What’s kinda funny is that Sony pulled a quote from my review and used it in an email campaign advertising a free webinar on Forge 10:

Steve Cunningham, (Radio and Production Nov 2009) writes “Sound Forge Pro 10 is to version 9 as a 2010 Ford Mustang is to a 1969 Boss Mustang… still wicked fast, still sounds like business, but so much easier to drive.”

Don’t misunderstand me… I like publicity as much as anyone, and the pull is a direct quote — yup, I wrote that. What’s amusing is that at no time did I ever speak to anyone at Sony Software, either before or after I wrote the review. Furthermore, I bought the upgrade and paid for it myself (which I think is as it should be). But my contact info is in there at the end of the article. I’d have thought they’d send a note asking if I objected to their use of it, or at least telling me they were going to use it.

Makes me go “hmmm…”.

Contrary to some popular notions, this report claims that spam originates evenly from three geographic areas: the Americas are responsible for about 35% of spam, versus 32% from Europe and 28% from Asia. About 58% of all spam comes from known botnets evenly distributed around the globe, although the botnet known as Donbot is alone responsible for 18%.

A botnet is a (usually) large group of computers that are all infected with virus, worm, or Trojan horse software under a command-and-control infrastructure. The originator, or “bot herder” issues commands to the infected “Zombie” computers to send or relay spam messages, as well as send out copies of the infected software in an attempt to gain control of additional, weakly-secured computers. It has been estimated that nearly one-quarter of all computers on the Internet are infected Zombies.

What can you do about all this? Not a great deal, unfortunately. Using anti-virus and anti-spam software, and updating it regularly, is the only way of combatting the flood of Internet spam and malware. In addition, most ISPs implement anti-malware software on their email servers — Google’s gMail service features one of the better anti-malware software suites.

But the bad guys are still out there, and they’re very busy. It pays to be vigilant, folks.

No wonder — the engineer is probably focused on how many whizzy-cool features s/he can invoke per second, and this can be give the talent a false impression. So here are the top ten objections to Pro Tools and my response to each. Read the rest of this entry »

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This month we take a look at several embedded audio players for use in HTML websites, as well as for those based on blogging software like WordPress. Nearly all of these players require MP3-formatted audio players to work, although some will play other formats as well. The players themselves are based on Adobe’s Flash technology combined with some Java scripting.

The reason for this is simple; nearly 97% of all online users have Adobe’s Flash player already installed on their computers, and almost all modern browsers know how to handle javascript properly. Using Flash insures that your clients will be able to hear your demos without the annoyance of having to stop and install yet another plug-in in their web browser.

As reported last week, the first remotely-controlled “botnet” created from Macintosh computers has been identified in the field. These Macs are infected with one of the above-named Trojan horse programs, which were identified back in January as being spread via illegal copies of Adobe CS-4 and iWork 2009 software.

MacScan’s removal tool is a stand-alone program that searches for these trojans and removes them if they exist. If neither Trojan exists, the program displays the dialog box to the left and you’re free to quit the program.

Mac users have been particularly fortunate, in that little in the way of malware has yet been aimed their computers. Clearly that has now changed, and given the potential of this malware to at minimum slow your Mac’s performance, and at worst to turn it into a “zombie,” there’s simply no reason not to download and run the removal tool.

Mac users who downloaded pirated copies of Adobe’s Creative Suite CS4 or iWork 2009 may have got more than they bargained for, as some of these copies contained trojan horse software OSX.Trojan.iServices.A and OSX.Trojan.iServices.B. When the user unpacks the pirated software, the trojan is installed and becomes active, turning the Mac into a “zombie.” Since the trojan software was first discovered in January 2009, most anti-virus software has by now been updated to remove the trojan and its remnants. Still, the botnet was recently implicated in DDoS attacks on several servers.

This incident provides yet another reason to avoid installing pirated software on your computer. The success of this Mac-based botnet almost guarantees that more pirated software will be released that is infected, so it’s best to stay away… stay far, far away.

There’s a prophead-type gent in Cambridge UK that proposes to give you exactly that. Seems this Lyndsay Williams fellow and his company, Girton Labs, are busy working out how to build knobs that magnetically stick to your lappy screen, and via both hardware and software, let you manipulate the underlying onscreen controls and therefore the attached software function.

It’s all very much in the beta test phase, and no prices or delivery date is set (or even hinted at). But there are videos on the website showing the SenseSurface in action… you should go check it out for yourself.

I’m not sure a laptop is the best platform for this — I’m thinking 30″ flat-screen monitors angled back — but if this can truly be made to work it would give us DIY controllers that could be easily re-configured on the fly, depending on the application. I can visualize a box ‘o pots and sliders next to the monitor… sweet.

Hat tip to Charlie Richmond at Richmond Sound Design; the full story at Girton’s website: girtonlabs – SenseSurface – Girton Labs Cambridge

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According to antivirus software maker Intego, there’s a new Trojan horse program that targets Macs running OSX. Designed to allow a hacker to take control of the computer, delete files, or damage the operating system, this little nasty masquerades as a poker game called “Ace in the Hole” or simply “PokerGame”. When downloaded and run, a shell script inside the Trojan opens an SSH connection, then transmits the username, password, and IP address of the infected computer.

The moral of the story: don’t download software you receive in email from people you don’t know, or from websites you don’t completely trust. Here’s the link to Intego’s page announcing the discovery, and the Get Info screenshot at right is from their page as well.

I’ll be investigating this further to see how widespread it is. Intego lists its threat level as low, since you have to explicitly download and run it in order for it to do nasty things to your machine. Just don’t, okay?

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There are three of them, and each is designed specifically for laptop use. They connect to your computer via USB, and appear to be bus-powered (at least for one at a time use. Don’t know if you can connect more with a hub or not). They all speak MIDI, so it should be possible to program them to perform various functions, as most Mac and PC software editors now support MIDI controllers and Continuous Controller (CC) messages. The music keyboard and drum pad units look like fun, but the money piece is the mix controller, shown below.

The nanoKONTROL comes with nine very short throw faders, nine associated knobs, and eighteen buttons for (I presume) mute and solo. It also features a transport section that lacks only a jog/shuttle wheel, and speaks MIDI Machine Control (MMC). A software app called Korg KONTROL Editor promises to provide a friendly interface when it’s time to program this Bad Boy, and the ability to store programs and settings on computer for later recall. I’ll def have to get my mitts on one of these mix controllers for review in RAP, ASAP.

Pricing and delivery information is not yet available, of course. But you can get firsthand info at Korg’s USA website here, or if you’re fluent reading Japanese you can check it out at the source here.

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I do have one Mac running Leopard for evaluation purposes, but the “money” machines are still on 10.4.11, at least until Digidesign qualifies Pro Tools LE and M-Powered for Leopard. Pro Tools HD is currently qualified on OS X 10.5.1, but not 10.5.2; LE and M-Powered are not yet qualified, period.

[Update 05/30/08] So-called pre-release versions of all three, ready for Leopard 10.5.3, are now available from Digidesign’s website. See this.

The money machines in my shop won’t be upgraded until the software is ready. But with the third update release for Leopard out now, it may be getting close. You may recall that Tiger (aka 10.4) wasn’t fully stable for all-day digital audio work until version 10.4.5, so patience becomes a virtue. We’ll keep an eye open and see which way the wind blows.

Meanwhile, 10.5.3′s laundry list of improvements includes a fix for stuttering video and audio played from USB devices, and nudges attached hard drives to make certain they appear in the Finder. Airport gets some attention, as does reliability in Time Capsule. For those of us whose lives are on multiple computers in iCal, that program gets its sync abilities fixed. There’s a great deal more on the list, which you can find here:

About the Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update.

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