Looking for a way to turn an ancient recording medium into something useful? Here’s an idea: combine it with an even more ancient recording medium. Aleks Kolkowski took his vintage vinyl record cutter to Manchester’s Futuresonic 2008 festival and used it to carve one track’s worth of music into old CDs for festival attendees who brought him a digital audio file. Stick the CD on a 45 RPM turntable, and you can groove to the grooves, old school. Oh yeah.
It will be a long time before digital turntables completely overtake their analog predecessors, but you can’t argue that carrying a hard drive full of MP3s to a gig is a lot easier than hauling crates full of vinyl. And it’s that convenience aspect that the Design Continuum has taken one step further with their DJ GO concept. The system is composed of a set of MP3/CD turntables with a built-in mixer that can fold up into a convenient single package. I have my doubts that the DJ GO would be the lightest thing you’ve ever thrown over your shoulder, but it’s at least lighter than the cases needed to move a set of 1200s. But don’t go throwing away your old tables just yet since there doesn’t seem to be any plans to put the DJ GO into production
Remember the Sony Rolly? The weird little dancing MP3 player thing that is somehow huge in Japan and costs 350 bucks? If you’re not lucky enough to live in Japan, and you don’t have $350, and you really really want a weird little dancing music playing thing, the Sega I-Spin may be for you. Plug your MP3 player into its ass, and the I-Spin will spin and flap around and stuff in time to the music. It’s powered by 3 AAA batts, probably has a really weak speaker, and is available in either blue or pink for about $50.
Just over a month ago, we wrote about a homebuilt laser harp that you play by selectively blocking out laser beams to generate tones. It looked pretty complicated to construct, but now you can buy your own in a slick silvery finish that’s powered by USB. The device includes 30 songs in 19 musical genres to provide background tracks, and breaking the laser beams generates “pre-authored pulses, streams, riffs or loops of musical notes or sounds from an incredible variety of instruments from around the world — guitars, steel guitar, strings of all types, percussion, keyboards, winds, even cowbell.” Thankfully, the Beamz Music Performance System has some brains inside that do their best to prevent you from causing blood to pour out the ears of your audience:
The notes are timed to the beat of the rhythm accompaniment and that as you trigger each one, an appropriate musical sequence of notes is played depending upon the rhythm accompaniment’s current key. In short, you’re performing much like a music conductor: you’re calling upon each instrument and controlling the shape of the music, but the beamz software is taking care of making sure everything fits together seamlessly.
I just have two questions: does it have bagpipes, and can I get more cowbell with that? The Beamz Music Performance System will be available from Sharper Image for about $600 (!).
In an effort to improve the nerdy image of the accordion Roland has added a few high-tech upgrades and improvements to their FR-2b model. Unfortunately though the only thing I know about accordions is what I’ve seen in Weird Al videos, so here’s a list of some of the improvements as taken from the Roland website:
Performance Parameters
The FR-2b has five pads for adding percussive excitement to your performance. Use them as drum pads or to trigger rhythms via Loop Playback Mode. There’s also a Song function for “minus one” play-along fun. The FR-2b contains eight user programs for instant storage and recall of your favorite settings.
Connections
The connection options of the FR-2b allow you to perform in any situation. A headphone output is provided for private practice. The Line output lets you plug into amplifiers and mixers onstage or in the studio. MIDI output allows you to play external keyboards and other MIDI-compatible instruments from your V-Accordion.
Adjustable Bellows Pressure
The improved Bellows Resistance Regulator on the FR-2b V-Accordion allows you to fine-tune the bellows pressure according to your strength, ability, and personal style — another FR-2b advantage for comfort and playability.
The FR-2b runs on 8 AA batteries, but even with them installed it still weighs almost half as much as a traditional accordion model. So if you spend your weekends rocking out at polka concerts or Polish weddings it might be able to improve both your image and your sore back. But if you’re looking to buy the Roland FR-2b you might want to book paying gigs all week long since it has a list price of $3,999.
I was born in the 80’s, so the first music format known to me was the cassette tape. I never really thought that they were all that cool, aside from recording my favorite songs off the radio (which were all missing at least a few seconds from the beginning as I raced to press record). I’m almost sorry that I didn’t get the experience of vinyl, as people that grew up on records claim that you’ll not find a better sound. Unfortunately, while it may have a great sound, your old 45’s aren’t exactly the easiest to to tote, so it might be worth your time and effort to put that music on a more portable format.
Sony has made the process of ripping music from vinyl to MP3 format about as simple as possible. Their new PS-LX300USB turntable hooks into your computer’s USB port and works with the included Sound Forge Audio Studio to bring your music into the digital age. You won’t have to spend a fortune on the equipment either, as it will only set you back $150.
Digital media is all over the place, in all kinds of different formats, and it’s often a huge pain in the ass to get it from one place to another, especially if the internet is involved. doubleTwist is an attempt to make all of your media play nice, especially with other people in social networking environments like Facebook. The idea is that the doubleTwist software will read all of your media, and make it available in one integrated, web-friendly place, doing all of the necessary reformatting and transcoding behind the scenes. You can then trade media back and forth with your friends just by dragging and dropping onto their online profiles.
As for DRM… doubleTwist was developed in part by the guy responsible for cracking DVD encoding as well as Apple’s FairPlay DRM. However, stripping DRM isn’t what this software is about. It will remove DRM from your iTunes music, sort of, but all it does it play the song in the background on mute while re-recording it to MP3, which you can do by yourself. And you have to have legally purchased and be authorized to play the iTunes music before it’ll do a thing. So, despite the root of doubleTwist, don’t expect it to perform any DRM miracles. Shame.
At this stage, doubleTwist supports relatively few (albeit the most common) file formats, and a limited number of devices. Also, the file sharing limits (when it comes to size and length) are quite restrictive. It’s a good idea and it’s completely free to download (it’s in beta at the moment), but if you’re serious about your media, you’ll probably want to keep messing with it the old fashioned way. For now, at least.
Laser harps aren’t, as far as I can tell, brand new tech, but you’ve got to admit, seeing a home built one in action is pretty cool. The principle is deceptively simple; a reflection sensor watches the beams, and when one is interrupted, it signals a MIDI routine to produce a tone. Sliding your hand up and down the beam can bend notes, or do anything else that you feel like encoding into the MIDI protocol. So, yeah, the music is great and all, but I think the best part of the video is the shutdown sequence at the very end. Hey, I wonder if he takes requests… How about Flight of the Bumblebee? No, wait! Free Bird!!!
If you want to build one yourself, it’s possible with some know-how, check out the website. Oh, and click here to watch an absolutely adorable video of how the harp works.
The only reason I find the E-Light Entertainment Light at all remarkable is that it looks like a tesla coil. Seriously, that’s it. What it’s designed to be is a combination lighting and speaker system that clips around patio umbrellas “to add dinner music and soft illumination to your alfresco dining.” I don’t know about you, but I think I’m alergic to alfresco. You can plug an MP3 player (or anything else with a 3.5mm jack) into it, and the rechargeable batteries last for 6 hours, or 12 hours if you only want light or music, not both. When you put it on the recharging dock, it turns into a desk lamp, as in the picture. You can buy it for a vaguely ridiculous $100 from Frontgate.
I think that Frontgate should throw a little R&D money at this thing and turn it into an actual musical tesla coil, like the awesome one in the video after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
I would be willing to venture that more than a few people reading this have downloaded music illegally. I’ll admit that I used to do my fair share back in the day, but being a little older and wiser, have been legally purchasing my music from iTunes for some time. Recently I heard about Qtrax, which is a legal site that will let you download as much music as you want, for free. The only catch is that it is DRM protected, and you have to watch some ads. Seems like a small price to pay for unlimited music downloads, right?
I’m sure that it would work out just fine, if they actually have any music to download. Unfortunately, the service went live yesterday, sans downloads. They had been talking big about the deals they had with the big four labels for over 25 million tracks, the only problem was that they didn’t have anything signed with even a single one of them.
You know what they say, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
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By Evan Ackerman
