Reviews

SimplyNoise is a site that offers nothing but noise; it’s a noise generator for the Web.
The only control is a slider that controls a low-pass filter.
According to the site, noise can help you block distractions, sleep and “find your zen”.

This is a word collage that shows what Synthtopia is all about - music, sound, synthesizers, news and more!
This is a weighted display, based on the text of the last week’s posts at Synthtopia.
If you go to Wordle.net, you can create your own. If you try it out, leave a link in the comments, so I can [...]

Peter Gabriel has announced the launch of The Filter, a personalized discovery engine for digital entertainment content.
Its aim is to make sense of the overwhelming amount of digital content available on the web by filtering out the stuff that an individual probably wouldn’t be interested in and filtering in the stuff they would be [...]

Multiverse is a collection of psytrance tracks from Israel’s Atomic Pulse, aka Tamir Ozana. 
It’s a dual CD collection that’s made to order for fans of psychedelic trance. The first CD is Atomic Pulse’s take on tracks by Infected Mushroom, Skazi, Astrix, Protoculture, Fatali, Shanti, G.B.U and Pop Stream. Atomic Pulse’s production is first rate, and the [...]

Rifflet is a new site you can have some fun with those songs that you’ve never gotten around to finishing.
The concept involves the uploading of something called a “rifflet,” which is a piece of a song - like a bass line, a guitar riff, a drum beat, or something else altogether. Each rifflet must also [...]

If you’re one of the beautiful people, planning your trip to @#$# Ibiza on your iPhone, you may want to check out iPhoneIbiza.com - an iPhone guide to Ibiza.
It’s got info on:

Club tickets
Gas stations
Restaurants
Free WiFi Hotspots
Weather

Miniorgan is a fun site that features cool vintage music toys, mostly of the 70’s and 80’s.

Synth DIY is a site that collects together schematics and other information for building your own synth modules.
Information is organized by products and tags, with special pages for things like data sheets and owner’s manuals.
What really makes the site interesting, though, is that many of the component parts for the synth modules are cross-referenced with [...]

Nine Inch Nails is riding high on the publicity of its heavily hyped Ghosts I-IV release and is capitalizing on that buzz with a new free album release, The Slip. It’s available exclusively as a free download, but physical releases are in the works.
There’s a 2008 Nine Inch Nails Tour coming up this fall, and [...]

 

 1,000,000: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Wired.com has a review of the Tonium Pacemaker Portable DJ Machine, and decides it’s cool, but an expensive toy:
The Tonium Pacemaker may be modeled after the idiot-proof iPod, but taking advantage of all the features on the Pacemaker requires an inordinate amount of button pushing. Fiddling around with it while sober requires a certain amount [...]

The Spotted Peccary label has been consistently putting out great ambient, space and synth music albums. Their latest release, Below The Mountain, by Craig Padilla, is no exception.
We’ve reviewed a couple of other albums by Padilla, The Light In The Shadow & Genesis. While his last two releases had more of an ambient or space [...]

Made Records sent over iiO’s Rapture Reconstructed and it wasn’t one of those disks that we had to immediately dig into and check out.
The release is a double-CD set of remixes of iiO’s 2002 club hit Rapture. Does anybody really need 18 remixes of any track?
After giving the release a few listens, though, I’ve changed [...]

If you want to hear some music that’s really original, you could do a lot worse than checking out Ojos De Brujo’s wonderfully syncopated, flamenco-influenced Techarí.
Ojos De Brujo (Eyes of the Wizard) is a Barcelona-based world fusion group, with eight members that play everything from flamenco guitar to tablas to turntables. Guest on the release [...]

Gods & Monsters, the seventh release from Juno Reactor, sees Ben Watkins stretching a bit, but not straying too far from the Reactor formula of mixing techno and world music influences.
While it’s great to see techno getting bent and adapted, not all off Juno Reactor’s attempts to push its range are successful.
The first track on [...]

Probably no synth has been cloned more times, both in hardware and software, than the Roland TB303.
But while excellent hardware 303 clones (FR777) have been available for years, virtual versions have never been completely satisfying.
AudioRealism’s BassLine 2 changes that. It cranks out authentic 303 sounds, using a simple interface that will be familiar to 303 [...]

 

 AudioRealism Bassline Demo [1:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 AudioRealism Bass Line 2 Loop 01 [0:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 AudioRealism Bass Line Acid Loop 02 [0:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download