It’s weird to buy someone a music app as a gift for the holidays, or any other time for that matter. Depending on the platform, you might be able to buy them store credits or a gift of the app itself — but either way, you don’t have anything to wrap, unless you feel like…
Sound quality is quite the hot topic in digital music these days, from Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones to Neil Young’s upcoming high-quality Pono music format. From the looks of things, music fans are (finally?) getting a little more picky about how their music sounds. The recording end of the equation is getting the same treatment,…
Rhapsody, which bills itself as “America’s #1 digital music subscriptions service (Spotify comes from Sweden), unveiled a neat app today that lets Android users identify songs as they play over speakers. Rhapsody SongMatch (free) lets premium Rhapsody subscribers add these songs to their collection instantly, so basically, you can collect music wherever you go, storing it…
You might not know the name Smule, but you probably know one or more of the apps that have earned the company approximately gazillions of dollars. Smule co-founder, CTO, and chief creative officer Dr. Ge Wang, who when he is not helping to make millions of people sound like T-Pain, is also an associate professor…
One of the most recognizable hallmarks of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been its “human microphone,” a technique through which protesters make speeches louder without the use of megaphones, which are banned from the protests. (Amplifying sound outdoors requires a permit in New York.) The concept behind the human microphone is simple: The crowd…
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA — There’s no shortage of recording apps for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, but when it comes to singing into those devices or miking acoustic instruments, iOS recording artists generally rely on the iPhone’s microphone, which works fine for phonecalls but lacks the nuance necessary for great-sounding musical recordings. Enter the…
This summer, the world gained several brand new musical instruments courtesy of the aptly-named New Musical Instruments Hackathon, part of the Monthly Music Hackathon NYC series. And what instruments they are! For pre-hacking inspiration, ten musical instrument inventors and builders addressed this room full of clever and talented people, and demonstrated some of their creations, and…
For many, the word “hackathon” conjures, if anything, caffeinated techies coding away in competition, because hackathon prizes can be substantial, as can the glory that accompanies a win. In late July at Spotify headquarters, a different kind of hackathon took place: the New Musical Instruments Hackathon, part of the Monthly Music Hackathon series, where the goal was not to win over the…
Artists often find inspiration in their surroundings. Unless they are quick to jot down their ideas, those can be lost forever. This is precisely why some recording artists use the notepad functions of their smartphones and tablets to capture song ideas and lyrics, although that approach fails to take advantage of the fact that the…
Some music-making apps are designed for Jedi-level music producers who can’t wait to get back into the studio, while others are for beginners looking to have a little fun. FiddleWax ($3, iOS), from Adam Kumpf of Luxemborg, sits somewhere in the middle. Anyone could pick it up and make something resembling music, but if you know…
Hip hop fans and artists are constantly searching for the newest ways to discover, write, see, and record new music. As we continue to move forward in the digital age, smartphones and tablets are the means of choice for a lot of that. These six apps that should probably find a home on every hip…
Bruno Zamborlin has devised a way to connect a custom contact microphone to an iPhone app, with intriguing results. His invention, the Mogee, attaches to just about anything around you and picks up vibrations from these objects, turning them into sound with the iPhone app, and then out to headphones, speakers, a recording device, an…
“If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” said the late Steve Jobs. He meant that rather than wait for a disruptor to change the game and grab marketshare, it’s better for a company to steal that marketshare from itself, even if that means releasing something that competes with an existing product. It’s a lesson that…
Maybe it’s because we’ve been lamenting the possible loss of the non-self-driving car as a music listening pod, or just because I have spent lots of time outdoors of late — or maybe it’s because we all just have so much information and noise coming at us these days, but whatever the reason, I am entranced…
We really like music apps, but some of them don’t exist, which is annoying. That’s okay. Along with some of our readers, Evolver.fm has been not-so-quietly inventing our own music apps out of thin air (this being a particularly good one), then posting the ideas in polls so people can vote on which ones they’d…
