If you’re journeying towards spiritual awakening, it might not hurt to choose the right soundtrack. The Zen Den by Logical Drift app (free for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, pictured below) provides serene, tranquil soundscapes to help you relax (ed. note: Unless that sort of thing drives you nuts). Music veterans John Matarazzo and Logan Strand,…
(Ed. note: Some people review stuff five minutes after it came out. Sometimes we do that too, but with iTunes 11, we took our time.) When I first installed iTunes 11, I felt a sense of panic. Most iTunes upgrades, these past few years, haven’t changed much of anything, which is one reason some people have been…
For the uninitiated, “chiptunes” are 8-bit versions of songs that sound as if they were made for video game systems from two decades ago. A large underground community is dedicated chiptuning songs and, for the most part, creating original works using vintage consoles and computers (updated), but AutoChipTune just made the former whole process a lot…
Even if you weren’t around for the original Breakout videogame for Atari, in which the player controls a horizontal bar in order to bounce a ball against bricks in order to destroy them, ideally clearing the board and moving on, you just might remember the similar Brick game from the first iPods. It’s one of the…
Imagine if your personal theme song played every time you walked into a room. It would be sort of like being in an opera or ballet (in which characters often have themes or motifs associated with them), but in real life. With an intriguing app called Music: The Gathering, which Adam Ribaudo and his team built…
Music Hack Day Boston took place this past weekend. Unfortunately, our editor was on an ill-timed, long-ago-scheduled vacation, but other Evolver.fm staffers, including yours truly, were on hand to chronicle the festivities. If you’re not familiar with Music Hack Day, the event gives software developers and hardware hackers 24 hours to come up with an idea and…
The era of the physical media era is behind us, but there remains some fondness for that antiquated concoction of plastic and tape, the cassette. The quality was sometimes poor by today’s standards — and who doesn’t remember occasionally having their stereo “eat” their cassette? However, the cassette taught us to share music, even if you…
When Steve Jobs announced the iPad a few years ago, it took most people by surprise, although Apple has had a hard time keeping a lid on other upcoming launches. Today, Apple was not remotely close to keeping the new iPad Mini a secret, with many blogs reporting leaked mockups and blurry photos over the…
You’re innocently going about your day when it happens: You hear a song you’ve never heard before. It rules. You need to know what it is. Before the age of smartphones, this would probably require writing down a few lyrics to Google later. Before computers, you’d probably have to come to terms with never ever hearing…
The internet has radio for every genre. Mashups? Yep. Dubstep? Check. A station solely for music featured in Breaking Bad? You bet. If you’re looking for music from a twenty-something metalhead in his garage, ta-da! Try Radio Reddit. Given the social link-sharing service Reddit’s large, diverse user base, you’d expect to find at least a few…
The processing power of smart phones — a huge step up from the MP3 players of old — gives practically anybody access to near-professional-grade audio effects. What used to require expensive high-end audio equipment can now be done with the so-called “phone” in your pocket, just by downloading an app. Assembling the top picks for this category was tricky. Many options…
The indie video game Minecraft has gotten popular — like, “oxygen” popular, in some circles, with over seven million copies sold. Now, a similar interface has spread into the realm of HTML5 music apps — in this case, for the Google Chrome web browser. ToneCraft from Dinahmoe, an “integrated music and sound production house,” takes the…
Rolling Stone magazine, once home to Hunter S. Thompson and now home to Matt Taibbi, has a concert finding app, Rolling Stone: On The Road, whose title tips its hat to every beatnik’s and hepcat’s favorite book. It has been available for some time on iOS, but was recently ported to Android, so we thought we’d…
Wireless data allows people to listen to millions of songs from the cloud, just about anywhere where they go, using all manner of services and sites. But once you lose that signal, the music stops. As is we all too clear, wireless bandwidth is a finite resource. Mobile users on most networks can no longer…
Smartphones are tricky things. They essentially cram an entire computer into a tiny chassis you can carry around in your pocket, which is pretty convenient. But for music fans, sound quality can suffer as manufacturers cut corners with the audio electronics in the interest of saving space and money. On top of that, the Android…
