, what a great idea. As long as (given all those features) it doesn’t also turn into an ironingboard or card table on stormy nights.

Korg KAOSSILATOR arriving soon!

The latest buzz and rumors indicate that the Korg KAOSSILATOR portable mini-synthesizer will be available in the U.S. after March 31, 2008, woo hoo!!

 

 

 >Order the Kaossilator> 

The Kaossilator, a new touchpad synthesizer, controller, recorder

Before it’s even released in all countries, the Kaossilator portable battery-operated synthesizer from Korg is already generating an enormous amount of buzz. It basically lets you draw music with your fingertip, live, on a small portable trackpad, which also has built in drums, beats, and many other sounds and sequences, supports overdubbing, and can also record what you do. You can even hook it up with a guitar strap and wear it while you play it.

Order the Kaossilator

The idea of a really solid gestural synthesizer has been a dream since the first thought of the Theremin. Some keyboards include an infrared beam-interrupt function, and there have been joysticks, and even music drawing functions in software, like in the old neXt machines. But this puts it all in one portable package.

It is basically a combination of radio dials and touchpad. The dial and gesture-drawing combination is a nice way to change a lot of inputs rapidly.

But the ergonomics seem awkward— it is designed as a one-hand-friendly device, but in a movie demo, the man using the synth keeps reaching over his gesturing hand to use the dials. Turning the pad sideways might this improve this situation.

It seems to have stereo line and mini-phone out, but not midi. For that you will need its awesome, but less portable, big brother, the $400 Kaoss Pad KP3.

Korg KP3 Kaoss Pad Dynamic Effects Sampler

The KP3 is a truly spectacular controller, effects-adder, recorder, and dj tool, which allows you to create and mix sounds and effects and samples, which can then be exported in midi or audio format, or saved to flash cards. It is AC, thus considerably less portable than the battery operated Kaossilator.

It seems like the Kaossilator would not be too hard for a beginner to learn. The demonstrators on utube put together some beats pretty fast. The opportunities for happy accidents and found-music abound—it will be interesting to see how easy it is to make deliberate beats and melodies. And what great opportunities for producing truly horrible sounds! $200 seems a small price to pay for so much fun.

Three “free” ways to digitize audio

We talked earlier about high quality handheld audio recorders. Some people simply need to digitize audio. Another time we will consider less expensive audio recorders, but this time you can look in your own house or office for potential digitizers you may have not considered before.

Even though many people have these tools available, they were not free when purchased, hence the quotation marks in the title.

1. Your computer
Begin with what’s closest—if your computer is of recent vintage (most Macs and some PCs have had this feature for years) it may come with either a built in or plug in microphone. If it’s not immediately obvious how to use it to record, check for instructions on the web.

2. Digital Cameras
Many recent digital still cameras, even little snapshot cameras, have the capacity to either take movies with audio or record audio notes. These may be low quality, only good for very retro-sounding podcasts, but for simply recording notes they work fine.

3. Video cameras
Most new video cameras, as well as many older ones, connect to computers. Video cameras are more bulky than still cameras, but for the real M-M-Max Headroom style, point this one at your face and record away.

Computer input and output devices: MUSICPOLE

No sooner did we build computers than we realized we had to find ways to get our stuff into them. Keyboards, stacks of cards, paper tapes, actually attaching wires to circuits and then moving them around–we’ve come a long way.

Then, of course, we have to get the good stuff back out. Monitors, printers, speakers, even computerized fabricating devices, there are more choices arriving each day.

Musicians seem to be especially adept at inventing unique instruments, and these days that often means ones that can also be connected to a computer. Here’s a recent novel MIDI device: the MusicPole.

http://www.themusicpole.com/

Apparently you strap contact strips to your thumbs, then to hit the notes you slide your thumbs over live areas, the “keys,” arrayed on a tube in a unique way to improve usability.

It costs about $400, and is lightweight, festive looking, and versatile, since it can serve as keyboard, percussion, or other synth instrument.  It is being sold by the muscian-inventor.

The cool thing about having more and more such alternate devices is that there will be something to suit every kind of dexterity, or lack of it.