NAMM Oddities 2006
Barry writes “After attending the Winter NAMM show for a number of years I’ve noticed that the exhibitors seem to fall into two categories: the established company showing their new (and sometimes vaporous) products; and the independent start-up company looking to be noticed by distributors, music stores, potential investors and the music press. It seems that every year I spent more of my NAMM cruising time checking out the various small companies that all get stashed off in some side room. Many of the products from these companies are never seen the by the mainstream either because their potential market is too small, or most people simply can’t figure out what the hell to do with it.” Link. Yay, MIDI trumpet!
MAKE Flickr photo pool member MH2 made an Apple Newton MP3 player, he writes “I download carefully prepared mp3 files to my outdated Newton MP 2100… I set up the 2100 to shut down after 10 minutes. Ten minutes each night, then I sleep. Of course the 2100 is no iPod. Music can’t be cut up as conveniently in two minute pieces as large audio book files, but above 900 KB (which is approx. 3,5 min @ 22050 Hz mono 32 kbps) transfer to the Newton gets complicated. Of course the internal speaker has only poor audio quality compared to an iPod. Or any other decent mp3 player, that is.” 
Peter writes – “The free homebrew software PSP Rhythm continues to advance. With the 3.0 upgrade, announced today, it’ll even output WAV files — meaning you can output high-quality drum loops you built on the road, and add them to your home computer’s song project in Ableton Live, Sony’s own ACID, whatever. There’s also a cool-sounding reverse drum feature.” 
Good article about the audio formats and hacks for the PSP – “The PSP’s audio capabilities are second to none among portable gaming platforms on the market today. In this feature you will learn the audio formats supported by your particular PSP, the right formats to use when encoding audio, how to access your iTunes library with your PSP, and much more.” [
Peter writes “Korg has kept its OASYS Linux PC – synth hybrid closed, but not Open Labs. Their Windows-based synthesizer keyboard slash DJ/VJ workstation slash home entertainment center (with remote control) has an open hard drive bay, four PCI slots, and hinged access to the PC innards, all with a fully-customizable Windows install. Sure, it’s preconfigured for music production with a 15″ touchscreen and software bundle, but you could go inside the machine and reconfigure it into whatever you wanted. One idea: control games from the music keyboard.” 
Fsteele writes in to confirm you can stream purchased video with the new iTunes – “Thanks for the link; it works just fine with store content. That’s actually how I noticed it. I’ve successfully imported content I captured via EyeTV, as well, but it looks like it only works if it was imported via iTunes 6.02. My wife has a couple of videos she bought with 6.01 that aren’t available. What really makes this cool is that there’s now a video streaming server inside every copy of iTunes, so it will be interesting to see what people can do with that.” 
Excellent set of photos of the construction of cigar box guitars from Pasque – “I am building guitars out of cigar boxes with my students. Here are some photos of the prototype I built at home (now updated with photos of my students’ guitars). I went begging and got a bunch of wooden fingerjointed cigar boxes. The fee… a photo of my students with their guitars, a fair trade. The project idea came from Make magazine 
