NAMM 2013 - best stuff

So NAMM 2013 has been and gone and there were some nice surprises this time around, alongside some of the expected releases from the big manufacturers. It was also nice to see Bitwig and Android audio codecs covered as well! Full coverage is best left for other sites, but three things in particular really got me going this year and unsurprisingly they were all synthesiser related.

HMV is dead - Part 2

Looking forward in all of this news of doom and gloom, the challenge for me as a blogger and music fan is to try and talk about something that someone else in the world hasn't pointed out about the demise of HMV and sadly, this isn't easy. So perhaps I will go out on a limb and and suggest that smaller specialist outlets will actually weather the storm rather well. According to commenters I have seen on websites, HMV used to be able to use their buying power to identify high selling lines and products in local music stores and undercut them significantly - perhaps now that HMV will be taking a more conservative approach with their new owners having to undoubtedly take on a different approach, the smaller fish in the pond will be able to take advantage of the vacuum.

And speaking of alternative options, there are plenty of those around. Specialist and indie record shops are just about hanging on in there and some of the better ones I go to are a stone's throw from HMV's flagship store. Here are some suggestions for London-based music fans to thumb through the racks.

State of Bitwig via Sonic State

Fanning the flames of my interest for Bitwig comes a nice 15 minute video with one of the developers at the NAMM 2013 show, courtesy of Nick at Sonic State. In particular it's nice to see that they are quite happy to have one license used across all three platforms they are developing for (Windows, OSX and Linux but no idea what flavour/s) and are really against dongles and other hardware license keys. In the age of Cubase leading the way on this, it's a refreshing change.

The best news? It's slated for a "summer 2013" release for v1.0. I can't wait!

I tried to embed the video but Blogger was having none of it. Never mind - video is available here