WARNING: AUDIO GEEKY POST AHEAD

So we got this thing called Record. It's basically a sequencer; it allows you to record audio and MIDI and then plays it back. But it's from the guys who do Reason, and so of course, it's actually a paradigm-shifting mind-blowing completely-different-to-what-you-once-knew piece of software. Basically, they take Reason, and strap on a big ol' SSL mixer and proper recording ability. This means we can now actually use that incredibly powerful vocoder with real vocals, and moreover we can write and mix songs at the same time. That might not seem like a big deal, but when you mix a song, you sometimes realise that it's missing something, or maybe this melody should be slightly different, or maybe this is a bit too crowded but when you thin it out it gets kind of boring. The ability to mix - and to mix properly - gives us a much better idea of what the song is going to sound like at the other end.

Basically it's awesome.

Along the same lines, I'm currently working on my own interpretation of the Ableton's Live. Live is an okay piece of software, but I feel like what it does can be done better, and probably with significantly less bloat. For the record - this isn't Live, it isn't a Live clone, it is something different in the same category - something to make playing electronic music live easier. I'm tentatively calling it Loopback.