Portable Audio

Belkin’s not letting a little thing like the launch of the iPhone 3G slow it down this morning — in addition to all that wireless gear, it’s even got the stones to throw down an iPod accessory, which is a little funny. The GoStudio recorder is a full-featured recording dock for the iPod 5G, classic, and 2G and 3G nanos, which allows you to record 16-bit 44.1kHz audio directly from two built-in stereo mics or quarter-inch, XLR, and minijack inputs, and dump it all into iTunes when you’re done. The $119 box isn’t the sexiest thing we’ve ever seen, but if you’re a dedicated podcaster or just suffer from delusions of being the next Martin Hannett, it’s probably worth a look.

VirtualDJ is one of many mixing applications out on the market today. But what separates it from the rest is that it combines some nice features to help beginners as well as pros get the most out of their mix.

The greatest feature we like about VirtualDJ is that it displays the actual waveform of the music. This allows you to see the musical beats, giving the user greater accuracy when mixing two songs together. Also you can see breaks in the music, which gives you some key points to where you might want to mix in another song.

In addition, VirtualDJ also tries to figure out the tempo of each song and gives you indicators along the bottom edge of the waveform that act like visual aids to help you mix. And if you just can’t get both songs playing in tempo, it also provides you with a sync button that will stretch the new song to fit the tempo of the current song.

We did notice that the accuracy of the tempo matching feature depends largely in part to the type of music. Your standard disco style beat gives more accurate results than one with more a more complicated drum pattern as it tend to throw off the system.

Other notable features include a built in sampler so that you can make loops on the fly, audio effects, scratching via the virtual turntables and cue points. These cue points are saved to a VirtualDJ file, so that each time you load up a specific song you can go directly to the cue point saving time in locating certain parts in the music.

VirtualDJ is available for both Windows and Mac operating systems and should be seriously consider for those wanting to dabble in electronic mixing.

The team at MixMeister wasted no time developing a scratch app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The MixMeister Scratch allows you to scratch anywhere and anytime you feel the need to.

The app comes with audio clips that you can scratch to by sliding your finger back and forth on the vinyl portion of the screen. We found the scratching fairly responsive but lacks the feel of an actual record (for obvious reasons).

If anything this is just an app to have fun with. Sounds are realistic and should impress your friends as you pretend to be the next DMC world champion.

MixMeister Scratch is free and available now at the iTunes App Store.

Sick of paying top dollar for your mixers? Yeah, so are we. But we’re not so sure about building our own from scratch, even if you can get the full source code and build schematics to whip up your own Auroroa open source mixer. (They’ll sell you posers one pre-built, too, if you want to front it.) Matching, scratching, and tasteful song selection? You’re on your own there, pally boy.

[Via hack a day]

So here we have it: The Creative Zen X-Fi. Officially announced by Creative in Singapore, the X-Fi is what we expected: a Wi-Fi-capable player with Yahoo and MSN instant-messaging clients, 2.5-inch LCD, onboard speaker, SD/SDHC expansion, FM radio, voice recorder, and 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB flavors for the taking. In surprise territory we have a bundled pair of nice EP-830 earbuds and Creative’s X-Fi Crystalizer technology. If that weren’t enough, Creative spiced up the X-Fi’s launch with limited-edition Red Cliff editions (pictured above). Along with the player’s launch, Creative announced several accessories, including the TravelSound Zen X-Fi Docking Speaker System, Armband, Silicone case, and leather case. Still no word when we’ll get our hands on the X-Fi here, but Singapore prices come in at S$229 ($145US), S$329 ($209US), and S$399 ($254US) for the various models.

[Thanks, yutaka]

If you found yourself infatuated with Samsung’s YP-U3, you’re sure to love the U4… we think. There’s a complete dearth of information regarding the device itself, but given that it already has a placeholder and image on the outfit’s Korean Yepp site, we’d say there’s a pretty good chance it’ll be getting real soon enough. Hold tight, miniature DAP lovers, Sammy won’t keep you in the dark much longer.

[Via AnythingButiPod]

We’ve covered several apps that integrate with the social music platform Last.FM, and we’ve expressed our worries about what might happen to the site when it was bought by CBS. As it happens, though, Last.FM has only gotten better lately. And now that they’ve released a shiny new version of their public API, we’re hoping for more development on the downloadable app front.

Here’s the skinny on the new API features: there’s now read/write authentication for desktop, web and mobile apps, which, besides being essential for any service that logs your music listening, sets the stage for — dare we hope? — a killer Last.fm app for iPhone. The API will also allow apps to access search functions and make playlists, which means easier access to Last.FM’s growing library of free streaming tracks. Scrobble on, amigos.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

If you listen to a ton of music and the word “scrobble” is part of your vocabulary, you’ll get a kick out of Lastgraph. It’s a service that generates interesting visual representations of your Last.fm listening history. You can view a sweet line graph of your listening to a given artist, or you can generate some snazzy posters of your overall listening.

The posters are pretty huge and take quite a while to render, but you can actually print them out as some stylish, informative wall art. If you don’t need something that huge, there’s also a smaller version available through the quick timeline feature. You can also export your data as an Excel file, a CSV or JSON.

So we’ve basically seen the wired version of this in Belkin’s RockStar, but at least that made a modicum of sense. This, however, does not. Thanko’s i2! Streams works as such: you plug one of the wireless transmitters in between your DAP / PMP and headphones, and up to five of your pals simply hold onto a receiver unit with earbuds of their own. As you can guess, those five pals now have your music piped to them through the air. The only problem? Why hold on to one of these things when you could pick up a chintzy DAP of your own down the street for a couple yuan / yen / whatever? Thanko’s wonders never cease…

[Via CrunchGear]

Roberts may get ridiculed for its design cues, but one thing’s for sure: it sticks to its guns. The latest patently ugly (but sort of cute) DAB radio to emerge from its lair is the solarDAB, which predictably gets energized by the sun. The unit packs a top-mounted solar panel along with a “level indicator on the display screen that shows the strength of the solar level being absorbed.” Once the rechargeable batteries are fully juiced, said radio will blast out tunes for a whopping 27 hours. You should be able to secure one in a variety of colors here soon for £79.99 ($158).

[Via TechDigest]