General Books - Page 6

iMovie 08 and iDVD 08 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide

Jeff Carlson

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Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Apple -> iMovie + iDVD
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Apple -> Graphics, Animation & Illustration
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Digital Music -> Audio & Video Editing

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Visual QuickStart Guide—the quick and easy way to learn!

This full-color, amply illustrated, accessible book teaches readers the essential skills necessary for creating compelling movies with iMovie and iDVD, Apple's consumer-friendly digital movie and DVD-burning software applications. Readers can follow the step-by-step instructions from the beginning to get a tour of the applications or look up specific tasks to learn just what they need to know. Longtime Macintosh and technology writer Jeff Carlson takes extra steps to ensure that readers understand all of the key aspects of digital movie making.

• Easy visual approach uses pictures to guide you through iMovie and iDVD (and how they interact with the other iLife ’08 applications) and show you what to do.
• Concise steps and explanations let you get up and running in no time.
• Page for page, the best content and value around.
• Companion Web site at www.jeffcarlson.com/imovievqs offers links mentioned in the book, sample movies, and ongoing news and information about iMovie, iDVD, and video editing.
  

Audio Mashup Construction Kit: ExtremeTech

Jordan "DJ Earworm" Roseman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

HERE ARE SOME SOUND IDEAS.

Wonder what would happen if the Big Band sound crashed into heavy metal? Or what the offspring of a balladeer and a rapper might sound like? How about smooth jazz and acid rock? Stop wondering-this book will take you there. You'll explore hardware and software choices first and select what you need; then you'll sample a little music theory. After that, it's step by step to the big mashup. Do what sounds good.

How to mix & mash.

Cool stuff you'll learn:

• How to use mashup construction software
• Basics of songwriting and music theory
• Insider tips on selecting your songs
• How to get your tracks in key and in sync
• Ways to extract vocals from full songs
• Tricks for arranging your mashup for maximum impact
• How to polish up your mashup with mastering and effects
• Rendering, distribution, and legal considerations

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0 Tutorial and MultiMedia CD

Roger Toogood

Amazon Price: $44.07 List Price: $69.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Schroff Development Corporation Amazon Marketplace: 49 new & used starting at $20.95

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good beginner tutorial. 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This tutorial is great for beginners who are using Pro/E Wildfire 3.0 for the first time. It doesn't cover some of the really advanced features, but Pro/E is just to deep of a program for that to be possible. Overall, it's an excellent book to teach the ins and outs of Pro/E, and it gets you very comfortable with designing almost anything imaginable. My one complaint is that, at times, the tutorial seems to get a bit wordy.

Editorial Review:

The ten lessons in this tutorial introduce students to Pro/ENGINEER's design capabilities.

Table of Contents

1. User Interface, View Controls and Model Structure
2. Creating a Simple Object (Part I)
3. Creating a Simple Object (Part II)
4. Revolved Protrusions, Mirror Copies, Rounds, and Chamfers
5. Modeling Utilities and the 3 R’s
6. Datum Planes and Sketcher Tools
7. Patterns and Copies
8. Engineering Drawings
9. Assembly Fundamentals
10. Assembly Operations
11. Sweeps and Blends
Appendix : Interface Customization
Index

Sound FX

Case

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Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> Recording & Sound

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Every session, every gig, every day, recording engineers strive to make the most of their audio signal processing devices. EQ, Compression, Delay, Distortion, Reverb and all those other FX are the well-worn tools of the audio trade. Recording and mixing, live and in the studio, engineers must thoroughly master these devices to stay competitive sonically. Its not enough to just know what each effect is supposed to do. Sound FX explains the basic and advanced signal processing techniques used in professional music production, describing real world techniques used by experienced engineers, and referencing popular music examples released internationally. The reader learns not just how to, but also what if, so they can better achieve what they already hear in the productions they admire and chase what they only hear in their imaginative minds ear. Sound FX will immediately help you make more thorough, more musical use of your sound FX.

The accompanying website www.soundfx-companion.com includes audio exaples of FX featured in the book.

Features:

A chapter dedicated to each key effect:
Distortion
Compression & Limiting
Expansion & Gating
Reverb
Equalization
Delay
Pitch Shift
Volume
More than 100 line drawings and illustrations.
Accompanying website featuring examples of all FX covered in the book.
Discography of FX at the end of each relevant chapter.

From the Sound FX Intro:

The most important music of our time is recorded music. The recording studio is its principle musical instrument. The recording engineers and music producers who create the music we love know how to use signal processing equipment to capture the work of artists, preserving realism or altering things wildly, as appropriate. While the talented, persistent, self-taught engineer can create sound recordings of artistic merit, more productive use of the studio is achieved through study, experience and collaboration. This book defines the technical basis of the most important signal processing effects used in the modern recording studio, highlights the key drivers of sound quality associated with each, shares common production techniques used by recording engineers with significant experience in the field, references many of the touchstone recordings of our time, and equips the reader with the knowledge needed to comfortably use effects devices correctly, and, more importantly, to apply these tools creatively.

* Mixing and Recording, studio and live -- for everyone who uses signal processing in audio.
* Defines the technical basis of the most important signal processing effects used in the modern recording studio
* Highlights the key drivers of sound quality associated with each
* Equips the reader with the knowledge needed to comfortably use effects devices correctly, and, more importantly, to apply these tools creatively

Composing Digital Music For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

Russell Dean Vines

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Yes, you can turn those great melodies and smokin’ grooves in your head into stunning digital music! And you don’t have to be a musical genius or a computer geek to do it! Composing Digital Music For Dummies shows you everything you need to know to compose great tunes using the hottest digital tools.

This friendly, plain-English guide explains all of the digital music basics, including how to work with the latest hardware and software, use templates from the companion CD-ROM to make a quick start, build your first tune, and save it in different formats. You’ll also find out how to add instruments to your score, set tempos and keys, create chord symbols and show fretboards, add lyrics to your tune, and much more. Discover how to:

• Write and arrange digital music
• Determine what — if any — equipment you need
• Create your own ringtones and mp3s
• Compose with a MIDI controller, or a mouse
• Work with notation software
• Use keyboard shortcuts
• Publish your creations on the Internet
• Build your own tune from scratch
• Extract parts from your score for each instrument

The companion CD-Rom also includes a demo of Sebelius 5, the most popular music notation software, as well as audio files for all music examples in the book. With this step-by-step guide and your computer, you’ll have everything you need to start writing, arranging, and publishing your own digital music — immediately!

Skype For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

Loren Abdulezer, Susan Abdulezer, Howard Dammond

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A note from Susan (one of the authors!) 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.

Okay, I had to give it 5 stars since I co-wrote the book and I know all the research, reflection, editing and late nights that went into Skype for Dummies. But I also wanted to add a little personal note about Skype and why I wanted to write this book.

Skype is an amazing way to communicate. I don't use it exclusively (I use land lines, email and cell phones too). But I wanted to open up the possibilities of using a program that let's you talk, type in messages, conference, videoconference, transfer files all at the same time, in the same venue, exploding the idea of what it means to mingle electronically. My husband Loren (my co-author), and our friend Howard Dammond (my other co-author), used Skype constantly in the writing work flow. We'd develop an outline and send the file out (you can send files out to a whole bunch of people at once if they are in a Skype chat or conference with you). We'd each look at it, comment, paste in paragraphs, changes, suggestions and add live links in the chat window, and then get down to work. Our work flow was almost exclusively on Skype. This was true even when Loren was in the study and I was in the living room in the same apartment. It was faster to Skype a file and paste a paragraph into a chat than it was to email or print and walk the chapter over to the next room. We really hadn't anticipated how efficient this was (and grateful for that efficiency when deadlines loomed).

Skype had become part of our culture of communicating. We used it for work, play, to explore, to teach and to connect our far flung families.

On any given day, while I'm at work writing or researching on my computer, a little alert comes up inviting me to answer a Skype call. Not unusual...but the call is from my mother, a new user to computers, and well into her eighties. Mom lives in Florida, I'm in New York, and her Skype contacts allow her to instantly call any of her children with a couple of clicks. She also uses landlines and cell phones, but the quality of a Skype call for her is much clearer...a boon to failing hearing. I coached my Mom in how to set up a contact list and how to Skype out to her brothers in Indiana and Virginia, and her nieces in California. She is a confident Skyper (although she calls it Spyke!) and absolutely took to the program because it made sense to use it.

In the book we certainly tried to be really, really clear about how to use all the features of Skype...and then some (editors in the Dummies series are meticulous about insisting on clarity...albeit with a huge dose of humour). But we wanted to talk about the new culture that is emerging because of such programs; the enormity of how much more productive we can be if we take advantage of new tools; how far our reach can go in multi-continent collaboration, language learning, and business development.

To me, Skype is personal. I use it every day. This book was not a platform for political, economic or ethical discussions on Skype, eBay, cable companies and the like (I'll let you know when I become a political columnist). It's simply a glance down the road, a fun travel guide to suggest a path and destination you may not have considered (or didn't know was there). What is that destination? A very rich, varied way to connect with each other.

Loren, Howard and I truly hope you enjoy the book (of course we do). But, more than that, we hope we've opened a few eyes, imaginations, and helped to launch a few enterprises.

Thanks for reading my little missive,

Sincerely, Susan Abdulezer

Editorial Review:

See how to use Skype for secure chats and connect SkypeOut and SkypeIN. Here's the fun and easy way (r) to understand all the hype about Skype and make this cool alternative communication system work for you! You'll get great advice about hardware, directions for downloading and installing Skype, ideas for using Skype in your business, and the lowdown on making Skype calls to people with old-fashioned phones.

Discover how to:

• Install Skype and start making calls
• Create a contacts list
• Set up voicemail and call forwarding
• Use Skype for worldwide conference calls and Skypecasting
• Enhance Skype with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi wireless, and video

Ableton Live 7 Tips and Tricks

Martin Delaney

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Create a Live template for performance/studio

Work with Live's software instruments

Create complex instrument and effect chains

Control Live via wireless

Audio editing workrounds within Live

Prepare a Live set for performance

Use Live with other music software

Ableton Live is the cross-platform software which has rocked the music world - gathering ardent fans in a way usually associated with performers rather than software. Musicians, DJs, remixers, composers, and producers alike have embraced Live, and it's fast becoming the universal software studio.

This book will give Live novices an insight into working methods that otherwise would take months to discover. For the more experienced user it promises a quick catch-up with Live's latest developments (including new software instruments, complex instrument and effects chains, the phenomenal audio slicing, and full video functionality), and a new perspective on some of Live's more established features.

The book does not duplicate the Live user manual, it expands upon it, and introduces creative concepts, workflow enhancements, and workrounds for common objectives and problems. It also includes interviews with high-profile Live users in a variety of musical genres, passing on their real-world experiences to you.

Although the Live interface is remarkably simple, there's a lot of power under the surface. This book will show you new ways to access that power.

iPhone Open Application Development: Write Native Objective-C Applications for the iPhone

Jonathan Zdziarski

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Certain technologies bring out everyone's hidden geek, and iPhone did the moment it was released. Even though Apple created iPhone as a closed device, tens of thousands of developers bought them with the express purpose of designing and running third-party software. In this clear and concise book, veteran hacker Jonathan Zdziarski -- one of the original hackers of the iPhone -- explains the iPhone's native environment and how you can build software for this device using its Objective-C, C, and C++ development frameworks. iPhone Open Application Development walks you through the iPhone's native development environment, offers an overview of the Objective-C language you'll use with it, and supplies background for the iPhone operating system. You also get detailed recipes and working examples for everyone's favorite iPhone features -- graphics and audio programming, interfaces for adding multitouch functionality to games, the use of hardware sensors, and the device's vast user interface kit. This book explains: How to access the iPhone's underlying operating system The makeup of an iPhone application How to get the open source tool chain running on your desktop The iPhone's core user interface framework, which is heavily tied to major application-level functions Using the many touted iPhone features such as multitouch, hardware sensors, and gestures Intercepting and handling event notifications for many iPhone-related events Raw video surfaces and 3D transformations that take you deeper into advanced graphics on the iPhone How to record and play simple sounds and intercept sound events Advanced digital audio output using Apple's new Audio Toolbox framework Advanced user interfacecomponents such as section lists, keyboards, and image manipulation

The Appendix includes a compendium of miscellaneous code examples for cool application features, such as using the camera and creating a CoverFlow(R)-like album browser. This book is a true hacker's book, designed for the millions of users who have run third party applications on their iPhone, but its concepts and code examples have shown to be remarkably similar to Apple's official SDK, making this book a valuable resource for both camps. Any programmer can use this book to write applications with the same spectacular effects that made the device an immediate hit, and impress users just as much as the official iPhone software does. That programmer can easily be you.

The Musician's Guide to Pro Tools

John Keane

List Price: $39.99 By: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media Amazon Marketplace: 20 new & used starting at $1.74

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

This is a great book.......... 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I've used a number of these and this one seems to get down to the practical things that you need to know in dealing with recording with Pro Tools. It's been a while since I've recorded so this was sort of like starting over. This book takes you step by step in set up and gives good pictures and illustrations of what you're doing. It comes with some files you can load but it recommends that you create some of your own. I found that to be very helpful. It took me from hooking up any instruments, drum boxes, or whatever to recording something to work with. It made it more "real world" instead of just following a file you've been given.

It's truly a book from a musician to a musician. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get down to recording!!!

Doug

Editorial Review:

This expertly written guide will show you exactly why Pro Tools shrinks a full music studio into a computer, replacing the bulky recording infrastructure of multi-track analog mixing boards and rolls of two-inch-wide magnetic tape. Ideal for beginning, intermediate, and advanced producers, sound engineers, and musicians.

Analog Synthesizers: Understanding, Performing, Buying- from the legacy of Moog to software synthesis

Mark Jenkins

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Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Computer Science -> Circuitry -> Analog Electronics
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this book, the technical explanation of the nature of analog sound creation is followed by the story of its birth and its subsequent development by various designers, manufacturers and performers.

The individual components of analog sound creation are then examined in detail, with step by step examples of sound creation techniques. Then the modern imitative analog instruments are examined, again with detailed instructions for programming and using them, and the book is completed with appendices listing the major instrument lines available, hints on values and purchasing, other sources of information, and a discography of readily available recordings which give good examples of analog sound synthesis.

The CD which accompanies the book gives many examples of analog sound creation basics as well as more advanced techniques, and of the abilities of the individual instruments associated with classical and with imitative analog sound synthesis.

* A complete history of analog sound in one work
* Interviews with industry Legends and developers of of analog synthesizers
* Audio CD of demo sounds and tuitional pieces to illustrate the processes discussed in the book