DJ Charlie Darker mixing at the Poleng Lounge in San Francisco.

It’s midnight at the Poleng Lounge in San Francisco and walking beyond the entrance is a challenge for partygoers, the place is so packed they have to wait in line to walk a few feet. The dance floor is so crowded dancers can miss a step and not fall down until the music stops. A young woman waiting at the base of the DJ’s platform wants to talk to the DJ spinning. Several minutes pass, finally DJ Charlie Darker leans down to listen to her, she wants him to play some hip-hop. Darker tells her “I am playing hip-hop.” Oh Dang! Where the hell has she been? Darker has been spinning hip-hop since he fired up the turntables and his MacBook Pro.  

This iPhone instrument group struggles with creative differences.

It's a handheld music studio on your iPhone.

BeatMaker takes songwriters from start to finish, crafting sample-based music on an iPhone or iPod touch. Record and then edit patterns using drum hits and loops, then arrange, mix, and export songs. BeatMaker can even load your own audio samples through a Mac or PC utility. This is the app beat-lovers have been waiting for, but even beginners can find their way through this powerful tool.

Apply DJ-style scratching over music and annoy girlfriends, free of charge.

What do Katy Perry and Lindsay Lohan have in common? If you said “not enough wiki-wiki sound effects in their music,” then two things: 1) Thanks for not paying attention to girl/girl kissing hype and 2) MixMeister Scratch is the free app for you.

In Little Snitch’s configuration screen, we set iTunes to deny connections to the Internet radio while still allowing access to the iTunes Store. In Safari, all websites are allowed except for www.pandora.com.
 

The Internet speed at my office slows down tremendously when my employees are streaming music through iTunes Radio and pandora.com. Is there any way to block my employees from streaming music on their Macs?

You could invest in a hardware-based content filtering firewall such as the Barracuda Web Filter (starting at $1,499, www.barracudanetworks.com), which blocks the users on your network from accessing websites that you specify based on domain name or category. It can also prevent applications, such as iTunes, from accessing the Internet.

For a software-based solution, there’s Little Snitch ($29.95, www.obdev.com), which informs you whenever a program attempts to establish an outgoing Internet connection (letting you know the specific port and IP address that your application is trying to access) and lets you block those attempts. You can prevent apps from accessing the entire Internet or just certain websites. Best of all, you can lock Little Snitch to prevent users from making changes to the settings that you’ve customized.

Selecting this option in iTunes ensures that your friends will see the track names when they insert your custom CD into their computers.

I used iTunes to burn a few awesome mix CDs for my girlfriend, but when she puts the CDs in her Mac, the track names either show up blank or with completely wrong track information. We had to manually type in all the information about each track. What’s going on here?

This is a topic that provides a great deal of confusion for many.

The quick answer is that if she’s going to be importing the tracks into her computer (instead of playing the CD in a normal audio CD player), you should burn your CD as a data CD. To do this, go to iTunes > Preferences, click the Advanced button, choose the Burning tab, and then select Data CD Or DVD. This is the equivalent of making a backup copy of your songs, which keeps the song title, artist, and album information intact for each song. Note that your girlfriend won’t be able to play a data CD in a normal audio CD player, nor will she be able to play any protected songs that you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store unless you authorize her computer with your iTunes username and password.

The explanation behind this answer is more complex. iTunes uses an audio CD standard created back in the 1980s that doesn’t allow for any text information about the tracks, such as artist name or song title. Yet whenever you insert a commercially released CD into your computer, iTunes goes online to a massive music database called Gracenote and looks up the track information based on the length of each track. iTunes then saves this information for future use into the CDInfo.cidb file located in ~/Library/Preferences. When you burn a custom audio CD, iTunes saves your track info into the CDInfo.cidb file as well. This is why you can reinsert a custom audio CD into your computer and iTunes will still recognize the song titles…but only on your own computer.

You could conceivably carry over your CDInfo.cidb file to your girlfriend’s computer (by putting it in her ~/Library/Preferences folder), and she would get all the track information about the custom audio CD that you burned for her. Many people have submitted custom CD track names to Gracenote by choosing Advanced > Submit Track Names in iTunes, but Gracenote was only supposed to be used for commercially released CDs and it should never be used for personal CDs. This misuse of the Gracenote service is the reason why you often get incorrect track names in iTunes when inserting a custom audio CD.

One final note: You may have noticed the CD Text option within the Advanced preferences of iTunes for burning audio CDs. This option actually does write song name and artist information onto a normal audio CD, but this information can only be read by certain audio CD drives. The CD drives that ship with Macs are unable to read this CD Text information.

Indie rockers CURSIVE use GarageBand to write songs and iPods to help them practice—and share their pro tips with you.

Choose Music > Pop-H when you're rocking out to Abba with headphones. Sure, it's easy enough to do, but we were too lazy to change Hear's preset to Hip Hop / Rap-H when the song switched to Akon's Smack That.

Even nonaudiophiles can appreciate an app like JoeSoft's Hear, which, for $49.95, boosts the sound quality of your entire digital music library - and any other audio you care to listen to on your Mac.

After an admittedly quick look at the app, however, we found ourselves wishing JoeSoft could build in a few more features that cater to lazy mousers like us. To wit: With its dozens of music presets - from Alternative / Punk to Hip Hop/Rap to Techno, all for both speakers and headphones, choosing the one you want quickly is, well, a challenge.