The review of IK Multimedia’s fabulous iRig MIDI that appears in this month’s issue of iCreate magazine has received its own mini-review on IK Multimedia’s news page. You can find out what I thought of the device by checking out the full news item at http://www.ikmultimedia.com/Main.html?MainPage.php (Clue: I kinda liked it!). Many thanks to Paul Kaufman at IK for putting the excerpts up on the site.
Monthly Archives: December 2011
iTunes Match Now Available in the UK
After making its debut earlier this year in the US, iTunes Match, the Apple iCloud service that promises to store your entire iTunes library (including music you’ve imported yourself from CD) in the Cloud and make it simultaneously accessible to all your Macs and iOS mobile devices, now appears to be accepting subscribers in the UK, along with several other countries including Canada, France, Spain, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and Mexico. The option appeared on the front page of the UK iTunes Music Store overnight, showing a subscription price of £21.99 per year. As a bonus, if your originals are shoddy, low bit-rate mp3’s, iTunes will match them to 256Kbps DRM-free versions. Which is nice. Time to get uploading!
iCreate Issue 102 Now Available
Issue 102 of iCreate magazine hits the shelves today, just in time for Christmas, haha. Unusually this month, I’ve been reviewing stuff rather than telling you how to use stuff. Page 120 is where you’ll find my comprehensive 2-page review of IK Multimedia’s astounding iRig MIDI. This is a proper MIDI interface for your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, if you can believe it. It’s the size of a Zippo lighter and means that you can hook up a full size MIDI keyboard to your iPhone, or swap things around and use your phone as a multi-touch MIDI controller. My last MIDI interface was a 19″ wide rackmounted unit, so I look upon this device with almost religious awe and wonderment.
Elsewhere in the issue, I get to have a play with Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac. Another amazing bit of kit, this allows you to fire up a virtual PC running Windows on your Mac, but does it so that you can switch and transfer files and data back and forth seamlessly between Windows and OS X applications, with no restarts required. After a while, you forget it’s there, it’s incredible technology. If you regularly need to access Windows software and documents but prefer using a Mac, this is your answer right here.
Auto-Tune Guide Featured in Computer Music 173
Fancy a few tips on how to use Auto-Tune? You could do a lot worse than pick up this month’s copy of Computer Music magazine, as it contains my 5-page tutorial feature on how to get the best out of Antares’ all-pervading pitch-correction plug-in. Comprehensive step-by-step guides show you how to use Auto mode for both robotic effects and natural-sounding tuning correction, how to import audio into Graphical mode, how to tune by hand with the Curve tool, how to adjust pitch with the Note tool, and how to deal with vibrato. Also shown is how to get the signature T-Pain / Kanye West sound using the budget EFX2 plug-in.
Logic Pro Goes Download-only
Apple have today relaunched their professional digital audio software solution, Logic Pro, as a download-only title available from the Mac App Store. Retailing in the UK at £139.99, this represents a considerable saving on the £399 RRP of the now discontinued Logic Studio bundle. Mainstage 2, the live performance application, is available separately for £20.99.
The new Logic Pro package is interesting in that it makes the Logic app available as a standalone application, rather than being part of a bundle. While the content included with the app itself initially appears to be greatly reduced in volume, Apple are making an additional 19GB of content (presumably Apple Loops, EXS24 instruments, synth presets and Space Designer impulse responses) available to download from within the app. Logic Express users will be interested to note that the high-end features thus far denied to them are now available at this price point, although it hasn’t been made clear whether there is an upgrade path from the Express version to this latest, Mac App Store version. For anyone considering moving up from GarageBand though, 140 quid is something of a bargain in my view.
As far as a brand new version, in the light of the furore surrounding the recent market repositioning of Final Cut Pro, nobody is really sure what Apple has up its sleeve for Logic. Will the next major release be a dumbed-down version for hobbyists that leaves professional users frothing, or will it be a totally re-written, re-structured ProTools killer? One thing we can definitely say is that, two and a half years after its last major update, this is a very interesting development in the evolution of the Logic product. Watch this space…
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