Gadgetoid

The long awaited synthesizer/controller combination, Noise.io, for the iPhone is now available for your music production pleasure.

Alas, I’ve been so addicted to actually playing with it, and so busy traveling down for the Microsoft Christmas Showcase that I didn’t have time to crank out a review to coincide with its release, rest assured a review is on its way for this fantastic iPhone synth- if you’re in a fit of indecision about whether or not to purchase it that must be resolved immediately then take my advice and do so!

I can say, with absolute certainty, that if you have any interest in sound design or synthesized music then this is an absolutely essential iPhone purchase that will blow you away with its sheer power. The idea of turning your iPhone into a pocket-sized synthesizer with this much power seems like a pipe dream, Noise.io has not only gone and done it but set the bar so absurdly high for competition it’ll likely be unchallenged for months, if not forever.

The concept of an iPhone Synthesizer is pretty brave, the memory management issues in the iPhone’s firmware are a pain to deal with and cause every single application to experience periodic crashes. You’ll be using Noise.io so often that you will, unfortunately, experience crashes and perceive them as being more frequent. Rest assured, though, that Noise.io is freakin’ stable and rebooting your iPhone before (and after, if you want other Apps to run without crashing) using it is a good idea.

From my first tentative try of the disappointing and absurd Band for iPhone, to immediately googling “iPhone Syntheszier” it’s been about two months with quite significant delays to the release of Noise.io. But those delays have more than paid off with some of the functionality they took the extra time to include, the step sequencer for example, being instrumental to my love of the app. What we have now is an absolutely genuine iPhone Synthesizer that looked so good on paper that people claimed it was vapor-ware. The reality of Noise.io is, however, beating all but the wildest of expectations and the only serious complaints I’ve seen thus far are lack of WAV export and crashes due to the iPhones rather unfortunate take on memory management and Noise.io’s heavy use of the iPhone’s resources. Perhaps a firmware 3.0 will make things better, only time will tell.

I will continue to tinker with Noise.io and create patch banks, but I’m sure there are sound designers out there who will massively eclipse my skills and come out with some awesome content for Noise.io that will go down a storm with the less tech-savvy owners and with those who just want to use Noise.io as a live performance tool.

Grab Noise.io from the App Store now for a paltry £5.99. It’s massively, massively underpriced.

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I’m sure most people are already well aware of Apple’s obscene RAM pricing, I have a tendency to rant about it from time to time. If you’re looking to buy a shiny new iMac then avoid the temptation to click that £94 upgrade to 4GB and bear with me a moment.

£94 for 4GB is about double what it’s worth, this isn’t too bad in itself but you have to be wary that you are, in fact, swapping from 2GB to 4Gb meaning that you’re actually paying that extra £94 for only 2GB extra.

That’s £47 per 1GB stick of RAM.

Multiply that by 4 and you have a whopping £188 cost for the pleasure of having 4GB of RAM installed in your iMac from the word go. That’s an insane price for something that costs only £45.81 elsewhere.

4.1 times more expensive, if you must know!

Not only that! But upgrading AFTER you purchase leaves you with two 1gb sticks of DDR2 RAM which you can shove into another computer or sell on EBay.

So, what’s it gonna’ be? 4GB RAM for £94 or 4GB + 2GB RAM for £46?

I thought so.

My ongoing crusade against Apple will probably never amount to anything remotely resembling success, but I have a strong objection to both their upgrade prices and spare/upgrade parts prices. A 250GB hard drive upgrade for the MacBook Pro, for example, costs about £70 for Apple and will cost you a further £60ish for installation unless you’re brave enough to attempt it yourself.

Yes. I recently investigated the cost of upgrading the paltry 120GB hard drive in my MacBook to 320GB. Now a 320GB, 7200RPM hard drive can be had for about £60-£70 and they wanted to sell me a 250GB one, with a spindle speed of 5200RPM no doubt, for the same price. Factor in installation and we’re talking over £130 for either option. Hint: a 1TB external hard drive can be had for about £90.

Why these disgusting prices when the Macs have already gained notoriety as premium products simply by their base purchase price alone? I find it hard to believe that Apple do anything more than buy off the shelf hard drives in bulk and re-sell them to their customers at absurdly inflated prices. There’s no need to shaft your customers over once they’ve bought into Mac, Apple. Stop it.

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Perhaps the most promising of upgrade paths for an aging MacBook Pro with only 120GB of internal hard disk space is an ExpressCard SSD. The idea of being able to instantly add up to 32GB of storage to the system without having to gut it, replace the hard disk and reinstall everything is quite appealing. But, unfortunately, every ExpressCard SSD on the market seems to be utterly missing the point.

Some key entrants onto the ExpressCard SSD market include Lexar with their drives reaching 16GB in capacity plus Transcend and Team who run up to a much more useful 32GB. Team even have a 64GB ExpressCard SSD on the horizon which means a massive 50% storage boost for MacBook Pro owners with a 120GB hard drive. It all sounds good so far, so what is the problem?

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This doesn’t apply to those of you lucky enough to already be rocking a brand new “brick” style MacBook Pro, but for those of us left in the dust there are other, most probably more sensible, upgrade paths available.

The compromises in the new MacBook Pro- need I mention the adaptor-hungry DisplayPort and the lack of a FireWire 400 port (instead opting for only 800) necessitating another adaptor - mean that it is not yet a viable upgrade for many old MacBook Pro owners. A new edition of OSX is on the horizon, too, which puts upgrades even further into the future for any MacBook Pro owner who doesn’t absolutely need the extra oomph. If we plumbed for the 2gb RAM option, shying away from Apple’s obscene prices, then there’s still a significant amount of performance that can be had by upgrading to 4gb.

And now you can do that for a measly £45! A hell of a lot less than the difference between your MacBook Pro and a shiny new one… particularly if you want to get a reasonable upgrade which will set you back nearly £2000.

Crucial was kind enough to send me a 4gb RAM kit so that I could run through the upgrade procedure and test the perceived performance gains for myself.

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Episode 1 of our Audio Podcast is up on t’internet ready for you to listen in. You can subscribe to our podcast with the following URL http://www.dxdec.com/gadgetoid/gadgetoid.xml

In this first episode we take a look at some notable games in the first half of 2008. It’s our first ever episode, so bear with us, we’ve made every effort to achieve good sound quality and, with the help of some Sennheiser microphones, a generous amount of filtering and some miraculous almost uninterrupted peace and quiet, we believe we’ve achieved it.

Enjoy!

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Review by Johnus Maximus

Warriors Orochi 2 is the follow up to last years crossover between two of Koei’s best selling hack and slash franchises - Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors. Released in September 2008, it is also available for PS2 and soon the PSP.

Developed by Omega Force and published by Koei the game seems to take a step forward in offering the player more characters and levels, yet also manages to take a step backward in terms of playability and technical competence, enough to frustrate even a die-hard Warriors fan.

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Piel Frama have really pulled out the stops with their leather HTC Touch Pro Case. Which is a shame, because after playing with the Touch Pro itself I am massively underwhelmed and utterly unable to get excited about it. But that’s a whole different story.

If you’ve picked up the HTC Touch Pro and are enjoying its generous specifications, and sexy screen, but are decidedly disappointed with the godawful case it comes bundled with then the Piel Frama HTC Touch Pro case is probably what you’re looking for. It completely blows away the Piel Frama iPhone 3g Case I reviewed recently in terms of fit, finish and functionality and is, without a shadow of a doubt, exceptionally well made.

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The AipTek MyNote is, without a doubt, an exceptional student accessory and doubles as a pretty cheap, basic A4 graphics tablet to boot at only £129.95. Unfortunately for all those OSX using students out there it does not include OSX drivers or software.

Some of the AipTek MyNote functionality is still present natively, however, plugging the tablet into a USB port on your Mac will give you full access to both its filesystem and that of any SD card inserted into it. Additionally it will automagically function as a 1:1 ratio graphics tablet in pen mode and, by going into OSX System Preferences and turning on Ink, you can even take advantage of your computers inherent handwriting recognition.

The killer feature of the AipTek MyNote, however, is its ability to digitize your notes as you write them down on A4 paper. It doesn’t do any native handwriting recognition, but instead stores your notes as vector data in easily accessible files on internal or SD storage.

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Although unpowered vocal microphones are not the best solution for Audio or Video Podcasting I have managed to get some pretty good results out of a pair of Sennheiser “e” series microphones hooked up to a mixing desk and mixed into Garageband.

The microphones are the Sennheiser e840 (£55.99 at DV247.com and the Sennheiser e815s (£25.99 at DV247.com), the “s” stands for Switch so the 815s boasts a hard on-off switch on the microphone itself whilst the superior 840 does not (there is a version of the 840 with a switch).

The two microphones are remarkably similar in build quality and both have an excellent, quality re-assuring weight thanks to their solid metal casing.

When recording a Podcast it’s worth spending a little cash- perhaps £100 -and getting yourself a reasonably good microphone and an audio interface. If you plan to have more than one host then a microphone per person is almost essential for the best possible quality. Crowing around a single laptop microphone will sound abysmal no matter how many filters you try.

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The new IXOS XHP280 both looks the business and almost certainly does the business (no, not that business). And, at £69.99 it’s definitely not unreasonably priced for a decent surge protector. It will most likely cost a lot more to replace any single piece of your A/V equipment, even if it’s a humble games console.

Unlike some cheaper alternatives IXOS swear that the XHP280 will shrug off any surge and reset to ensure continued protection of your equipment. It also comes with a generous 2meter mains cable and will protect coaxial ariels and telecoms lines from surges too.

If that’s not enough, every socket is individually labelled and colour coded, and the IXOS XHP280 comes with cable labels to help make sense of the mass of cables that would usually be plugged in.

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