NAMM Years’ Eve: Favorite 2007 Musical Moments

New Years’ Eve? What’s that? The music tech year begins and ends at the massive NAMM trade show, across from Disneyland in Anaheim, California. So, as we settle in for a few hours’ rest before the big circus begins, I asked Liz McLean Knight and Mike Una to offer some of their 2007 highlights. And this gives us some great music to listen to while we (invariably) edit the hours of footage of NAMM and my recent Australian visualist tour.

Great music, great tools, and some personal highlights ahead. (Photo: moriza. Ah, sweet 2007.)

read more

Your Top 10 Music Tech CDM Stories of 2007

>Pictured above: what happens to CDM readership if I go on a bizarre tangent for too long, or take too much Elton John time. Erm, and it also happens to be CDM readers’ favorite new software of 2007: Ableton Live 7.

To all of our readers here at Create Digital Music, thank you for 2007. It’s been fantastic to sit at the helm of CDM and get to hear from all of you, from news tips to musical and technological projects, and get to meet you out in the world (at Macworld San Francisco, Maker Faire San Mateo, Handmade Music events here in New York with Etsy and Make, in Chicago at a demo swap, and even in Australia at a coffee shop).

I’m wrapping our own 2007 in review story, but which stories did Webizens choose as the most significant? Here’s 2007 by the numbers, according to our server. First, the most visited stories of the year:

Top Ten Stories By Visit

The top ten start out with Yamaha’s unveiling of the long-awaited TENORI-ON instrument, a tool for mobile recording, a terrific free tool for Windows, and an unusual DJ take on mobile music players. Apple’s Logic Studio manages not to sneak into the top ten, I suspect because it can’t compete with apps that run on two platforms instead of one. But Reason 4 falls just short of matching CDM reader favorite Ableton Live:

read more