Paul Ford individually reviews all 763 SXSW MP3 submissions

The Morning News's Paul Ford has reviewed every single song in the SXSW torrent file, after actually listening to the entire 48 hours worth of music - no doubt disqualifying himself from ever writing reviews for Maxim magazine.

To keep the task manageable, he limited each review to exactly six words, with some interesting results.

"Soft pink vagina frosted jazz cupcakes"

Check it out

Windows Vista SP1 released

Windows-based musicians who have been having reliability and performance issues with Vista may be interested to know that the final version of the first service pack release is now available to download. Microsoft claim that it will make your machine "more reliable, run more smoothly, and even more enjoyable to use, all at no charge".

Very generous of them.

They're are encouraging people to wait until mid-April when SP1 will be available via automatic updates, but for the impatient or adventurous, there is a direct download available now.

Native Instruments release free Kore Player with 300MB sample set

This actually came out a few days back, but this blog didn't exist then, so my excuse is relatively sound! :)

According to the NI website, "KORE PLAYER brings world-class Native Instruments sound within the reach of any musician or producer". Lovely. As well as the 300MB sound library that comes with the download, it can load and play Kore Soundpacks which are available separately (although you have to pay for those ones!)

I've not really jumped on the Kore bandwagon, but there are some nice sounds in there, and the price is right! When you consider that you're getting the sound engines from Kontakt, Reaktor, Massive, Guitar Rig, FM8, and Absynth (albeit not directly accessible - you can tweak some parameters from the Kore interface though) it's definitely worth a download if you have the bandwidth. It runs as a VST, AU, or RTAS (Pro Tools 7) on either Mac universal binary or Windows.

Jem Godfrey going a bit silly with a Roland Fantom X6

This is not really news - as I write this it's a weeks-old video of a four year old synth playing sounds from a year old concert tour, being operated by a thirty-something year old keyboard player.

Nevertheless it's quite entertaining, and if I didn't know about it, I'd be quite happy to stumble across a link to it on the web. So here you go.

And in the "sort of related news, therefore I can add an extra tag" department, Mr Godfrey has apparently been signed up to present the web video content for Roland's new Fantom G which should make for marginally perplexing but still informative viewing.

Celemony brings polyphonic pitch manipulation to the table with DNA

Recording purists were given something new to gripe about recently with Celemony's announcement of their DNA "Direct Note Access" technology. Set to be released to the public as part of Melodyne 2, Celemony are claiming that DNA will "change forever the way we handle audio", and while that may be drawing something of a long bow, it's certainly a technology to keep an eye on.

There's an impressive video demonstration at the Celemony website.

Although I have to ask - what's "meedi"? ;)