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.
Category Archives: Published Stuff
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…
MacUser Xmas Gift Guide
Check out the latest issue of Mac User for some inspiring gift ideas for your Mac-obsessed friends or relatives. I was honoured to be asked to participate in suggesting a couple of things, which you’ll find on page 48! The brief was to come up with really useful stuff you can’t be without, so there are some brilliant apps and gadgets on show here, making it well worth a look if you’re stuck for what to give the Mac geek in your life.
iCreate Issue 101 – Out Now!
Issue 101 of iCreate hits the news stands today! This month I have a hefty 6-page feature about ways to make Lion faster – other than dressing up like an antelope and dancing around in front of its face that is. You’ll find the feature on page 64 🙂
Pro Tools 10 / HDX Breaks Cover at AES 2011
Avid today unveiled their next generation of Pro Tools professional audio recording, mixing and editing software and hardware. Pro Tools 10 software offers over 250 new features, enhancements and improvements, including changes in the way it handles audio files on your hard drive, the ability to load and playback sessions from RAM, realtime fades (farewell, fade files!), clip gain, new AAX plugin architecture and many more. The new hardware delivers 5x the DSP performance of an HD system, higher resolution, larger track counts, more headroom…. just lots more of everything by the sound of it!
Exciting stuff, can’t wait to try it out. Now, what was Avid’s phone number again?
Happy 100th issue to iCreate Magazine!
It’s finally here, the day we thought would never arrive – iCreate’s 100th issue! I’m proud to have been writing for every issue of this magazine now since issue 41 in 2007, and am really happy to see it reach this milestone. Contributions from me this month include a feature celebrating the last ten years of the iPod, and a tutorial explaining how to work with GarageBand’s Notation View. As always, you can find the mag at WHSmiths and most large supermarkets. Here’s hoping the next 100 issues will be as good as this one 🙂
Debut Feature for Future Publishing Hits the Shelves
Issue 171 of Computer Music magazine is out today, featuring my first feature for Future Publishing on page 65. Four pages covering the use of colour-coding in Digital Audio Workstation software – colour me happy!
Debut piece for MacUser is out!
You know you’ve made it as a tech writer when you make it into a publication as well-known and as well-respected as MacUser, and this week I’ve finally made it onto the pages of this prestigious magazine with a tutorial about how to use GarageBand’s built-in pitch correction feature on page 86 of this issue. After years of relative anonymity writing for iCreate, the novelty of a photo byline takes a bit of getting used to! Here’s hoping it’s the first of many…
iCreate 99 On Sale Today
iCreate issue 99 is out today for all you creative Mac-type types. With iWeb being quietly and discreetly ushered out of Apple’s back door, I was tasked to produce a feature dealing with how to build a stylish website using alternative services and solutions such as SquareSpace, Blogger, WordPress and Flavors.me. See the results in this issue, on page 15! Very proud to have the lead feature this month, and thanks to the team at iCreate for making it look so good!
iCreate 97 – Enhance iLife
Teaser shot of the first two pages of my iLife feature in issue 97 of iCreate – in shops now! As long as they haven’t sold out, of course…
iCreate 97 is pleased to make your acquaintance
Issue 97 of iCreate magazine hits the shelves today, and this time I made the front cover! I have a feature in this issue on how to enhance and go beyond iLife, and also two GarageBand tutorials: one on mastering keyboard shortcuts and one highlighting a little-known feature that allows you to build your own basic sampler instruments. Only three more issues til we hit the magic 100!
Apps Magazine 8
Keep an eye out for Apps Magazine Issue 8 on the shelves of your local magazinical emporium. This issue contains my feature on apps to use while on holiday!
iCreate 96 issues forth
Issues forth? The problem with this is that I haven’t been blogging for that long, and I’m already running out of interesting ways to announce each new magazine issue that contains stuff I’ve written. No doubt the emergence of issue 97 of iCreate will be heralded by something along the lines of “iCreate 97 is pleased to make your acquaintance”.
Anyway, back to issue 96, which I’m happy to say actually contains quite a bit of me. Eight pages on GarageBand for beginners, a separate 2-page GarageBand tutorial on how to record electric guitar parts and a four page feature/review on the new Quidco mobile phone app. Fourteen pages in total in one issue – a new personal best!
Smartphone Essentials 115 Out Today!
I got an entire two pages of iPhone app reviews into Smartphone Essentials Issue 115, which hits the shelves today. Okay, so in terms of percentage contribution to the issue it’s not the largest, but every little helps. They must have been ok though, because not only did they let them into the mag, they’ve asked for two more pages for next month!
Apps 7 – Talk Anywhere for Free
I thought I’d just post this teaser shot of my ‘free video calls’ feature that appears on the front cover of Issue 7 of Apps magazine this month. A comprehensive roundup of all the current iPhone apps that offer free video calling services, including FaceTime, Skype, Fring and Tango, whichever one is right for you, you could end up saving a packet!
iCreate 95 Goes On Sale
Well, that month flew by… now I’m doing this full time, the days fly by quicker than the quickest thing in Quickville. Another packed issue of iCreate hits the shelves this week, full of great stuff to help you get more from your Mac. I have a 6-page feature on how to paint on your iPad (digitally, not literally!) on page 98 of this issue, and also a 2-page guide to basic vocal recording in GarageBand.
Apps Magazine 7
I made the front cover of issue 7, yeeha! Both my features for Apps magazine made the front page this month, with the feature on free video calling taking centre stage and the ‘Do Smartphones Make You Smarter?’ piece also getting a mention. I could get used to this….
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