In the 90s, that was the plan – the miracle of convergence would merge everything into one giant übergadget. The Handspring Visor didn’t do the trick, and although the iPhone combined lots of stuff into one little box, it hasn’t obliterated the standalone camera, or the standalone e-reader (or book!), or the standalone gaming system – or, for that matter, the magical, revolutionary, rainbow-puking iPad.

The iPad is a contradiction. On one hand, it’s the poster child for convergence – it’s an e-reader, media player, game device, and word processor all in one, and if you’re a grandmother or a nomadic hipster, it could be the only gadget you own. On the other hand, it’s basically overgrown iPhone, snazzy industrial design and A4 system-on-a-chip notwithstanding. A major reason that the iPad has been such a hit is that it comes in such an interesting shape and size – you can Facebook stalk from your couch!

Or what about the Cumby, the huggable Internet clock radio doohickey? All it really does is display widgets and play music, and your average smartphone could beat it up and steal its lunch money – but somehow it’s been enough of a hit to spawn a knockoff from none other than Sony. It’s been a success because it fits a kooky little niche that few other gadgets do.

I started researching sales numbers, but few companies provide detailed stats.  In their annual reports, Apple provides total revenue by product category while Nintendo gives Wii and DS unit sales for the 3rd quarter of the past few fiscal years. Amazon.com is cagey and refers to the Kindle just 8 times in its 92-page annual report – never with hard sales numbers, of course.

Suffice it to say, though that each company is doing just fine. Why? I think it comes down to a few reasons:

• Interface – In an age of touchscreens, there’s something to be said for buttons, glorious buttons. Keyboard apps are all well and good, but if you’re a pianist, they’ll never match even the cheapest Casio. Similarly, an e-ink screen saves battery life (and your eyes!) on the Kindle, but it’d be useless on a do-it-all device like the iPad.
• Content – Dedicated devices often have software that’s tailored to their purpose – Nintendo’s platforms have loads of rich, in-depth games, while Apple’s have lots of simple, 99-cent timewasters.  There’s no major technical reason that you couldn’t put Doodle Jump on the DS – or Zelda or Scribblenauts on the iPhone. The audience for each platform is different, and developers are catering to different needs.
• Horsepower - Do-it-all gadgets pack a lot of features into a little space, so they have to make some sacrifices. Hey, how’s the flash on your camera phone? The Kindle doesn’t need to do much computing, so it can ratchet up its battery life to absurd levels – up to 1 week, according to Amazon.com – versus 10 hours for the iPad. On the other hand, playing games on the Kindle would probably be a nightmare.

With the mobile processors getting faster and cheaper, I hope we see more Chumbies and Skype phones – and maybe even another peek or two. Form matters, and it helps us humans integrate gadgets into our lives.

After moderate success trying to use an equalizer to remove the noise, I decided to just accept it as part of the synth’s low-fi charm. I ran it through Garageband’s “Intense Whispering” effect, which gave it kind of a guitar-ey sound. When no notes played, the noise ended up sounding like a rhythm guitar. Turns out if you run synths through some distortion and play with the EQ, you too can sound like Justice!

I have a tendency to tinker and tweak music until it’s perfect, which means nothing ever gets finished or posted. I’m trying to break away from that, and in that spirit I’ve posted several minutes of crazy noises that I recorded last night. It’s not particularly polished, but boy does it sound cool. I recorded the Bliptronic in one take, and during the end part the synth is actually unplugged. It turns out that if you touch the end of an unplugged patch cable, that’s enough to create some interesting noises.

Listen at your own risk below.

Download MP3

Download MP3

After the break: audio geekery and what’s next for this song.

I haven’t compressed the song yet, so the song has really loud and quiet parts instead of sounding uniformly loud. As a result, the song currently looks like this:

This is opposed to the Prodigy’s “Invaders Must Die,” which looks like this:

The Prodigy song does have distinct quiet and loud parts, but when it gets loud, it’s cranked to 11. In digital audio, the amplitude of a sound wave is measured as a decimal between 1.0 and -1.0, where 0 is silence. Anything higher than 1.0 or lower than -1.0 will clip, causing really nasty-sounding digital distortion – which sounds decidedly less awesome than analog distortion.

Anyway, Liam Howlett and friends (ok, probably just Howlett) have gotten the track basically as loud as it can go, and it’s a better listen for it. I’ve mostly avoided compression myself because it can often rob songs of their expressiveness – imagine if you took a recording of a jazz pianist and compressed it so that each note was played at the same volume. It’d sound like it was being played by a robot. But with dance music, it’s kinda expected – compression gives songs an extra oomph and reduces headaches for DJs. The trick is to do it gently, so listeners don’t get worn out by five minutes of full-blast audio.

When you hear this song next, it’ll probably have a few tweaks to the mix – I rushed it a bit to get it in for the Together Bedroom Producer competition – and I’ll probably cave to the in-your-face sound of compression.

Times – A unique RSS reader that looks like an actual newspaper. I don’t feel great about the part that scrapes article text and pulls it into the app, but boy is it convenient! Support for Twitter and other social networking services is a nice touch too.

djay – A clean, solid DJ app. It includes neat features like touchpad scratching, iTunes integration, and a sampler, plus staples like the ability to speed up or slow down records without changing pitch, cueing and looping, effects, an equalizer, support for multiple outputs, and recording. There’s no automatic BPM detection and there aren’t as many features in djay as there are in industrial-strength apps like Traktor Pro, but what would you really do with four decks anyway?

Paint.Net – The image editing program Microsoft should’ve included with Windows. It’s easy to use, powerful enough for most of my graphic editing needs at work, and a shining example of good interface design on Windows.

Boxer – A unique DosBox front-end that wraps up your old DOS applications (read: games) into single files that work just like native Mac OS apps. Imagine what would happen Parallels fell through a time warp into 1994 and you’ve got the idea.

Xmarks – The bookmark tool formerly known as Foxmarks, this app lets you store your IE, Firefox, or Safari bookmarks in the cloud for easy access from another browser or the Xmarks website. It also adds its own links to Google searches, but those are easy enough to turn off if you’d like.

The archive, music, and downloads will be back soon – you can grab them from the old site at http://www.ragingmime.com/index_old.shtml if you’d like. And if you missed my original design – an eye-melting green checkerboard – well, consider yourself lucky.

I downloaded the new Prodigy record, Invaders Must Die for two bucks from Amazon.com, and it’s fantastic – completely worth the eight bucks that it costs now. Forget 2004’s rock-oriented, largely forgettable Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, this is the real deal, with lots of wild, blippy synths and the monster beats that only Liam Howlett can deliver.

A lot of it sounds like their 90s work with better production, but there are some surprises too – “Colours” alternates between high-energy synths and crunchy dance-rock guitar work in a way that does more for the concept of nu-rave than those hipster wimps from the Klaxons ever could.

The title track and the lead single, Omen, are both classic Prodigy: loud, stupid, and completely badass. They do get a modern bump from collaborators Does It Offend You, Yeah – so again: hipsters, take notice.

The most surprising track is the closer, “Stand Up.” It is – get ready for this – a low-key, instrumental funk/hip-hop track with lots of electronic effects sprinkled on top. Somehow, a lot of the reviewers who complained about how the record just retraced old ground never heard this one – maybe they gave up and went back to reading Pitchfork.

That’s not to say there’s not a big 90s dance influence going on here, but the Prodigy throw enough curveballs to keep the record fresh. Yeah, a lot of the melodies are the the same two bars looped over and over, and the production sometimes outshines the songwriting – but what were you expecting, Kraftwerk?

If the lack of deep, moving pieces really bothers you, you might do well to pick up Moby’s new(ish) record, Last Night, which is pretty much the opposite extreme: the sounds are solid, sure, but he’s all about warm melodies and soulful vocalists. And it has a bit of a 90s sound too – but it’s more polished and mature than the real thing ever was. This is the way I want to remember 1997.

I wish I could say I was listening to these guys then, but I actually was really into the Barenaked Ladies and Ace of Base – and I owned both Eiffel 65’s Europop and Alice Deejay’s Who Needs Guitars Anyway. They were both pretty awful, but at least BNL’s still doing their thing, even putting out a really wacky kids’ record. It’s a shame Steven Page left last week, but at least the band’s still touring and recording a new record.

Ok, this post has been longer than I expected so I’m gonna wrap it up. Here’s hoping that ten years from now, I’m going on about how cool the 2000s were, and that 40 years from now I haven’t blown out my eardrums from listening to dance music too loud.

More info (and free, Creative Commons-licensed download): www.antneely.com