5 Siri-like apps for iPhone 4, iPod, and iPad

• By Sebastian Anthony 
• From http://www.extremetech.com/

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One of the biggest puzzlers surrounding the release of iOS 5 is the iPhone 4S’s exclusive ability to use Siri, the voice-controlled virtual assistant. At first we had assumed that Siri requires special hardware — the A5 processor and oodles of RAM, perhaps — but it turns out that the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 are virtually identical. Then there’s the fact that Siri, the standalone app that Apple acquired earlier this year, worked just fine on every iOS device, including the iPhone 3GS and 4, and iPod touch. Still, Apple undoubtedly has its reasons, and who are we to question a higher power?

Fortunately, thanks to a thing called the App Store, there are a few Siri alternatives that you can install. By virtue of being apps, rather baked into the OS like Siri, these alternatives won’t be quite as smooth or fast as Apple’s new wunderkind — but they should be more than capable of sending an email or text while driving, or looking up directions while on the move.

Vlingo (Free)

By far the closest comparison to Siri is Vlingo, an app that has its own voice-recognition engine, a powerful cloud-based back end, and almost all of Siri’s functionality, including booking restaurants. The two caveats are that it can’t set reminders (though a new release might fix that), and unlike its Android brother there doesn’t seem to be a voice-activated mode for hands-free in-car mode.

As an added bonus, there’s also a Vlingo app for just about every platform under the sun, including BlackBerry and Nokia phones, and even Windows; but not Mac, unfortunately.

Google Search (Free)

You probably already have it installed, but the Google Search app for iOS includes the same Voice Search feature found on Android devices. As the name suggests, the app only lets you search using your voice, and there’s absolutely no integration with any other services — but it’s a nice stopgap until Safari innately supports voice searching. Just like mobile website, the Google Search app uses your location data to make sure that the results it returns are contextual, too.

Dragon Go! (Free)

Here’s a fun one: Siri herself doesn’t actually manage voice recognition — a module provided by Nuance does that, and then hands your utterances along to Siri once it’s worked out what you’re trying to say. Dragon Go is made by Nuance, and thus it is just as accurate as Siri… but it’s no where near as polished or full-featured.

Dragon Go is basically a voice interface to a bunch of web services, including Wolfram Alpha, Google, Yelp, Google Maps, and so on. It also interfaces with Pandora, Spotify, and Netflix if they’re installed. There’s also Dragon Diction, which is all about dictating messages or longer notes. You can then send your voice-recognized musing via email, Twitter, Facebook, or SMS.

Built-in Voice Control (Free)

If you want to make (almost) hands-free calls in the car, iOS’s built-in Voice Control is your best bet: press and hold the Home button (or the equivalent on your headset), you’ll hear a beep, and then speak your command. If you want to call someone, say “call” or “dial” followed by their name or number, or you can even initiate a FaceTime connection by saying “FaceTime” and then a name and location (iPhone, home, and so on).

Built-in Voice Control can manipulate your music playback, too (but only the iPod app). Use “play” followed by the name of a song, album, playlist or artist — and you can also “what” and “who” to find out what song/artist is currently playing, or “genius” to have your iDevice pick a new, similar song for you.

Voice Camera Pro ($1.99)

Finally we have the only non-free app on the list: Voice Camera Pro, which does exactly what you think, plus a little bit more. First, you can say “camera” to turn the camera on and “shoot” to take a photo, but you can also say “double,” “triple,” and “quad” to take a series of sequential photos.

You can’t avoid the fact that you have to launch the app before you can use it, though — this isn’t going to let you whip your phone out and magically take photos from the lock screen by shouting “TAKE A PHOTO!” Also, it doesn’t seem to have the ability to shoot video, which seems a little weak for an app that costs money.

How to Set Up the Ultimate Desktop Recording Studio

With the right software and a few plug-in instruments, anyone (really, anyone) can be a rock star in his own home. Here's how to use a MIDI keyboard and software like M-Powered Essential and GarageBand to become the next Beck.

By Glenn Derene

Published in the February 2010 issue.
http://www.origin.popularmechanics.com/

Entry-level music-production gear such as M-Audio’s KeyStudio 49 keyboard and Fast Track audio interface can plug in via USB. (Photograph by Jeff Westbrook)

Consider it another marvel of the digital age—or the latest evidence that the beautifully difficult, soul-­taxing art of music creation has irretrievably slid into the hands of talentless idiots. Either way, with the help of a computer, a few peripherals, a variety of entry-level software and two weekends’ worth of struggle, I have produced my first single.

It’s hardly a secret that musical production has been striding boldly into the digital age over the past three decades. Software that enables instruments to interface directly with PCs was pioneered in the 1980s, and current programs pack all the goodness of a full production studio into a laptop, with virtualized instruments, amps, effects, mixing boards and multitrack recording machines all onscreen. This has had a profound effect on the music industry—lowering the barrier to entry to the point where a small band with a computer, a microphone and a few instruments can produce studio-quality recordings.

Instruments have changed, too. Much of the computational heavy lifting that used to be done by circuitry inside digital keyboards and drum pads has been off-loaded to PC-based software. By turning instruments that used to play independently into computer-­connected USB peripherals, manufacturers have reduced the cost of some of these devices to within reach of the musical dabbler. That’s where I come in.

My last formal musical instruction was in high school. I took a year of piano and drum lessons, and I have since forgotten far more than I ever learned. But the basics of drum rolls and chord progressions remained in the stickier regions of my subconscious, and I can generally noodle around with such instruments so long as no sheet music is involved.

I started by picking up KeyStudio 49, a software–hardware combo recently launched by M-Audio. For $130, the kit comes with a 49-key MIDI USB keyboard and a mini-USB audio interface, as well as the company’s entry-level Pro Tools M-Powered Essential software. The software comes with more than 60 virtual instruments, hundreds of loops and templated recording sessions. As a basic launchpad into digital music production, it’s a darn good deal; the keyboard alone is worth the money, since it can be used with multiple music programs.

Digital music-production software can be a bit overwhelming if you’ve never worked with it before. Much of it caters to the obsessive audio engineers who populate the music industry. M-Powered Essential is pitched as a “streamlined” version of parent company M-Audio’s industry standard Digidesign Pro Tools suite of software. The advantage to this approach (as opposed to software such as Apple’s GarageBand, which was designed from the ground up for newbies) is that once you’ve learned how it works, you are well on your way to learning how professional music is made. The disadvantage is that, if you’re like me, you don’t give a damn how professional music is made, and you may end up grinding off several layers of tooth enamel trying to weed through all of the menus and submenus that don’t apply to you before finding the stuff that does.

Regardless of what software you pick, there are a few basic concepts that are common to all digital music-production software. Understanding these basics will help you focus your use of the software on what’s relevant.

Writing sheet music is hard, but using software that does it for you is easy. With programs such as Sibelius First ($130) from Avid, all you need to do is play an instrument into your PC, and your computer will transcribe the notes.

Multitrack Recording

This is a carryover process from the days of analog tape, when producers would record elements of a song on different tape tracks, edit them separately, then combine everything into a cohesive whole. Computers have simplified this process immensely. “New Track” is one of the easier-to-find menu items in most programs—so building a song is like layering ingredients on a sandwich. I started with a percussion line, then added a bass line on a separate track, then another for rhythm instruments, another track for piano, then vocals and so on. And, I was free to tinker with individual tracks without altering everything at once.

Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI)

MIDI is a standardized language that helps instruments digitally communicate with computers over interfaces such as USB or FireWire. Instead of sending actual sound to a PC, a MIDI controller—usually a keyboard or drum pad—sends data about pitch and intensity of notes, and the computer translates that info into sound. That allows a MIDI device such as my KeyStudio piano to function as any one of thousands of virtual (sometimes called synth) instruments—these vary from the general (grand piano) to the highly specific (Modular Moog 3C). Each virtual instrument has software controls that adjust variables such as sustain, attack, delay, reverb, etc.

Plug-Ins

In digital-music parlance, the production program that you use to record and edit your songs is called the host software. Users can supplement that program with additional software elements such as virtual instruments and effects, known as plug-ins. Most host software comes with a variety of virtual instruments, effects and loops, but users can add to that with third-party plug-ins. This adds a lot of flexibility to the host software but can also complicate and confuse things a bit. Plug-ins tend to be host-specific (for instance, plug-ins that worked with my M-Powered Essential software would also work with other Pro Tools software, but not with Cakewalk’s competing Sonar software), but some work with multiple hosts. In general, the more plug-ins you get, the more tied to a particular host platform you become.

Loops

All music-production host software will come with a stockpile of pre-arranged loops in a variety of categories, and they vastly simplify the process of music creation. By using loops, you can quickly arrange a background melody by making tracks of simple loop arrangements. I, for instance, can (sort of) play piano and (kind of) play drums, but I don’t know the first thing about brass or wind instruments. So, by browsing my host software and looking online at places like vstplanet.com and audiomastermind.com, I was able to grab a few different loops of trumpets and clarinets and oboes or an entire orchestra, then stitch them together to add another dimension to my song. If you can’t find exactly what you want, some software lets you clip a sample from an existing song and use it as a custom loop. In fact, there are musical genres in which songs are formed entirely of arranged loops.

Putting It All Together

Digital pianos and drum pads get the most obvious benefits from a computer interface, but electric guitars can also get a performance boost. There are a few high-tech MIDI guitars that can interface directly with computers, but you can plug an ordinary guitar in to a PC via a USB audio interface. Audio interfaces can get sophisticated and expensive, but a basic model, such as the Cakewalk UA-1G, can be had for $100. With the computer interface, you can bypass a conventional amp, letting the software create a virtual amp and effects pedals. Guitarists (admittedly, I’m not one of them) can get pretty geeky about the sound characteristics of certain legendary amps, and software engineers are just as geeky about faithfully reproducing them. Want to play your Gibson Les Paul guitar through an ’85 Mesa/Boogie Mark IIc+? There’s a plug-in for that.

I had far more fun with the digital tricks that can be applied to vocals. Most of the same audio interfaces that work with guitars also work with microphones, and there are a variety of effects that can change the character of the voice or ­other acoustic instruments. Reverb, echo and specialized effects—my favorites were “mouse voice” and “helium breath”—can add character (or comedy) to your performance.

I was able to piece together a workable song (well, depending on your standards—my 11-month-old son seemed to like it) with M-Powered Essential. However, as a newbie, the experience was frustrating. There’s very little hand-holding for beginners unfamiliar with the logic of the program; instruments and effects are buried in submenus that are not always clearly labeled. And some elements are positively annoying—the software won’t even start unless you have the USB audio interface plugged in, and scattered throughout the menus are items that don’t actually work but instead launch pop-up windows that try to up-sell you on higher-end versions of M-Powered in which those features are actually functional.

After a weekend of working with M-Powered Essential, I decided to try again with software that is actually aimed at beginners. Apple’s GarageBand, first launched in 2004 and now in its fifth generation, comes installed on all new Macs. GarageBand was obviously designed to walk you right into the process of music creation. It in­stantly recognized the M-Audio MIDI keyboard. Tracks are easy to arrange, instruments are organized logically—and assigning virtual instruments to the keyboard was a snap.

For those who just want to jam with a backing band, GarageBand Jam instantly gives you a multi-instrument rhythm section in whatever musical style you select. And if you don’t know the first thing about music, you can follow instructions on the basics of piano or guitar, or download (for $5) Artist Lessons from famous musicians. Sting, for instance, will teach you to play “Roxanne.” There is no direct analog to GarageBand for the PC, which is a pity, since most people still use Windows PCs, but there are some programs that come close. Sonar Music Creator ($35) is well-priced and has a clean interface that is simple to use, as is Acoustica Mixcraft ($65)—and both programs use the popular DirectX and VST plug-in formats.

So after tinkering with multiple programs, I finally got a song I’m satisfied with—at the very least, it has a discernible beginning, middle and end. I’ve exported it to an MP3 file, and it’s currently sitting on my iPod, where only I can listen to it—for now, the rest of the world is safe.

Three ­Devices = Infinite Instruments

This basic setup will plug you in to a wide world of synth instruments and digital audio effects.

1. Drum Pad Most music-production software will come with a variety of “drum kits”—sampled percussion instruments that vary by genre (rock, salsa, dance, etc.). While you can play these on a MIDI piano or even a qwerty keyboard, a drum pad or digital drum set lets you break out the sticks. Available from Roland, Alesis, and Yamaha; expect to pay between $140 to $4000 for a full set.

2. Audio Interface To choose a USB audio interface, first determine what you want to plug in to your computer. Most have basic analog-to-digital audio converters inside to capture vocals and analog instruments through a microphone. Others integrate MIDI inputs and have built-in dials for manual adjustment of input levels. Available from Cakewalk, M-Audio and Behringer; expect to pay between $45 and $1000.

3. MIDI Keyboard The most flexible digital music device you can buy—a MIDI keyboard can be made to imitate any instrument imaginable. More expensive models have manual controls and settings—some have onboard audio processing and can play independent of a PC. Available from M-Audio, Yamaha, Roland, Korg; prices range greatly, from $50 to $4000.

Auto-Tune: Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect

By Josh Tyrangiel

If you haven't been listening to pop radio in the past few months, you've missed the rise of two seemingly opposing trends. In a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of pop vocals suddenly sound great. Better than great: note- and pitch-perfect, as if there's been an unspoken tightening of standards at record labels or an evolutionary leap in the development of vocal cords. At the other extreme are a few hip-hop singers who also hit their notes but with a precision so exaggerated that on first listen, their songs sound comically artificial, like a chorus of '50s robots singing Motown.

The force behind both trends is an ingenious plug-in called Auto-Tune, a downloadable studio trick that can take a vocal and instantly nudge it onto the proper note or move it to the correct pitch. It's like Photoshop for the human voice. Auto-Tune doesn't make it possible for just anyone to sing like a pro, but used as its creator intended, it can transform a wavering performance into something technically flawless. "Right now, if you listen to pop, everything is in perfect pitch, perfect time and perfect tune," says producer Rick Rubin. "That's how ubiquitous Auto-Tune is." (Download TIME's Auto-Tune Podcast from iTunes)

Auto-Tune's inventor is a man named Andy Hildebrand, who worked for years interpreting seismic data for the oil industry. Using a mathematical formula called autocorrelation, Hildebrand would send sound waves into the ground and record their reflections, providing an accurate map of potential drill sites. It's a technique that saves oil companies lots of money and allowed Hildebrand to retire at 40. He was debating the next chapter of his life at a dinner party when a guest challenged him to invent a box that would allow her to sing in tune. After he tinkered with autocorrelation for a few months, Auto-Tune was born in late 1996.

Almost immediately, studio engineers adopted it as a trade secret to fix flubbed notes, saving them the expense and hassle of having to redo sessions. The first time common ears heard Auto-Tune was on the immensely irritating 1998 Cher hit "Believe." In the first verse, when Cher sings "I can't break through" as though she's standing behind an electric fan, that's Auto-Tune--but it's not the way Hildebrand meant it to be used. The program's retune speed, which adjusts the singer's voice, can be set from zero to 400. "If you set it to 10, that means that the output pitch will get halfway to the target pitch in 10 milliseconds," says Hildebrand. "But if you let that parameter go to zero, it finds the nearest note and changes the output pitch instantaneously"--eliminating the natural transition between notes and making the singer sound jumpy and automated. "I never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that," he says.

Like other trends spawned by Cher, the creative abuse of Auto-Tune quickly went out of fashion, although it continued to be an indispensable, if inaudible, part of the engineer's toolbox. But in 2003, T-Pain (Faheem Najm), a little-known rapper and singer, accidentally stumbled onto the Cher effect while Auto-Tuning some of his vocals. "It just worked for my voice," says T-Pain in his natural Tallahassee drawl. "And there wasn't anyone else doing it."

Since his 2005 debut album, T-Pain has sent a dozen slightly raunchy, mechanically cheery singles into the Top 10. He contributed to four nominated songs at this year's Grammys on Feb. 8 (see page 51), and his influence is still spreading. When Kanye West was looking for an effect to match some heartbroken lyrics, he flew T-Pain to Hawaii to see how many ways they could tweak Auto-Tune. Diddy gave a percentage of his upcoming album's profits to T-Pain in exchange for some lessons. Even Prince is rumored to be experimenting with Auto-Tune on his new record. "I know [Auto-Tune] better than anyone," says T-Pain. "And even I'm just figuring out all the ways you can use it to change the mood of a record." (See pictures of Diddy.)

Other sonic tricks have had their moment--notably Peter Frampton's "talk- box," a plastic tube that made his guitar sound as if it were talking--but in skilled hands, Auto-Tune is the rare gimmick that can lead to innovation. On T-Pain's latest album, Thr33 Ringz, tracks like "Karaoke" and "Chopped N Skrewed" literally bounce between notes, giving the record a kids-on--Pop Rocks exuberance. Using the same program, West's 808s & Heartbreak is the complete opposite--angsty, slow and brutally introspective. West sings throughout, and while he couldn't have hit most of the notes without Auto-Tune, he also couldn't have sounded as ghostly and cold, and it's that alienated tone that made 808s one of the best albums of last year.

Plenty of critics raved about West's use of Auto-Tune, but T-Pain is often dismissed as a novelty act. (Not that he minds: "I'd rather be known for something than unknown for nothing.") But unlike most singers, he acknowledges the impact Auto-Tune has had on his career. Of the half a dozen engineers and producers interviewed for this story, none could remember a pop recording session in the past few years when Auto-Tune didn't make a cameo--and none could think of a singer who would want that fact known. "There's no shame in fixing a note or two," says Jim Anderson, professor of the Clive Davis department of recorded music at New York University and president of the Audio Engineering Society. "But we've gone far beyond that."

Some Auto-Tuning is almost unavoidable. Most contemporary music is composed on Pro Tools, a program that lets musicians and engineers record into a computer and map out songs on a visual grid. You can cut at one point on the grid and paste at another, just as in word-processing, but making sure the cuts match up requires the even pitch that Auto-Tune provides. "It usually ends up just like plastic surgery," says a Grammy-winning recording engineer. "You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it's very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck." Like plastic surgery, he adds, more people have had it than you think. "Let's just say I've had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood cast albums. And every singer now presumes that you'll just run their voice through the box."

Rubin, who's produced artists as diverse as the Dixie Chicks and Metallica, worries that the safety net of Auto-Tune is making singers lazy. "Sometimes a singer will do lots of takes when they're recording a song, and you really can hear the emotional difference when someone does a great performance vs. an average one," says Rubin. "If you're pitch-correcting, you might not bother to make the effort. You might just get it done and put it through the machine so it's all in tune." Rubin has taken to having an ethical conversation before each new recording session. "I encourage artists to embrace a natural process," he says. (See pictures of Rick Rubin.)

With the exception of Milli Vanilli's, pop listeners have always been fairly indulgent about performers' ethics. It's hits that matter, and the average person listening to just one pop song on the radio will have a hard time hearing Auto-Tune's impact; it's effectively deceptive. But when track after track has perfect pitch, the songs are harder to differentiate from one another--which explains why pop is in a pretty serious lull at the moment. It also changes the way we hear unaffected voices. "The other day, someone was talking about how Aretha Franklin at the Inauguration was a bit pitchy," says Anderson. "I said, 'Of course! She was singing!' And that was a musician talking. People are getting used to hearing things dead on pitch, and it's changed their expectations."

Despite Randy Jackson's stock American Idol critique--"A little pitchy, dawg"--many beloved songs are actually off-pitch or out of tune. There's Ringo Starr on "With a Little Help from My Friends," of course, and just about every blues song slides into notes as opposed to hitting them dead on. Even Norah Jones, the poster girl of pure vocals, isn't perfect. "There's some wonderful imperfections of pitch on 'Don't Know Why' from Come Away with Me," says Anderson, "and most of the other tunes on the album as well. But I wouldn't want to change a single note."

Let's hope that pop's fetish for uniform perfect pitch will fade, even if the spread of Auto-Tune shows no signs of slowing. A $99 version for home musicians was released in November 2007, and T-Pain and Auto-Tune's parent company are finishing work on an iPhone app. "It's gonna be real cool," says T-Pain. "Basically, you can add Auto-Tune to your voice and send it to your friends and put it on the Web. You'll be able to sound just like me." Asked if that might render him no longer unique, T-Pain laughs: "I'm not too worried. I got lots of tricks you ain't seen yet. It's everybody else that needs to step up their game."

Perfect Pitch? To hear Auto-Tune in action, go to time.com/autotune