Professional Audio

Samson “Go Mic” USB Microphone

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Adding to the ever-growing mixed bag of microphones geared towards podcasting, the Samson Go Mic will clip onto your laptop or sit upon a desk stylishly doing its thing.

Its fold-away design makes it an excellent portable, stand-alone microphone to accompany your laptop and far exceed its noisy internal one in recording clarity and accuracy.

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Line 6 Pocket Pod Express

Monday, April 27th, 2009

At first glance the Line6 Pocket Pod Express is very cute, stylish, and shiny. Almost toy-like. It’s the smallest and most basic of the Pod lineup and is designed to be simple, easy to use and portable but it’s looks can be deceiving, for they hide quite an exceptional sounding and flexible piece of kit that’s an absolute must-have for any practicing guitarist.

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Behringer UMA25S Controller Keyboard

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

After a bit of a quiet period on the professional audio front here at Gadgetoid we’re coming back full force with a focus on producing professional sounding podcasts. Nestled within a recent shipment of gear from Behringer, with which to do just that, came the Behringer UMA25S which has nothing much to do with podcasting but, gosh darn it, I can’t resist taking a look at a control surface/keyboard!

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Sennheiser High Quality In-Ear Phones

Friday, December 19th, 2008

Now that Sennheiser have finished aggressively stomping their competition into oblivion by producing superb headphone products in almost every category imaginable they are free to try some slightly more ambitious projects.

First out of the door are the IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8, which have no relation to Internet Explorer. IE, here, stands for In-Ear.

The 6, 7 and 8 models start at £119.99 and quickly soar up to £169.99 and £249.99 respectively.

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Line6 Pocket POD Express And BackTrack+mic

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Just in the nick of time for Christmas, if you haven’t already been sensible and grabbed your special someone (yourself) a gift, we’ve got hold of a Line6 Pocket POD Express and BackTrack+mic to give you the low-down on these cute little gadgets.

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KORG KAOSSILATOR Limited Edition Pink

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

It’s never too late for a last minute Christmas impulse buy, and KORG are certainly playing that market with the pink KORG KAOSSILATOR. The much adored, portable and diminutively sized portable synthesizer is now available in limited quantities in an obnoxious but, if I’m honest, rather fetching pink and white.

If you want to set yourself apart from the hordes of people who picked up a KAOSSILATOR this year, then this is your chance. It’s a damned fine excuse to pick up a second one, too!

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Noise.io iPhone Synthesizer And Controller Review

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on Noise.io a couple of days before its release. Now, a couple of days after, I have been absolutely stunned by the iPhone synthesizer and even bought the application, despite already having it, to support the small but talented development team who have invested months in this project. Fortunately, they’ve already shifted something in the region of 2000 copies to synth-heads across the globe and the more people with Noise.io the better the community, and user generated content, will get.

So, without further ado, head over the fold for my full Noise.io review.

P.S. if you want a cracked version of Noise.io, or are looking for the Noise.io cracked app, need a Noise.io crack or want Noise.io cracked… suck it up and buy the $9.99 application, you cheapskate! Failing that, wait for the demo version, it’s called “Noise.io Pro” for a reason.

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Noise.io iPhone Synthesizer Hits The App Store

Friday, October 31st, 2008

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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Noise.io Groundbreaking Synthesizer For The iPhone

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

I’ve been pining for a quality synthesizer application on the iPhone since picking one up a few weeks ago.

Noise.io seems to deliver almost exactly what I was looking for, and it boggles the mind that I only discovered it yesterday.

Noise.io is set to sequeeze every last drop of functionality and controllability out of the iPhone by using everything that could constitute an input device, right up to using the Microphone as a breath controller.

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Sound Control Stores Acquired By Professional Music Technology

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Professional Music Technology, winner of “Best UK Music Retailer Chain” for two years running has taken on Sound Control stores in Norwich, Leeds and Manchester Salford adding to their existing stores in Birmingham, Northampton, Oxford, Romford and Southend.

This is good news for our local Norwich store which will remain under the management of Giles Massingham and continue hosting the excellent Roland Planet and all the lovely music tech that comes with it.

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