Tag: Music
Serious about Guitar Hero? So is Logitech.
I’m sure you’ve seen those pictures of real guitars modded to work with Guitar Hero, and coveted them furiously. Me too. Well, covet no longer, because you can have your very own wooden guitar to play Guitar Hero on, courtesy of Logitech.
The guitar, over there, has a rosewood fretboard, metal frets, and a wireless range of up to ten metres, via 2.4GHz wireless technology. It’s even got the slider bar from Guitar Hero World Tour, so you can get that awesome whooshy phaser sound.
It’s PS2/PS3 only, but Logitech reckons it’ll work fine on all versions of Guitar Hero, and Activision has even fully licensed it to that effect. It’ll be available on Amazon UK, and cost a rather-hefty-but-oh-so-worth-it £150.
Related posts: Gibson Guitar introduces limited edition Dark Fire | Guitar Hero makes music look easy – 2.5 million extra kids learning instruments thanks to video games
PureSolo is Karaoke 2.0, and great for learning instruments, too
PureSolo is a new application designed for people to sing, or play, along with backing tracks. It’s great for drunken Karaoke after lunch on Christmas day, but it’s also good for any aspiring musicians – classical or rock & pop – to play along as if they were in a real band.
Each song offered by the service is missing a particular track, be that vocals, guitar, or even oboe or alto sax. When you join you get one free download, but beyond that, each track costs £1 to £2. You can record your efforts with a microphone, and use headphones, too.
Songbird hits version 1.0
Plenty of GOOD NEWS this morning in the world of digital music. First Amazon MP3 launches in the UK, and now awesome media player Songbird hits version 1.0.
Songbird, as I’ve said before, is one of my favourite music clients. Although it’s currently being neglected in favour of Spotify, it remains my player of choice for actual MP3 files. Why? Because it’s so wonderfully intuitive and feature-packed, as well as being open-source.
The new version brings massive performance improvements, loads of UI tweaks, better search and sorting, and better ability to cope with big libraries (full of completely legally-acquired MP3s, I’m sure). If you’re still using iTunes to play music, then I strongly recommend you give this a try. You won’t be disappointed.
Related posts: 5 good reasons to try Songbird | Try Spotify, too
Amazon MP3 goes live in the UK
Rejoice, DRM-haters. Amazon MP3 has quietly gone live in the UK this morning. You can find it here. It’s got some big big discounts on popular albums, with Take That’s new ‘Circus’ going for just £3, as is Elbow’s ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ and Seasick Steve’s ‘I Started Out With Nothin And I Still Got Most Of It Left’. Recent albums by Kings Of Leon, Coldplay and Girls Aloud are similarly cheaptastic.
Although the catalogue isn’t as ridiculously extensive as more established download services – yet – the user experience is great. I just downloaded Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ in just four clicks, plus a small one-off Amazon Downloader install, which downloads tracks in the background and adds them to your favourite media player.
Thanksgiving Tech Trumpet: Computer SSB
Yes, it’s that time of year when Americans take a bit of time out and give thanks for… well, things.
In honour of that, here’s a special Tech Trumpet – a computerised version of the Star Spangled Banner.
You wouldn’t expect me just to play the tune without modifying it though, would you?
Course not, which is just as well, because this is a very special version of the song…
Last.fm mashup maps every artist ever
This beautiful cloud represents the entirety of music. Every single artist tracked by Last.fm is marked as a point on the map, and ‘similar’ artists are connected by a grey line. The size of each point reflects the popularity of the artist, and different colours represent different genres.
It’s the creation of Budapest University PhD candidate Nepusz Tamas, who hammered Last.FM’s servers for over a week with a request every five seconds. Unfortunately, the only way to interact with the map is to pinpoint your favourite bands, and you can’t zoom in, but it’s still a beautiful representation of the world’s listening habits.
Reconstructing the structure of the world-wide music scene with Last.fm (via Listening Post)
Related posts: Last.fm gets a makeover – and a few new features | Viacom wins right to sift through YouTube user data, all four terabytes of it
Musebin looking to Twitter-ise the world of music reviews
Newly launched Musebin seems to fancy itself as a Twitter rival, targeting the music-blogging scene with its angle of one-line music reviews.
As well as the idea of a limited 140-word verbal workspace, Musebin rips-off another popular internet thing – voting. The community can give every post a Yay or Nay, ensuring that spam and nonsense is swiftly voted…
Logic3 releases iPod dock with valve amplifier
iPod docks, as I’ve said before, are ten-a-penny around here. They’re not the most exciting product to write about, and every company in the world makes one. This, however, is something special. It’s got valves.
If you don’t know why that’s good, then go ask your neighborhood audiophile. It basically makes the music sound ‘warmer’, and valve amps have long been praised for the lovely feel that they give to sound and music. Of course they’re not cheap. This model costs £300. For that, you’re getting lovely lovely sound, a pair of 40W speakers (though you can plug in whatever speakers you like) and two auxiliary inputs, for plugging in your TV or stereo. Full specs are over the jump.
Gibson teases us with "Dark Fire" Guitar
This is the tells-us-nothing teaser video that Gibson just sent us. It’s something to do with a guitar, and glowy bits. But damnit does it look tasty. Following some pretty snazzy work with digital guitars previously, there’s every possibility that this could be the most awesome axe since Hendrix’s flaming guitar.
Luckily, there’s a little bit more info revealed by a variety of product shots that we’ve been handed. Click the picture in the post to begin.
MySpace co-founder considering portable music device
In an interview the other day, MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe said that he could see MySpace developing and launching a “device for listening to music” in the future, but that they’re currently just focusing on MySpace Music.
Earlier this year, MySpace launched a download store in conjunction with major labels. Building its own MP3 player which ties in to that service, and potentially allows users to stream tracks over wireless, would be an obvious next step for the social networking company. Especially if it starts offering Slacker-like features.
Related posts: MySpace Music | Oasis teasing new album ‘Dig Out Your Soul’ for free via MySpace
