The lovely and talented Peter Kirn over at Create Digital Music has posted a round up of music apps for the iPod / iTouch platform. The list includes tools for using your iPhone as a MIDI/OSC controller, making random weird digital art, visualizing your music and, er, listening to Snow Patrol's next album, amongst other apps. Peter's a thoughtful critic and his evaluations are pretty detailed and thorough.

If you're an aspiring iPhone musician / DJ/ sound designer, this is definitely a good place to start finding useful apps.

Do you need to make basic sound level measurements? For example, do you want to prove that your next door neighbor really is playing music loud enough to make your ears bleed?

Faber Acoustical is coming to your rescue with their US$19.99 SoundMeter for iPhone. They discovered that both the built-in and headset microphones of the iPhone have a flat enough frequency response to make them useful for measuring sound levels.

To quote the technical part of their press release, "SoundMeter measures average sound levels with fast, slow, and impulse time weightings. Peak, maximum, and equivalent sound levels are also available. All sound levels may be measured with Flat, A, or C frequency weighting." Got that?

Faber notes that SoundMeter doesn't meet ANSI or IEC standards for precision sound level meters, but it works very well as an inexpensive level meter for hobbyists. They recommend not using the built-in mic on first-generation iPhones (the headset may be used instead), and SoundMeter should be calibrated prior to use.

Faber Acoustical also produces two other really impressive iPhone apps, SignalScope and SignalSuite. SoundMeter for iPhone is available in the App Store now (click opens iTunes).

[via prMac]

AudioFinder fits a niche that I admittedly don't have a lot of experience in, but I just gave version 4.7 a test run and I'm impressed. OK, so it got me with its not-bad looks to start with, which gave it a leg up on most of the other prosumer-level audio asset managers I've played with. But it quickly lived up to its moniker with Finder-like ease-of-use and powerful features made simple.

I loved that it integrated completely with Finder, and that it provided an interface for viewing audio that was as powerful as anything I've seen for graphics previews. I haven't seen any app at any price do this as simply. A keyboard in the main window lets you pitch sounds in realtime, as well as run them through AudioUnits. It essentially has a full editor built into the "Finder" panel that is powerful without being domineering.

There is a free level (sound browsing only) available if you request an activation code. The list price for full activation is $69.95 and the demo of 4.7 is available for download. At the time of this writing the website still says the download is version 4.6.3, but it's not. I checked, just for you.

I guess the $2 billion iPod accessory market is inspiring everyone to snag a piece of the pie, no matter how... unique their accessory concept might be. Behold: the iSoundCap, a 'breakthrough' way to carry your iPod nano or shuffle. As you can see from the diagram, this stylish cap comes with a pouch (that appears to be permanently mounted on the right side) that offers access to your nano or shuffle controls, along with two headphone wire spools (one for a spare) to help tackle all the slack.

The creative cap sells for $29.95, and it comes in a variety of styles depending on model (including pink just for the ladies). If you pre-order before its ship date of 8/1506, iSoundCap is offering a 10% off coupon at their store.

[via Engadget]

I'm finally done being in pain from laughter to post this hilarious revisit of the Star Wars Kid using that MacSaber app we found over the weekend. Great work, YouTube user mathowie.

[via Waxy.org]

The iTMS has introduced an intriguing new service called "New Rock Revealed", where one band's music will be dissected each week to find who their roots and inspirations were, as well as similar sounds you can find today.

This first week looks at Pearl Jam's new album (which rocks, by the way), and lists its tracks in the middle of the chart. On the left side is a list of "Roots & Influences", where songs from bands that inspired Pearl Jam are listed, track by track, matching up to the Pearl Jam songs where their influences can be heard. On the right side is the "Similar Sounds" list of bands who clearly were inspired by Pearl Jam. Each of the two lists (Roots & Influences and Similar Sounds) are available as mixes ready for purchase, priced at just over $12 apiece. I would imagine that price will fluctuate, depending on the length of the album New Rock Revealed dissects each week.

This is a really cool idea, though I wish the iTMS could produce some more information along the lines of truly exploring a band's roots. I'd love to be able to read a little more into what exactly inspired Pearl Jam; where they got their sound, how they started out as a band living out of their broken-down tour bus and eating stale bread three times a day until they got their big break. With that said, I'm excited to see the iTMS whipping out clever new services like this to get people more interested in music, where it came from and where it's going.

Freeverse has announced a free set of automation plug-ins for Sound Studio 3, their fantastic, easy-to-use audio editing application which we've blogged before. Dubbed "Monbots" (short for Monkey Bots), these are but the first three in what Freeverse promises to be a series of handy automation plug-ins and tools.

The first monbot, Clean & Convert, is an audio scrubber for tidying up any misbehaving or noisy audio. The second, called Mastering Console, offers a set of tools and effects for (you guessed it) mastering audio, while Bookend Audio allows you to easily add intro and outro audio to a file or group of files. A fourth monbot, capable of stitching multiple pieces of audio together into one file, is aptly called Stitch and is listed as coming soon.

It looks like the monbots are free, so all you need is a copy of Sound Studio 3 which sells for a mere $79.95.