recorder

Steve "The Spherical Audiophiliac" Guttenberg makes his first 2012 appearance on the show this morning and adds some more descriptors to his middle name.

He brings in a few noise-canceling earbuds and headphones into the studio for a head-to-head, and we'll confer about which modern artists have the talent to stick around another 30 years.

Finally, we'll end the show with a talk about Paul McCartney pulling his tracks from Spotify! These stories and more on today's 404 Podcast.… Read more

Audio Hijack Pro is an affordable audio-recording workhorse for the Mac, capable of capturing audio from applications, devices such as microphones, or any other source that runs through your machine.

Audio Hijack Pro's clean, two-paned, iTunes-like interface focuses on sources that you can capture--which means just about anything, from software to hardware. By default, the left pane includes some of the usual suspects that you might want to record (DVD Player, iChat, iTunes, QuickTime Player, RealPlayer, Safari, Skype, your system audio, and default system input), but you can easily add additional sources, such as other apps or devices.

You … Read more

Twitter reports that football fans sent roughly 10,000 tweets in the final 3 minutes of last night's game, but that wasn't enough to overthrow the all-time record for tweets per second.

Guess which film roped in 25,088 tweets per second last December? Hint: it wasn't made in America.… Read more

With a frown on his face and holding his head in his hand, LimeWire founder Mark Gorton appeared depressed last May as he sat in a New York courtroom.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had already won its copyright case against Gorton and LimeWire, the once-popular file-sharing service, and the parties were back before the judge to determine how much in damages he owed the four top major record companies. On May 12, he agreed to pay the RIAA $105 million.

But Gorton's pain didn't end there. Ever since, he's been under siege by different … Read more

Contrary to recent media reports, the FBI did not arrest MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom after being pressured by managers at the four major record companies, who supposedly feared DotCom would launch an unlicensed music service, sources close to the investigation told CNET.

Numerous film and music industry sources have discussed some of the events that preceded the January 19 raid in New Zealand on DotCom's home. What becomes clear is that two years ago, when the FBI began investigating the cyberlocker service, the film studios were far more intent on taking down MegaUpload than their counterparts at the music … Read more

Recording artist Neil Young today said that he was working with late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on a project that would push the quality of digital downloads to studio-quality levels.

In an interview with All Things Digital at the outlet's D: Dive Into Media conference today, Young discussed the quality of digital recordings, chiding MP3s for having just "5 percent of the data present in the original recording."

The answer to that other 95 percent would be "high-resolution" digital tracks that are of the same quality as the original studio recording, Young offered.

There are … Read more

When humanity makes true, verifiable progress, we can all sit up, admire, and imagine what it must be like to be in the pioneer's shoes.

Please, therefore, take a moment today to consider how it must feel to be Cathy Matthews and her more than 100 friends.

Did they cross the Atlantic on a 2 by 4? Not quite. Did they climb Everest dressed only in bikinis? Almost. For they claim to have broken the world comments record for a single Facebook post.

I am indebted to the Huffington Post for bringing this history to my attention.

Matthews claimed in an interview with KTXL-TV in Sacramento … Read more

You know the old saying: necessity is the mother of invention. The necessity? film two sides of a conversation with one iPhone.

The invention: the Love Box video mixer, a wood contraption that looks like it was born in shop class.

The result: documentary filmmakers were able to record a real-time conversation between two people, one on either side of the iPhone, without a special app or any kind of post-production editing. Neat!

The unfortunately named Love Box is little more than a wood stand with an angled mirror that can slide back and forth. Positioned properly, it focuses half the iPhone's lens on what's in front of it and half on what's behind. The result is a split-screen view, not unlike what you'd see during a TV-news interview.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--Having hauled my record collection from state to state, I know that vinyl is pretty much the antithesis of portability. Ion Audio's LP 2 GO is making me think differently about my stash of Dylan and Stones records.

Ion has been spinning around in the digital turntable market for a while. The LP 2 GO takes that same tech and shrinks it down to something you can toss into a backpack. You'll still have to pack those big record platters around, though.

LP 2 GO has a built-in speaker and headphone output. You can blast your tunes or convert them to MP3 format via USB with the bundled software. It plays both 33s and 45s.… Read more