Music, Sound Effects, Tech News, and More — The AudioMicro Blog

Don’t confuse Apple Corps. with the Apple Company that makes the iPhone, iPod and the Mac computer. Apple Corps. is a company that was created to handle all of the Beatles business, whether music-related or not. The Beatles have been at the forefront lately, partly due to the recent release of the Beatles Rock Band game for Nintendo Wii. As a result, Apple Corps. and EMI Music are releasing an apple shaped USB stick containing 14 of the Beatles’ albums in digital format. How cool is that?

The USB is metallic green in color and shaped just like an apple. Just remove the “apple core” and insert the USB into any portable music device or computer to access the music. It’s an innovative idea to reconnect new and old Beatles fans with some of the Beatles most famous music selections.  According to the product description, there is only a limited edition of 30,000 apple-shaped USB drives that loaded with the re-mastered audio for The Beatles’ 14 stereo titles, as well as all of the re-mastered CDs’ visual elements, including 13 mini-documentary films about the studio albums, replicated original UK album art, rare photos and expanded liner notes. These limited edition USB devices contain 16GB of memory and “the music will come in FLAC 44.1 KHz 24 bit and MP3 320 Kbps formats. FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a lossless audio format, which means that during compression, FLAC does not lose quality where as MP3 does.” The good news is that FLAC is open source and also royalty-free.

The following 14 Beatles albums are included on the USB device:

Please Please Me

With The Beatles

A Hard Day’s Night

Beatles For Sale

Help!

Rubber Soul

Revolver

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Magical Mystery Tour

Yellow Submarine

The White Album

Abbey Road

Let It Be

Past Masters

Look for the “apples” this Christmas, as they will be released in the United States on December 8^th. The price is based on 200 pounds, which will average out to almost $500.

More Music News From Around the Web Today…

Paying for MySpace

Jason Karaban’s Succeed 101: Single Review

New Rain Machine Video – “Give Blood”

New Soft Pack Video/MP3: “Answer To Yourself”

Jimmy Fallon Features “Soul Food”

Posted in: Apple, Beatles

Billed as “explosive,” P5Audio.com recently introduced two additional sample sounds for Garageband. Garageband is great way to create your own tracks, using loops from other samples (royalty free, of course.) Aspiring producers can play with the loops and audio samples without having to worry about copyright issues. The samples are available for instant download at P5Audio.com.

“We are really fired-up about these scorchin’ new sounds for Garageband since we started this new music samples inventory blitz,” states P5Audio President, David Whiteside, “and these sounds are inspired by the music industry greats with the highest quality music production that our customers expect from P5Audio!”

The two new and innovative music samples include:

• Wayne’s Voodoo Rebirth Music Loop Set

• Digeridoo World Grime

Wayne’s Voodoo Rebirth Music Loop Set is a tribute to the famous and grimy rapper, Lil’ Wayne. With the download, you’ll get 25 royalty free tracks featuring the Dirty South New Orleans Style that Lil’ Wayne made famous, and seven loop sets with Wayne-style female vocals including pitched vocals, sexy shout outs and auto-tune. There are many more features included in the download package as well.

Digerido World Grime features one of the oldest instruments of all time. The Didgeridoo, originally from Australia, is made from Eucalyptus trees, which have been naturally hollowed out by termites. With the download, you’ll get the?unique Didgeridoo World Grime sounds, which are dirty, grimy, urban, and “gangsta.” You’ll also get Didgeridoo World Grime Loops n’ Licks, containing 219 Licks and 158 Loops. There are additional features included with the download package as well.

P5Audio.com prides itself on providing 100 percent royalty free music that is always available for instant download. The website offers “multi track music loops and sample downloads, hip hop samples, music loops and sample sounds for fruity loops, apple garage band, acid pro — ready to use in all major software sampler formats, as well as all music hardware samplers.”

Posted in: Apple, garageband, P5 audio

How’s this for pathetic? The BBC is reporting that nine people, including a few DJs, have been arrested and held in suspicion of credit card fraud and money laundering after they allegedly used 1,500 stolen cards to purchase their own albums on iTunes and Amazon.

Not only that, they also made hundreds of thousand of British pounds doing it! For anyone who’s checked the exchange rate recently, you’ll know that equals a whole hell of a lot in U.S. dollars. The crafty thieves first posted their music on Amazon and iTunes, and then spent almost £500,000 worth of their own music on credit cards that didn’t belong to them. This netted them about £200,000 in royalties.

Investigators say this is part of an ongoing investigation into international fraud conspiracy against the online music retailers.

iTunes and Amazon have been down this road before. People have been using the sites to test out the legitimacy of stolen credit cards for years. Thieves will steal your card info, use it to buy music on iTunes. Once that transaction is successful they then go on a credit-ruining shopping spree.

Poor Apple has probably seen more than its fair share of creative fraud attempts. Like this guy who set up shop as an iPod repairman, then defrauded Apple into sending him up to 9,000 replacement iPod shuffles players.

But every story has another side, and Apple has been on the receiving end of fraud charges in the not-to-distant past. An Illinois couple is suing the tech giant for misrepresentation when they were charged $1.29 per download when their gift cards promised the songs could be purchased for $.99. Seems like an innocent mistake, until you take into account this same thing may have happened to millions of people. The couple is also seeking refunds for all other users who had the same experience. If a judge rules the suit as class-action, the damages could reach up to $5 million — probably chump-change to Apple.

Always a good thing to be reminded to check your credit card statements, even after buying an intangible MP3.

–Michelle Lanz

Posted in: Amazon, Apple, credit card fraud, iPhone, iPod Shuffle, itunes

Yep, that’s right. According to T3 gadget magazine, the now-obsolete cassette (remember those?) player is the most important music-specific invention of the last 50 years, beating out compact discs, mp3 format and even the market-dominating iPod.

In a recent U.K. Telegraph article, Kat Hanniford at T3 said they chose the Walkman over these newer inventions because, “It changed the way we access music, changed how often we could access music, and changed a generation.”

Originally invented so the co-founder of Sony, Akio Morita, could listen to opera while on the road, the beast really did revolutionize how we consume music. It finally came out July 1, 1979 and was called the Freestyle, the Soundabout and the Stowaway in a number of different countries, until Sony decided to make Walkman the official name.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the portable cassette player, the BBC recently invited a 13-year-old named Scott Campbell to give up his precious iPod and replace it with a Walkman for an entire week. The thing probably looks like a VCR with headphones to a kid who had probably never even heard of a Walkman before the experiment. Campbell even says it was borderline embarrassing to be seen in public with the monstrosity:

“When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.”

Poor little chap. I remember how every kid in the neighbor HAD to have “the grandfather of the MP3 Player,” in order to be socially acceptable. Well, maybe it wasn’t that serious, but not having the ability to tune out on the bus to school in the morning definitely put you at a disadvantage. I also remember when the portable compact disc player came out and I begged my parents go buy me my ticket to cool-hood.

So this all has me a little nostalgic with flashbacks to my childhood, and I am sure some of you out there feel the same way. So to take a little walk(man) down memory lane, here is CNET’s photogallery of the Walkman’s illustrious career.

What will the next 50 years will bring in the universe of portable music technology? Will it be the iPod or something we have yet to invent? It’s exciting to think of the possibilities.

Happy 4th of July!

–Michelle Lanz

Photo by Esa Sorjonen

Posted in: Apple, iPod, mp3, music technology, Sony, Walkman

The folks over at TorrentFreak have been reporting on a new trend in iPhone hacking that’s on track to gain significant attention in 2009. When the earth-shattering mobile phone hit the shelves nearly two years ago, the process of jailbreaking was one of the only widely renowned ways techies and hackers alike could play around with Apple’s not-so-transparent technology. Now Crackulous, a piece of code that removes copy protection in applications, has been made available to the public.

The term “hacking” bears negative connotations to those that don’t understand technology, and the developers of Crackulous have a highly proletarian view on the whole issue. Quite simply, using Crackulous would allow users to share applications they’ve downloaded through Apple, all while contributing to new software developments via open source coding. This would lead to various advancements in the scheme of using the iPhone to its full potential.

Although code junkies were only recently given the opportunity to experiment with Crackulous, software developers concerned about the success of their IP have since become hot on their trail. Ripdev, the newest threat to software pirates, is the latest application of anti-DRM testing systems that has already undergone Apple’s software approval process. TorrentFreak quotes the Ripdev representatives, noting that “the Kali system is a server-side service which can take any App Store application and place it inside another protection wrapper which, Ripdev claims, will prevent it from being pirated.” While the technical side of the issue is sure to be far more complicated, the Ripdev team is essentially challenging hackers to break through an extra barrier of protection, all for a 1%-%5 cut of developer’s revenue depending on price. While this is nothing new to the code-crackers of the tech world, it is among the first steps towards the oft-told battle of software copyright protection in the digital age.

Posted in: Apple, DRM, piracy, software