New Florence. New Renaissance.

Cloud Music Player

Part Wi-Fi router, part living-room music player, Gramofon connects old-school home stereo equipment to Spotify and other streaming music services that can be controlled by a smartphone or tablet.

BusinessWeek

50 ways to listen to Paul Simon in your car

Road and Track describes the various ways an iPad can play Paul Simon and other classics in your car no matter how old

 

Taming Soundwaves

Sound waves tend to travel every which way, meaning if you can hear something, you can usually be heard. This acoustic circulator focuses sound waves so they travel in one direction and blocks them from moving back.

Bloomberg

Beats – from headphones to streaming music

Time interview with Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre as they move into streaming music beyond their hugely successful headsets

And the younger generation had no idea what the music was supposed to sound like.  That’s why both of us take great pride in the fact that this company is turning a lot of young people onto quality sound, when what they were getting before was really bad earbuds and computers where the speakers faced the table.  Dre was very frustrated with that, and we talked about that quite often, because my beginning was as a recording engineer as well.  So we’ve always shared that – it was our connection from day one, speakers and audio.  And this came about and we did this, and we’re very proud of the fact that an entire generation now is turned onto audio.

Photo Credit

The Sounds of Pixar and More

How do animated and other movies get their sounds and squeals. Often at Skywalker Ranch courtesy of three times Oscar nominated sound designer Tom Myers.

Via KALW

“To make the sound of the glow urchins flying through the air and hitting a body, Myers did the following:

“The first is sort of a synthesized tone that I put through a Doppler program.  I took that tone, pitched it down a bit, I think I added a little bacon frying with it. To give it some texture.”

That’s right. He adds the sound of bacon frying. And just so you know, this isn’t a fancy industry term.  It’s literally the sound of bacon in a pan.

And beyond the pitched up tone and the bacon frying, there’s also the sound of two Hot Wheels cars banging into each other. And at one point, they used the sound of someone hitting a giant, empty water bottle.”

Pioneer and the amateur DJ market

Fortune (sub required) on how Pioneer has moved its focus from the club and professional DJ market to the consumer market

Web Radio

Carlin is one of a raft of entrepreneurs reinventing a medium long judged a money pit: Web radio, or podcasting. Some of them have broken into the mainstream. Satirist Marc Maron, for instance, has appeared on Comedy Central and is a frequent guest on Conan. Others, like The Nerdist Podcast, mine subcultures for show topics. And many are hosted by comedians seeking new outlets, including Adam Carolla and Jason and Randy Sklar, whose program Sklarbro Country is essentially sports radio with jokes.

The most successful hosts are even giving traditional media a run for their money. Carlin's most recent history broadcast, for example, was downloaded more than 40,000 times by fans within the first hour of its release. Considering that some prime-time networks draw in a few hundred thousand viewers a night, it's not hard to see why the medium is getting another look.

Time (sub required)

Photo Credit

RIP, Dr. Amar Bose

Of course, the entire audio industry was roiled when the MP3 player came on the scene. But even then, Bose managed to put itself in just the right place. Indeed, the circumstances would almost uniquely benefit the company: In the absence of physical media (LP, cassette, CD), digital music didn’t require the complicated hardware that earlier formats did. That would spell trouble for phonograph and cassette-deck makers, but Bose wasn’t in those product lines—it just made speakers, and in the era of the iPod (AAPL), speakers were basically the only thing that mattered. Bose’s SoundDock became the fancy iPod (and, later, iPhone) dock for that key market of discerning-but-not-obsessive-to-an-antisocial-degree customers.

Bloomberg

Daft Punk

Time (sub required) on the band which has a new album Random Access Memories

"We never actually made music with computers," says one-half of Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter, on the phone from their Daft Arts compound in L.A. This is surprising given the digital sheen that glistens over so much of their music. But he and his partner Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo made Homework in an "experimental lab, with wires everywhere," also known as Bangalter's childhood bedroom in Paris. "We used hardware and analog equipment that behaved in weird ways"--i.e., temperamental, largely Japanese machines attempting to mimic drums and bass guitars and failing into the future. Homework attracted attention from budding-genius directors like Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The resulting videos embodied Daft Punk's synthesis of rigid structure and loose-limbed whimsy, featuring skeletons dancing on Q*bert platforms, tomato-sauce tutorials and lovelorn bloodhounds.

A music tuner app

It’s not necessarily the first tuner to incorporate visualization, but Sandler thinks (Tunable) has a good chance of being the first one musicians will find useful from the moment they open it. In addition to the pitch history, Tunable also includes a tone generator and a metronome--a fairly sophisticated little kit of tools--but there’s practically zero learning curve for figuring them all out. Much of that is owed to the app’s simple, sharp UI, which draws from an unlikely source of inspiration: an old Ideo concept for futuristic digital books.

FastCompany