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Posts Tagged ‘Axe’

Warner Bros to axe licenses for free streaming services

After a rough quarter which suggested that the variable-track pricing record labels fought so hard for was hurting digital sales, Warner Music Group has announced that it will no longer be licensing its music to services that offer free streaming. Warner hasn’t specifically spelled out if that will apply to current deals with services like Last.fm, Spotify, and Pandora, or just to future deals, but it could put a damper on them if artists like REM, Death Cab for Cutie, and T-Pain were no longer available on those services.

“Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed,” Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr. told BBC News. “The ‘get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price’ strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.”

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Misa Digital Guitar cuts the strings, brings the noise

The intersection of the classical instrument known as a guitar and the modernist urge to modify everything has resulted in plenty of nutty, zany, and just plain questionable products in its time. It’s quite a pleasure, therefore, to point you in the direction of a so-called Digital Guitar that keeps the axe looking refreshingly familiar, while turning it into something that poses a legitimate threat of actually being useful. Essentially a MIDI controller, the Misa guitar has 24 frets and a large multifunctional touchscreen, which you can use to interface with the appropriate software on your pc. We’ve got a video demonstration after the break, and you can hit up the source link for more info including details on how you might be able to buy one for yourself.

Continue reading Misa Digital Guitar cuts the strings, brings the noise

Misa Digital Guitar cuts the strings, brings the noise originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 02:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Football Hero mod takes Arduino to the Kasabian-approved big leagues (video)

Some folks say less is more, but we’ll bet they never saw Guitar Hero being played by kicking footballs against a giant wall. This epic undertaking will give your plastic axe a major inadequacy complex with its huge wall-mounted piezo vibration sensors and absurdly large fretboard projection. An Arduino acts as the conduit between the contact sensors and a PC running the freeware Frets on Fire. The outcome from such a relatively simple setup is pretty astounding, and you can check it out in the videos past the break, including some behind the scenes footage.

Continue reading Football Hero mod takes Arduino to the Kasabian-approved big leagues (video)

Filed under: Gaming

Football Hero mod takes Arduino to the Kasabian-approved big leagues (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Exclaim Track: Track Twitter Search Terms Over IM In Near Real Time

Twitter Search is great, but you have to be on Twitter’s site or one of the third-party apps to use it. This requires an active approach; you must enter terms and load or reload the results to get what you want. That’s why Twitter’s old “track” feature was so great, it would ping you every time a keyword you were searching for came up. Unfortunately, as growth exploded, Twitter had to axe the feature. But third parties have slowly been bringing it back. And a new one offers a pretty nice way of doing it.

Exclaim Track is a very simple service. It’s Twitter track over IM. Right now, it works with Google Talk (via Jabber), and all you have to do is follow exclaimtrack@appspot.com. Once that name is on your contact list, simply IM it with “track <keyword>” and it will IM you all Twitter mentions of the term you put in.

But here’s why Exclaim Track is really great: It’s so simple to both track and un-track items. For example, today is the Michigan/Notre Dame football game. I can’t watch it because I’m stuck at the office doing work for TechCrunch50 (hope to see you there Monday and Tuesday). I want to know what people are saying about the game, but don’t want to keep reloading Twitter Search, so instead I set up an Exclaim Track query, and now I’m getting pinged every time something comes up. After the game is over, I won’t care about the search anymore, so I simply type “remove <keyword>” and it’s gone.

You can also easily turn notifications on or off simply by IMing “on” or “off” to the Exlcaim Track IM account. That’s great if you want to mute notifications, but don’t necessarily want to remove a term. Also, you can search multiple terms at the same time, so removing all of them to quite the service might be a pain, without the “off” command.

Exclaim Track is a part of Excla.im, a service which allows you to update your Twitter status via IM. The developer, Harper Reed, set up this new tracking feature using the Pubsubhubbub real-time pinging service and Superfeedr, which does real-time feed parsing. He simply used Google’s App Engine for the messaging and hosting aspects, so the service actually costs him nothing to run.

One small downside to Exclaim Track is that when you first start tracking a keyword, it will find most of the recent mentions of the term that are available in Twitter Search. This means you’ll get a punch of non-real-time information. But once this runs through (usually just seconds or minutes), you’ll start to see new results pop-up in near real time. “Near” is an important thing to note, it’s not quite real time, but it’s usually pretty close, usually under a minute of the mention on Twitter.

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iPod touch prices slashed dramatically before today’s event (nano and classic too)

Seeing is believing and we’re seeing price drops across each and every iPod touch on Apple’s on-line store front. The 8GB model is now $189 (was $229), the 16GB model is $249 (was $299), and the 32GB model is just $279 (was $399). Now what could Apple be making room for?

Update: And now the nano and classic have fallen under the axe. The classic has been cut to $229 (was $249) while the nano now starts at $129 (was $149) for the 8GB model or just $149 (down from $199) for the 16GB nano.

[Thanks, Max H.]

Filed under: Handhelds, Portable Audio, Portable Video

iPod touch prices slashed dramatically before today’s event (nano and classic too) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Colorware offers up $6,000 Stealth MacBook Pro: it’s really dark

Colorware’s well known for offering up all sorts of consumer electronics in all sorts of hues, but the outfit has definitely stepped up its game with the Stealth MacBook Pro. This limited edition piece is an all-black 15-inch MacBook Pro with a matte display, 3.06GHz CPU, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, 256GB SSD, an 8x SuperDrive, zero gloss finish and a SofTouch coating that’ll make it downright impossible for your fingers to stop stroking it. Reportedly, these will be limited to just ten units, and each one will cost a not-at-all affordable $5,999. See Apple, this is what you get when you voluntarily axe the BlackBook. Opportunity, lost.

[Via Engadget Polska]

Filed under: Laptops

Colorware offers up $6,000 Stealth MacBook Pro: it’s really dark originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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