Reader Nat Slater, aka 601 (see band page and hear some tunes on his MySpace page) responds to our ongoing racked-PC rig series with tips from building his own rig:

Love the blog; thought I would chip in on the current run of articles about rackmounting PCs. I have just done the same thing after many weeks of research. Like most people looking at this, my budget cannot stretch to a laptop at the moment, so rackmounting my current PC ([AMD] Operton 165) seemed like a cheaper idea. I also needed to mount up my mixer as the idea is to live live with my band and be able to mix vocals/instruments through the computer as well as turntables, etc.

As I continue this Reasonable Friday, here’s a reader report on how to use Propellerhead Reason live in performance. He’s making use of the terrific Windows-only MIDI tool Peter Tools LiveSet — more on that in an upcoming story. And he’s taking his one-man band to an environmental-activist music festival outside Sydney in gorgeous environs (pictured).

Stevo writes us:

I have been working on organising Reason for use in a live situation . . . I am a solo artist producing entirely on a laptop. I have a controller keyboard, a [Behringer] BCF2000 controller that is locked to the main mixer, a Korg Kaoss 2 pad, and a copy of Peter Tools LiveSet. I am a loop-based type of artist, meaning I like to mess with ideas as loops and rarely program a song from begin to end, as this ends up doing my head in . . .

I love it when CDM readers win major accolades. So it is with Cris “Atariboy” Pearson of plasq, who’s just scored the prestigious Apple Design Award for Best New Product for OS X at the WWDC conference. The winning app, the brilliant comic creation tool Comic Life got mentioned here on CDM just about before anyone knew about it. Congrats, Atariboy!

Of course, as this is a music site and all, we’re still partial to the very-cool, very-free, very-Mac-only sampling instrument Musolomo, which just got a lovely Sound on Sound review. But that doesn’t mean we can’t send kudos to Cris, and that I’m still not holding out hope that someone will create a digital music-themed comic using this tool. If it helps motivate you, I could point out that the Packrat strip featured on Music Thing got picked up by Keyboard. I’m waiting.