I’m enjoying MusicTech Focus - a series of popular “in-depth guide(s) for the creative musician” written and compiled by MusicTech Magazine’s mastering experts. A little pricey at £8.99, but then they do include DVDs of files and examples. They’ll be a useful set of guides for students of music technology but no substitute for hands on experience. They’ll probably have a limited shelf life as they’re dependent on application versions available today.

My first AudioBoo (actually a water recording I made a while back and played through my monitors) recorded into AudioBoo on the iPhone. This iPhone App enables ‘boos’ to be recorded on the iPhone then shared on AudioBoo and can also be linked to your Twitter and Facebook. It can also give GPS location. An account with AudioBoo is easy to set up and free (so far) and can also embedded, as here:

This iKEY Plus from iKEY-audio.com looks like a great budget entry level device for recording digital audio.

Matthew sent me the link to this amazing tabletop synthesizer.

The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

From: http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable

I'm currently checking out Webwag which serves content from the web to my mobile phone, a Motorola V3x.

Have a look at the Webwag Blog It has the feel of iPhone applications but without the interface or design.
Webwag displays widgets on the phone and synchronises them:

• clock
• weather
• Flickr
• RSS feeds
• Gmail

The synchronisation can be set to every half-hour but no more often. The display is full resolution.

I live in the countryside not far from the major industrial conurbation of Birmingham and surrounded by major infrastructure M5, M42 and A38. Still, my BT Broadband is slow! Thanks to a great BT Engineer, half-an-hour ago, my BT line was reconnected. The local wiring was old and finally fell over on Monday when I lodged a complaint. I was advised by the Helpline to change my ADSL Filter. I knew the moment the advisor offered this help that she was probably wrong. What's been happening since I was connected a couple of months ago, is that the connection kept dropping out. This got unbearable by last Monday, when I finally had enough time to phone and complain. It took over an hour to get the wrong advise. I plugged the modem directly into the phone line to see if it was the filter at fault. Nothing happened. I unplugged the modem and then the phone didn't work. The line was dead. The BT Engineer which has just left told me that the local distribution box in the room next door was in a bit of a mess. He rewired it and now (touch wood) I back online. All problems will now be logged here in case I need to report faults again in the future.

For those of you who are involved in Music Education, pupils and teachers, I urge you to visit and use SoundJunction

The SoundJunction website's all about music. You can take music apart and find out how it works, create music yourself, find out how other people make music and how they perform it, you can find out about musical instruments, and look at the backgrounds to different musical styles.

Check out the New Tool for making music.

SoundJunction is an initiative of the ABRSM and has received a BETT award for Digital Content at Secondary Level.

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I've recently joined the team at Musicate to offer Music Technology and composition sessions to their clients.

The first sessions I've done with Richard have been in a school in Coventry encouraging school children to make music using technology. The school currently has Cubase VST running on Windows, or rather not running. There were problems with the signal routing and drivers, file management and other annoying obstacles to getting on with making music. After 2 lessons of having difficulty getting their Windows computers to work, we switched to using GarageBand - see QuickTime tour here and www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/. Within seconds we were making music with the children particpating as a group composing a song. We resolved then to research the possibility of implementing the use of Apple computers and software in our future sessions.

• More Musicate photos at Flickr here
• Introduction to GarageBand - Wikiversity