There have been a number of interesting things in the news this week in the keyboard world. 

Firstly, there's been a noticeable increase in the release and coverage of apps - especially iOS (e.g. iPhone, iPad) apps - enabling users to play, record and/or learn keyboard on screen. Playing piano on a flat screen really is a big industry now!

Next, as a piano player nearly all my life, this one came as a bit of a surprise to me - there is actually such a thing as a left-handed piano! Yes, a piano which is a complete mirror image of a standard piano, specially designed for left-handed players by a left-handed player. The piano has all the highest pitch notes as the far left of the keyboard and all the bass notes towards the top / far right. Strange but true. 

Finally, I was amazed by this very cool online music player from Japan called Songle. It enables you to upload a link to any URL containing an mp3 file (or a link to a song on SoundCloud) and it will analyse and provide a visual representation of what it finds in the song. Structures, chords, beat analysis, interpretation of where the chorus starts... pretty amazing stuff. 

There's never a dull moment in the world of music...

This song I wrote in around 1996 - it has evolved very little since then. I composed this back then on a 61-key Ensoniq SQ-1+ synth.

There have been a few iterations of this track over the years, with the somewhat undecided track title originating from my high school nickname of Wombler (long story) and the fact that I played in a metal band with some friends in which we wrote lyrics to this song and fully "orchestrated" it, titling it "The Sweetest Lullaby" in that incarnation. 

I love that this is a very "linear" song, there are no repeating sections, but an adventure from start to finish through various tempos and time signatures. Enjoy...

A short time ago I stumble across a great post from WinkSound - with some excellent tools to help convert, play and share audio. I have since been using this trio of Mac apps to streamline sending demos of tracks I am working on to clients.

But taking these free (yes, free!) apps away from an audio creation context, two in particular are indispensable for quickly and easily sending files to the cloud or listening to audio.

1. Cloud - this is a simple little app to enable very easy transfer of files to cloud storage. The basic plan is free, and fine for most file-transferring needs but not suitable so for long-term backup or storage. Once signed up, simply dragging a file into the app's icon will transfer it to the cloud. Further streamlining things, as soon as the upload is complete the link to your upload is automatically copied to your clipboard, ready to paste into an email.

2. Vox - anyone on a Mac would be familiar with the common process of being able to listen to an audio file such as a WAV or mp3 by simply highlighting the file and pressing space bar (to play it in the Finder preview window) or double clicking it to open it in iTunes. Each of these processes has its shortfalls. The preview window won't enable the audio file to keep playing in the background if you switch to another app or select another file. Alternatively, adding a file to iTunes every time you listen to something new is a time consuming and unnecessary process. Vox is a lightweight audio player which is great to get around both of these issues. I especially like the app's icon which displays a neat, circular playback progress status during play.

Hope these tips help musicians and non-musicians alike.

Earlier this week I was completing work for a client who required audio output as a WAV file with a 48kHz sample rate. As my audio editing program by default created the track at a sample rate of 44.1kHz (standard for CD audio), converting the sample rate once the music had already been created was a little tricky.

If I knew the required sample rate when I began the project, I could have set up my recording software accordingly. However, changing the sample rate at the end of the recording process was a challenge. Exporting my finished audio at the higher sample rate (converting it from 44.1kHz to 48kHz) naturally resulted in a shortening in the length of the track and an increase in pitch. A quick Google finds that this is a common problem.

There are many ways to approach this challenge. The purpose of this post is to share what I found to be an incredibly easy solution. A simple conversion using NCH Software's Switch Audio Converter (yes, even using the free version!). I'm happy to say as well these guys are Australian!

Switch is available for both Mac and Windows is is a very powerful audio tool. The feature list is large and includes the ability to convert between a pretty exhaustive range of common audio formats, extract audio from video files and DVDs, automatically normalize the audio when converting, and most importantly in my case - it supports a wide range of sample rates when encoding WAV format.

So, my 41.kHz to 48kHz conversion was as simple as dragging and dropping the audio file into Switch, selecting WAV as the output format and changing the encoder setting to 48kHz. The outcome was perfect.

Just wanted to share this quick tip for anyone else who's needed a quick resolution to this same challenge.

Happy converting!