Monthly Archives: February 2012

How to Make a Videosong with iLife ’11 – MacUser Tutorial

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Videosongs are home-made music videos where you record both audio and video of your performance, then edit it together so that what you hear is also what you see. They’re a fantastic and fun way to show off your musical talents to the world at large, and as promised in an earlier post, the 6-page videosong tutorial I was working on in January appears in this fortnight’s issue of MacUser magazine. In a massive 28-step guide on how to record, edit and share a complete multitrack audio and split-screen video performance, I take you step by step through the process from start to finish, using only a camcorder or iPhone 4, together with the GarageBand and iMovie software that comes free with every new Mac. So if you fancy getting stuck into a rewarding and entertaining creative project, why not nip down to Smiths this afternoon and pick up a copy of the mag?

Guide to Audio Restoration – Computer Music Issue 175

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Ever wanted to get rid of an annoying hum or tape hiss from an audio recording? My 5-page feature tutorial “Taking the Hiss” on page 48 of this month’s issue of Computer Music magazine turns the spotlight on what’s possible with the latest audio restoration software. Logic, ProTools, iZotope’s amazing RX2 and Adobe Audition are all featured, along with an amazing piece of software called Photosounder that literally turns sound into images so that you can edit out unwanted noises using image editing software like Photoshop, then turn the doctored image back into sound again, without the noise… incredible stuff! With audio examples for all the step-by-step guides included on the cover DVD, if you’ve ever been troubled by crackles, pops, squeaky chairs, coughs or burps (sounds like the average morning around the breakfast table in our house), this is your comprehensive guide to noise removal using noise profiling, spectral editing, even a pencil tool. As ever, there’s lots of other great stuff in the mag too, so check out Computer Music 175 in all good newsagents – now!

iCreate Issue 104!

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Another issue of iCreate rolls off the presses and into your local news emporia this week, and I have a total of eight pages of tutorial stuff in this month’s issue, evenly split between OS X and GarageBand topics. In keeping with the issue’s main theme of WiFi networking, I show you how to share both a wired internet connection and another computer’s optical drive across a wireless network. Elsewhere, on a musical tip, I focus on using free AudioUnit plug-ins from third-party manufacturers in GarageBand, rounding off with a couple of pages covering how to master your tracks once you’ve finished recording and mixing them.