Book Review: Instant MuseScore

Packt Publishing asked me to review their new book Instant MuseScore.


Here's my review:
First off, if Nicolas Froment, MuseScore's CTO, was a reviewer for this book, then you know it's gotta be good :) He's helped me personally, several times, with getting started with MuseScore and knows what he's talking about.

I was pleased to see there's an installation section for Linux :)

One thing I can totally agree with the author on is learning the keyboard shortcuts--composing will go much faster.

If anyone is interested, a powerful, but more programmatic alternative to MuseScore is Lilypond.

Lilypond is a non-graphical, music notation software that uses its own notation (programming language), written in simple text files, then compiled to produce music notation in a PDF, MIDI and/or PNG file. Here's the Lilypond tutorial.


Here's my review of Instant MuseScore on amazon.

[SOLVED] skullcandy crusher headphones - bass boost only works when i hold in the embossed skull button

i got the skullcandy crusher headphones for christmas :)

the instructions say to put the red end of the 3.5mm connector cable (2 lines) into the headphones and the other end (black, 3 lines) into the audio device (e.g. laptop, phone, etc). but when i did this and turned up the bass using the slider on the left headphone speaker, i couldn't hear any bass unless i held in the embossed skull button on the cable.

(unless my product is defect, then) THIS IS WRONG! when i put the red end of the cable into my laptop and the black end into the actual headphones, THEN THE BASS WAS ON THE WHOLE TIME, without having to hold in the skull button! :)

once i figured that out, WOW what a great, shaking sound experience! :)

here's my amazon review for the skullcandy crusher headphones.

Book Review: "Instant Audio Processing with Web Audio"

I was asked by Packt Publishing to review their new book "Instant Audio Processing with Web Audio".



Here's my generalized review:

In order to get the most out of this book you MUST download the code bundle from Packt. It is full of great, working examples of how to play audio in the browser using jQuery and the Web Audio API. Worked totally fine on Ubuntu Linux 13.04, in Chrome v31.0.1650.63.

I also recommend reading the "Bonus Recipies" PDF mentioned in the intro, first.

The book suggests using the Apache server to test the examples. I recommend using python's "SimpleHTTPServer", which works on Linux and Windows (and Mac, I assume, but have not tested), instead of messing around with a bloated XAMPP/LAMPP bundle, just to get the apache server (php and MySQL aren't needed). Here's how to quickly and easily set up the python web server.

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Here's my review on amazon.
Here's the book on Packt's website.