The book publishing world is enjoying a fair bit of disarray at the moment. The rise of ebooks that everyone hates (but reads anyway), the closing of book shops that everyone protests about (while shopping on Amazon) and the generally grumbling that happens when a long established industry has to change – what does this have to do with music technology I hear you ask? We’ve got enough turmoil of our own surely? Well a couple of weeks ago I read an article in the Guardian (online of course, not on that paper stuff) by Andrew Motion (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/16/booktrack-ebooks-sensuous-andrew-motion) about a new publishing phenomenon called Booktrack. “Soundtracks for books” is the tag line and the basic idea is that you take an ebook and you slap on a musical score and sound effects track which follows along as you read. Now there are usually two reactions to this – one is to recoil in horror and the other is to put on some headphones and jump straight in. A quick google search will reveal very divided opinion on the concept, but I’m not going to worry about that – what interests me is that there are shed loads of books out there and someone is going to have to write a lot of music to go with them and that sounds like my dream occupation.
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It's Europe's biggest music trade show and happens in Frankfurt every year at the end of March. With a lot of music software companies being European it's often the place for impressive product launches or glimpses into the future - this year, not so much. Digging around the news feeds and videos from the show it's actually quite hard to find anything particularly dramatic.
Ah those were the days. Animated gif's and bad html formatting were all the rage back in 1998 when the first PC Music Guru website appeared out of the fog of a text heavy world wide web. At that time there really was nothing out there about making music on a computer, certainly nothing on doing it in Windows - it was a frontier town, population - me.