Yes, it’s true: I flew about 25 hours each way from New York to attend Music Hack Day Sydney last weekend, and have written up just about every app and hack to emerge from it over the course of the week. These Aussies and the occasional New Zealander or Englishman produced some really great hacks,…
For those who wish to enjoy online the potent mix of glory and humiliation that karaoke brings, tokStar represents a promising new development. Choose your song, enter your name, enable your camera and microphone, wait your turn, and you’re up and running on its virtual stage, singing your heart out for the voting pleasure of…
If you’ve already heard of the social cross-service music app for the desktop, Tomahawk, you already know how cool it is. Freelance developer Syd Lawrence, the same man who brought us the frivolous This Was My Jam, donned his thinking cap to build Toma.hk, a simple-to-use web app that lets anyone embed music on blogs or link…
The Byrds and the Bee Gees web app attracted a fair amount of attention at Rethink Music Hack Day for the way it generated a Spotify playlist based on what your parents were likely listening to when you were conceived, with an extra option that asks you to specify “whether your dad was smooth back then.” Springing…
We’ll stop writing about all the neat stuff to emerge from Music Hack Day Sydney at some point, but I’m not done with this thing yet, even as my jetlag is finally waning. Although this latest iteration of the Music Hack Day series produced only just north of 20 functional apps, they were all humdingers….
First, let us note that you cannot yet use Soundtastic, built by Eric Bae at Music Hack Day Sydney this past weekend. But we witnessed a fully-functional demonstration, and it was pretty impressive. Bae likens his creation to “StumbleUpon for music,” and in a way, he’s right. Soundtastic mines your Facebook page for your Likes, then starts…
Dylan Wood of Serato, which makes the industry-standard DJ setup that lets people the playback of MP3s as if they were vinyl records, put together this show-stopping music hardware hack at Sydney Music Hack Day in a single weekend: 8Bit Serato VJ. Once again, a Music Hack Day has made me wonder why I became…
Nobody likes missing out on the big gig, whether due to a prior commitment, lack of funds, or scarcity of tickets, as with the recent tours by Kraftwerk and Pulp. Wish You Were Here, developed at Music Hack Day Sydney, is a simple web app that promises to alleviate some pain on the part of…
We were mightily impressed with the music apps created at Music Hack Day Sydney — the first such hackathon ever to be held in the southwestern hemisphere. The latest to float our boat: Ivy, a web app that lets friends or coworkers add songs to a group playlist that they can all hear at the same…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — You might already know about This Is My Jam, which encourages users to post the one song they truly care about at any given time, in a refreshing change from the deluge of millions of songs that threaten to entertain music fans at any given time these days. When you update your…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — When Sonos released an API to let developers build music apps that could talk to its excellent line of connected speakers for the home, we expected a deluge of neat stuff, but it never showed. That changed this weekend, with the creation of SoCo (pictured above) and SonoShell (below), whose potential…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — The sound designers who make our videogames, plays, movies, television shows, and so on face a Herculean task when it comes to finding the right door slams, thunderclaps, and so on: They have to trawl through massive sonic databases looking just the right scream or creaky door sound, to enhance scenes on…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — Most Twitter bots drive us insane with demands to buy tooth whitener or win free iPads. This one just wants to play you the music you want to hear. It really couldn’t be much simpler: just enter an artist name, or some text with the artist name in it, and send that to…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — We already know the vinyl revival is not going away. Now, there’s a handy new app looking to help record shoppers (not to mention CD holdouts) listen to albums before buying them, as well as sharing their prospective purchases with friends a la Instagram. Enter: InstaSound. This iOS app (with a companion…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — Raspberry Pi is a fairly raw computer that a bit larger than a credit-card that costs $25, and which hackers can turn into a wide variety of things. It’s a blank canvas, making it perfectly suited to the hardware hackers at Music Hack Days such as the one happening today here in…
