I’ve spent my Thursday nights over the past couple weeks enjoying the mild North Carolina autumn on a friend’s porch. A group of us get together, drink whiskey, and play guitar. It’s a good time, and though our musical tastes span a wide variety of genres, we can usually keep up with one another. There are those rare instances, though, where I’m glad to have an iPhone. I can dig up lyrics and tabs on the go. There’s just one problem: where do I put the phone? With the well-documented fragility of the iPhone’s glass, I don’t want to accidentally drop it on a cement porch.
Enter Castiv’s Guitar Sidekick. It’s a slick little gadget designed with this very problem in mind. The Guitar Sidekick consists of a rubber lined clip that grips your strings between the nut and the tuners and provides a cradle for your phone. The cradle is basically a spring-loaded claw with rubberized grips to keep your phone in place. It sounds tenuous, and trust me, it looks tenuous. That’s why I tested it over my bed before taking it for a porch session. I was shocked that it held so well, though if you’re really nervous about stability, just use a case along with the Castiv. The Apple Bumper, for instance, made the grip a rubber to rubber connection. My phone wasn’t going anywhere.
My only real complaint about the Guitar Sidekick is that it can be difficult to get the angle just right. It can be tough to secure a tight lock for the claw part of the device and adjust it to the right angle. It’s not impossible, just a nuisance. The good news is that you can secure a tight lock, which is probably of greater concern.
All in all, I think the Castiv Guitar Sidekick will be great for anyone looking to pick up songs quickly at an impromptu jam session. It’s application will be a little limited elsewhere, at least until there is a wide offering of apps across several mobile platforms.
It’s no secret that iTunes is one of the more bloated pieces of software in use by millions of people every day. Ever tried to find an album or song quickly in the iTunes store? I’m pretty sure that’s some sort of oxymoron.
A 15-year-old put together a little web service he’s calling iTunes Instant, which is just about what it sounds like. You type in your search and get treated to instant results, replete with links to pull up each result in iTunes.
I constantly struggle to find new music. Yes, there are a million resources out there – blogs, fan sites, news and reviews, venues, torrents, etc. etc. – but there’s so much music in the world that a lot of it ends up sounding the same, and I don’t want something that always sounds the same.
I decided I was going to try a streaming service for the sheer amount of music available. Pandora isn’t on-demand so that was out. I gave Rdio a shot because it was free and had just launched but their selection was woefully slim (they were missing big names like The Arcade Fire among some lesser stuff I was hoping for). From there I turned to MOG and I’ve been fairly impressed. Their selection is good, the iPhone app is passable, as is their web-based player, but I don’t think I’ve discovered all that much.
MOG does have a feature on the web player that allows you to broaden your horizons by including similar artists to the one at the top of your playlist, but it’s just not diverse. It’s the same thing with Pandora. What I want is some sort of discovery mode, where the player throws a wide selection of stuff at you, based not just on the music you’re listening to, but what other people interested in that selection listen to. I would love if it there was even some sort of blacklist feature so that you wouldn’t get the same old mix.
As a for instance, I’m listening to The Hold Steady right now. The similar artist list is about what you’d expect – Modest Mouse, A.C. Newman, Spoon, White Rabbits – all bands that someone listening to The Hold Steady would probably say, “Hey, you’d like these guys, too.” I don’t need that kind of guarantee, though. I want to hear a mix of stuff I might not like and might like and might be surprised I like, and I haven’t found a music service that provides that.
I probably won’t renew my MOG subscription beyond a month because I’m not getting a whole lot more from it than I can get from a Pandora. The on-demand is nice, but the web-player is a little clunky, and I have plenty of music to get through on my own.
This has to be one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Well, heard, really. Most of the time when you think of audio manipulation, it’s means marring the sound in some awful way. The pitch changes or the sound just goes all to hell. That’s what makes this process so special. It can swing a song, any song. You should recognize the example above.
The code comes courtesy of Music Machinery. Be sure to check out the other examples they’ve got.
