composers

Though we haven't had a digital-imaging-related giveaway in a while, we have a good one this week from Lensbaby for all of you with dSLR cameras. We're not only offering up the Lensbaby Composer Lens but we're also throwing in the two newest additions to the Lensbaby Optic Swap System, the Fisheye Optic, and the Soft Focus Optic.

That's a pretty sweet package.  The good news is that if you win, Lensbaby will send you the right products for your specific camera, whether it's a Canon EF (EOS), Nikon F, Sony Alpha A / Minolta … Read more

Even with the most practiced digits, composing long e-mail on the iPhone's virtual keyboard is the slow, awkward pits compared with typing on a desktop keyboard. However, Google released a small new feature on Monday just for long-winded iPhone e-mail authors that makes typing lengthy Gmail messages easier on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Before, the composition box was fixed. Starting today, verbose e-mailers will see blank lines appear below the cursor as you reach the bottom of the window. If there's a limit to how many lines you can add in a Gmail message, we haven't … Read more

Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are making preparations to one day collect performance fees from Apple and other e-tailers for not just traditional music downloads but for downloads of films and TV shows as well. Those downloads contain music after all.

These groups even want compensation for iTunes' 30-second song samples.

At a time when many iTunes shoppers are still fuming over Apple's first-ever increase in song prices, the demands by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), and other performing-rights groups, would likely lead to more price hikes at iTunes. For many, … Read more

MagicScore School provides users with a program to write, edit, and listen to their score. With a utilitarian layout and a variety of options, this program will appeal to musicians.

We felt a little overwhelmed by the program's interface, not having much technical musical knowledge beforehand. But the Help file's breakdown of the commands and a swift online tutorial made navigation much easier. We began creating our score immediately, as we had the option to click and drag notes from a bank and place them on a music scale or to play a virtual piano that also populated … Read more

FastChords Pro provides a little something for piano players of all skill levels. With an ability to transcribe as well as play songs, musicians will get a lot of use from this program.

This program's ingenious layout makes all its many operations simple to access. With a piano's keys laid across the top and a calculator-like box for all other commands, users shouldn't have to make too many trips to the Help file before they are navigating the program like an old pro. Playing a song was very simple and only required users to input the specific … Read more

There are programs designed specifically for novices and those geared toward experienced users. Then there are programs designed to make experienced users feel like novices. Welcome to Crypto Composer; 10 tabs of boxes, buttons, text fields, and a Help file filled with enough jargon to cause your eyes to turn glassy.

Can you tell we loved it?

This freeware application is for the uber-privacy advocate on a budget. Experienced users looking for a challenge should jump right into this collection of privacy tools. The less masochistic might look to the Help manual. However, the FAQ-based manual might lead to greater … Read more

MyCaption, a member of the BlackBerry Alliance, introduced on Tuesday a new way BlackBerry users can work with e-mails on their smartphones: by speaking.

Actually, this is not exactly a breakthrough, as voice recognition technology has been out there for a long time and can be found in the Voice Command or Voice Dialing features of many smartphones. However, this seems to be the first time you can use it for more than simple sentences, such as, "Call Johnny at the office."

MyCaption claims that its new application is sophisticated enough that people can compose, forward, or reply … Read more

Needless to say, we're fairly sick of all the alarm clocks that continue to flood the market, regardless of how sycophantic they may be. So we thought that we'd perhaps feel differently about a clock that lets us compose our own music to awaken us. We were wrong.

Hammacher Schlemmer's "Desktop Music Composer" has seven plastic modules of varying colors and shapes that provide sounds of different instruments depending where they're placed--up to 1,159 variations, to be exact. But as Ubergizmo says, "It will probably take a lifetime to find a tune … Read more