Apple
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Technology advancements are one of the best things that ever happened to everyone and this includes music producers and composers too. Technology has allowed them to play around with raw music samples and eventually turn them into awesome worthwhile sounds that we all love. If you are a music producer or someone who loves unique music sounds and uses windows pc or computer and can’t access GarageBand, we got you covered. GarageBand is an application that you can download online and install it on your iOSdevice. It allows you to create your music as uniquely as you can think. It is one of the most used apps as it is known for its best features that exposes users to a number of options when creating their music. If you want to know more then check here. Music production market is changing over time and people demand for new and evolving types of music. Having this in mind music producers ought to look for ways of improving their music and producing fulfilling sounds to their audience. Great news for windows users there are other all rounded apps with all of the above and more ways of achieving your music goals. These alternatives have different features that you can choose from. This article highlights some of the 6 GarageBand alternatives that you can use for music production on your windows device. This does not mean that the listed are the only alternatives as the list is endless. AUDIOTOOL If you are a person who has limited supply of internet and has been looking for an online option of making your music, audiotool is your solution. This is an online software that is known for its ability to save your music samples as you keep editing and presenting. It functions perfectly with fast...
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June 16, 2017Verizon closes $4.5B acquisition of Yahoo and Marissa Mayer Resigns As CEO I am surprised this went through I figured with massive Yahoo email hack that this deal would have fallen through. For Yahoo’s sake, I am glad it did not considering this is a lifeline for them since they turned down Microsoft’s offer years ago. Marissa Mayer who has impressive credentials I am sure will find her footing at another company. I don’t blame Marissa Mayer by the time she came on board Yahoo was already on life support. Mozilla Announced Firefox 54 I have not seen this much buzz around Firefox in a long time many users including myself feel the browser is much better than the last version which used to slow my machine down to a crawl. Mozilla’s Nick Nguyen explains. “Our new version of Firefox nails the ‘just right’ balance between memory and speed.” Microsoft Finally Brings Office 365 To Windows Store I am not sure why this took so long but Microsoft has finally added their own apps to the Windows Store. “Windows 10 S runs the rich desktop Office apps including popular productivity apps like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook,” Microsoft goes on to say. “The full suite of Office apps in preview are currently available to download today with Office 365 in the Windows Store for Windows 10 S. On Surface Laptop, you can simply open the Start menu and click on any of the Office app icons like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint to launch the download from the Store.” Big Patch Tuesday For Microsoft As Microsoft does on the second Tuesday of every month they release updates named Patch Tuesday. The number of supported operating system versions shrank by one as Vista support ended back in April 2017. The same is...
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June 15, 2017Today’s music industry is totally different than the music industry of ten years ago or even five years ago. Music has become a service based business that users pay for monthly rather than buying indicial songs like they used to do back when the original iPod debuted in October of 2001. Yes, you still have the music fans who will be buying one song here or there and mostly just listen to whatever is on the radio but those people aside the music industry changed over the years. I would like to point out first that in 2004 Microsoft launched MSN Music a competitor or iTunes and in 2006 launch the Zune. Zune had a repackaged version of MSN Music called Zune Music which at the time was subscription based. Microsoft had the first subscription-based music service but never took off due to poor adoption numbers against iPod and iTunes. Zune music would be renamed to Microsoft Groove and offered as part of Xbox later down the line. Despite being the first subscription-based music service it never took off and still has a small userbase if any due to Microsoft loss in the mobile market and home speaker market. In July of 2011 Spotify debuted in the USA after enjoying years of success since 2008 in Europe. Spotify changed the industry from Apples buy one song for 99 cents to paying $9.99 month for an unlimited amount of songs. Google was at that point playing around with users uploading their music libraries to Google Music Beta there was no music store offered at the time. Google would take Music out of beta and officially launch Google Music in November of 2011. Google felt that by allowing users to store there already preowned libraries in the cloud it gave them a...
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June 9, 2017Apple Starts the Week off with WWDC Apple pretty much monopolized the week’s tech news with it biggest conference of the year WWDC. Apple announced the usual new hardware and software updates iOS, MacOS and WatchOS. Apple announced huge updates to the iPad and unveiled a new speaker with built-in Siri called HomePod. Amazon Killed Off Unlimited Cloud Storage Amazon pulled a Microsoft OneDrive and did away with their unlimited cloud storage plan and made it a 1TB Plan for the same monthly cost. Amazon who had the best deal in online storage unlimited for $59.99 now has been replaced with the standard cloud storage tier system we all have come to know and love. Orange is the new Black Season 5 Debuts One of Netflix’s breakout original series Orange is the new Black go live for streaming today June 6. I have not watched the series myself but there is no denying the popularity of the show with fans. The series has been the attention of many bloggers and has brought in many subscribers to Netflix. Verizon is expected to cut 1,000 jobs after accusation of Yahoo and AOL This is a very common thing when companies get taken over and in this case a much-needed one. While it is very unfortunate to see anyone lose their job in this economy, AOL and Yahoo are two companies that have been losing money for years and need a restructure if they are going to survive and be profitable again. That being said it does not make people losing their jobs any easier. Google Releases Chrome 59 Google keeping up with technology released Chrome 59 with some updates to make a better browsing experience. Some include native notifications on MacOS, Image API changes and service worker improvements. Microsoft Outlook Adds Contact...
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April 14, 2017Apple recently announced a red iPhone while I don’t consider this a major announcement by Apple I find that another announcement made a little over a year ago would be a shocking game changer a year later. On March 21, 2016, Apple unveiled the iPhone SE and began shipping them on March 31, 2016. When the iPhone SE was first announced, I did not find this to be a big deal. I remember telling my friend and I quote “So now Apple making the iPhone as small as they used to I guess they ran out of ideas after making them bigger.” Little did I know that those words would be so untrue. The iPhone SE was a major game changer for Apple while I myself have an iPhone 6 Plus the iPhone SE started finding a home with a new crowd. I started to notice the iPhone SE showing up at a business that used to run Android. When I asked around the consensus from businesses I was getting was why buy an Android when an iPhone is the same price. The iPhone SE is priced at $399 for the 32GB model and then jumps to $499 for the 128GB version. The iPhone SE meets almost all the same specs as the iPhone 6s except for a smaller screen with less resolution, 3D Touch, less resolution facetime camera and few other smaller items this is done I believe in keeping cost down. The price point of the iPhone SE nipples away at the Moto X and Nexus price that was very attractive to businesses. Since Apple in generally held as let’s say the Cadillac of phones the attitude from business users which are general your iPhone users is “just get the iPhone for the same price”. The other appealing...
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March 28, 2017I have been reviewing a lot of Microsoft software and services as of late. I reviewed OneDrive not long ago which is part of the Office365 package. I recently reviewed the Outlook Mail App. I thought now would be a good time to compare both Microsoft OneNote and Apple Notes. I use Microsoft OneNote over Apple Notes daily, I personally think this is part of a workflow habit but when using Apple Notes I find that at times it’s aimed to heavily towards Apple iPhone users, and rightfully so it’s Apple product and they think everyone should have an iPhone. One issue that comes into play when using Apple Notes is using an Android you can’t see the images right in Apple Notes which can make things kind of a pain. The other issue is there is no way to just share a link to Apple Notes the only people you invite will be able to access your notes. Products like OneNote and Google drive have link sharing that anyone with that link can view or edit a doc and you cannot find that link online. Security by obscurity is not the best form of security but there are certain things that just having a shareable link are good for on daily basis. Things that don’t need to be secure and things you need to send easily OneNote defiantly does do sharing better than Apple Notes. I find OneNote to be easier and better at organizing of information with its tab, section, and notebook layout. You can very easily see what changes were made by other users using the notification section and see what you were recently working on using the recent section. OneNote and Apple Notes both let you add Photos, Lists, and Notes. Both apps offer photo integration and check off style...
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March 7, 2017New figures indicate business demand for Apple iPads is almost outstripping independent consumers, with information access, mobile point of sale, and customer service all driving sales. It’s turning around the past few years of slump for the company, with the New York Times noting nearly half of all iPads are now bought by corporations and governments, equating to service and hardware revenue of $25 billion. That represents a rise of corporate sales by almost 40% last financial year, with renowned KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo tipping the company will further embrace the emerging market in 2017, releasing a 10.5-inch model to go directly after the corporate and education sectors. So how are iPads being used by business and what do they deliver? mPOS Mobile Point of Sale or mPOS is one of the fastest growing areas, with iPads high on the list of devices favored. Research and consultancy firm Grandview Research tips the general mPOS market is only set to boom further, growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 18% from 2016 to 2024. Predominantly driving it are the retail and hospitality sectors, with a new generation of apps making it easier than ever before to download point of sale software like PayPal Here, ShopKeep and Square POS to an iPad and integrate it quickly with further software like accounting apps, and email marketing. Meanwhile a massive hardware industry also supports the trend. PayPal Here provides card readers for quick payments, as does Square. Compatible wireless cash drawers and barcode readers are readily available, while secure tablet enclosures from companies like BossTab insure iPads against damage and theft. One of the major benefits retailers and the hospitality sector are recognizing is the capability to take the register and information to the customer. Need to know if it’s available at another...
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December 27, 2016Chromebooks have been all the rage over the last few years powered by the ChromeOS (operating system) put out by Google. ChromeOS is primary Linux based and is probably the most successful Linux desktop/laptop computer we’ve seen to date. An article posted recently by The Verge stated, “Google’s low-cost Chromebooks outsold Apple’s range of Macs for the first time in the US recently.” After reading this article the question I asked is why? To start with Apple has been very lax on their computer line refresh recently Apple CEO Tim Cook stated in a post on an Apple employee discussion board, Cook stated ““Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops,” adding that “If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.” The post, which was verified and reported on by TechCrunch got me thinking even more about why Apple got outsold to me I could think of three main reasons. Cost Savings While Apples latest MacBook Pro laptop has been getting hit with mixed reviews there are other reasons for the Chromebooks success. One being the low price point of under 300 dollars has been a huge driving point for the product. The product itself is very cheap because the ChromeOS is cloud based so little hardware is needed to run the computer making the price point low. Another reason for a low price point is Google is not a hardware company for the most part. Apple’s main business is selling hardware Google’s is not I am sure they make a little money on the sale but their main purpose is to sell ad space to companies and sell services to you the consumer like Google...
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December 22, 2016I am a big podcast listener some people binge on YouTube and Netflix videos I binge listen to podcasts. There is a huge call for on-demand audio like podcasts in the dying age of radio. Before DVR boxes and on-demand video like streaming, there was an on-demand audio called podcasts. When Apple introduced podcasts in 2004, the iPod changed the music industry a small device that could fit in your pocket and iTunes store allowed you to download any song you wanted at any time starting the instant gratification of music. No need to go to your local store and buy CDS when you can just download a small MP3 file and place it onto a small device that holds thousands of songs and fits in your pocket. Since there was no cellular data yet to get a music or podcasts to your iPod you had to be plugged into a computer, open iTunes then music and podcasts had to sync over to the device via a cable. It was the start of a revolution in the on-demand radio industry that we call podcasts. The word podcast is a combination of the word iPod and broadcast a term developed by a journalist. Originally the word was audio blogging which lacked the cool hip feel that the broadcaster and Apple were going for so the name was changed to Podcast. Companies like TWIT one of the first podcasts available on iTunes calls them netcasts to get away from the assumption you need an Apple device to listen to the broadcast. Podcasts are basically MP3 files that can be played by any music device, not just an iPod or iPhone. At the time the iPod was really the only mobile music player available and now there are many. When the iPhone was released...