AmpliTube

Turn your iPad into a fully featured electric guitarist's studio with one simple app!

AmpliTube mimics a typical guitarist's setup, providing you with an amplifier, effects pedals and a little recording studio, all on your iPad. All you have to bring to the party is your electric guitar, some talent and a pair of headphones. Oh, and a cable to connect your guitar to your iPad (or iPhone - there's a separate version available). There are two main types of cable on the market - the AmpliTube-branded iRig. Both work equally well with the AmpliTube app, but we prefer the iRig for build quality.

The level of detail in the photorealistic amps and effects pedals is superb - it's just like using the real thing. The downside of this is that the casual guitarist could well be put off by the level of complexity involved in setting an amp up, but thankfully there are presets available for each amp with names like 'Smooth lead' or 'Seattle'.

In the free version of this app, you get just three pedals (Noise Filter, Delay and Distortion) and one amp - with more available as in-app purchases. You can also purchase a version of the app with five amps and 11 pedals and make a significant saving compared to buying every item individually. But even with this version of AmpliTube, you still need to make in-app purchases to get all the extras, such as the upgrade to an eight-track recorder.

Other features of note include the ability to import songs from your iPod app (or over your Wi-Fi network), so you can play along with them. The lengthy importing process is a real hassle, but once it's done you can slow down the track and loop individual sections. Results are mixed, however - slowing down songs seems to result in a lot of audio crackle.

The app did crash a few times on us too, but these are relatively small niggles compared to the fun that's to be had here. Its nearest competitor is Griffin's iShred, but AmpliTube beats it hands down for sheer versatility, even if iShred works better with the iPod app.

Where Are All the Supernovae?

Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was lucky. In 1572, he saw a bright supernova explosion in the constellation of Cassiopeia. Just 32 years later, his German pupil Johannes Kepler observed a similar event in Ophiuchus. Ever since, the Milky Way has produced not a single visible supernova, although John Flamsteed may have observed a pretty faint one in 1680. Indeed, there have only been eight in the past 2,000 years. Yet astronomers believe there should be at least three per century. So where are they?

In all likelihood, a supernova probably does pop off in the Milky Way every few decades. But since they occur in the thin Galactic disc, their light is heavily obscured by interstellar dust. "The supernovae seen by Tycho and Kepler were relatively close to us in the Galaxy," says David Green of the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge. "No doubt there have been others much further away, which would have been obscured more."

Supernova explosions leave expanding gaseous remnants, like the famous Crab Nebula. Also, the cores of the exploding stars collapse into dense neutron stars, some of which are detected as pulsars. But counting supernova remnants and pulsars doesn't help much in pinning down the true supernova rote. Ages of older remnants are poorly known; our inventory is far from complete, and most neutron stars go unnoticed.

Still, the predicted supernova rate is consistent with the figure derived from supernovae detected in other galaxies, so it seems likely that we just haven't seen them. But it's not all bad news: future telescopes will operate in a wide range of wavelengths, giving us a better chance of observing them, and therefore proving that they're really happening.

Korg iMS-20 vs ReBirth

Both of these appps are retro-styled emulations of classic studio kit that have shaped the sound of dance music for the past 25 years. Forget Garageband, these apps represent retro beat and groove creation at their most synthetic.

Heritage

Just as Gibson and Les Paul set a benchmark for rock guitar, so Roland's TR-808, TR-909 and TB-303 defined and detonated hip-hop and house. And all three machines are perfectly recreated in ReBirth. It was released on iPhone in 2010, and thanks to the extra finger room of the iPad all three classics have room to shine.

Korg's MS-20 may not be as famous as the Roland originals, but in many ways it's an even more fashionable and prized synth. The MS-20's raw powersynth sound has been key to tracks by the likes of Daft Punk, Soulwax and The Chemical Brothers. The iMS-20 is a gorgeous recreation of this classic plus a drum synth, sequencer, mixer and effects - all you need to make a banging tune.

Ease of use

As synths go, the MS-20 is a simple unit but the way its oscillators and filters are arranged (and patchable through the addition of cables to the front panel) allow some truly ear-shredding sounds. It's not particularly easy to 'make a sound' but you can spend hours happily tweaking, and the built-in presets (a luxury unavailable on the original) are a great head start in learning what certain sounds 'look like'.

Rebirth on the other hand makes it amazingly easy to bash out tunes. You now own a pair of 303 bassline machines linked to 808 and 909 drum machines. You program your beats and melody in the exact same laborious, stunted way you programmed the original machines and then you hit play. With no practice, no talent, and no idea what you're doing it's childsplay to make amazing, technically accurate house. This is because - thanks to the fiddly, near impossible to master interface of the 303 in particular- that's exactly what the makers of all those hit records did.

Authenticity

Fiddling with ReBirth's knobs-opening and dosing the sound thanks to the Multi-Touch interface - is the sound of acid house. The built in compression, distortion, reverb and delay effects help push the sound to the same dizzying extremes. Meanwhile the sound of the iMS-20 is richer and nothing short of incredible for an app. All the grit and grime is intact. Forget any 'cello', 'choir' or miked 'drum kit' sounds: this synth is raw vintage.

Private spacecraft orbits Earth

The commercial space industry celebrated a landmark achievement on 8 December 2010, when California-based company SpaceX launched a spacecraft into orbit and successfully brought it back to Earth. It's the first time a commercial company has ever recovered a spacecraft from orbit, and it paves the way for private spacecraft missions to ferry supplies to the International Space Station. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden called the feat a 'dramatic step forward'. "We're witnessing the dawn of a new era, whose ultimate result could be routine, safe access to space with industry, academia and governments regularly sending payloads and people to low Earth orbit. That's the goal," he said. SpaceX used its own Falcon 9 vehicle to launch the Dragon spacecraft, which is capable of carrying a payload of six tonnes and could eventually be crewed by up to seven astronauts. Both the Dragon spacecraft and the first stage of the Falcon 9 are designed to be reusable, which is a key part of long-term plans to reduce the costs of spaceflight a factor of 10.

After lifting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the Dragon spacecraft orbited the Earth twice before re-entering the atmosphere. An advanced heat shield protected it from temperatures of up to 2,200"C. It then deployed parachutes before gently splashing into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.

"This has really been better than I expected there's so much that can go wrong and it all went right," said the company's CEO Elon Musk following the mission, which took less than four hours from lift-off to landing.

Later this year, Space X plans to carry out a five-day mission in which the Dragon will approach within 10 km (6.2 miles) of the International Space Station and communicate with its crew before returning to Earth. After that, a full cargo mission that docks with the station and delivers supplies should take place.

SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract to make at least 12 flights to the International Space Station, following the retirement of NASA's Shuttle fleet later this year after nearly 30 years of service.

Japan's Energy Options in an Non-nuclear Future

Few months after the explosions and radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in japan, the prime minister, Naoto Kan, has announced that the country will not build any new reactors.

If Kan really means it the government will have to abandon the plans for expanding nuclear power it adopted only last year. To make up the energy shortfall, Kan has set the ambitious goal of using renewables.

That is most likely to mean wind, according to a report released last month by the Ministry of the Environment There is "an extremely large introduction potential of wind power generation", it says, especially in the tsunami-hit north-east of the country.

'The potential of wind is huge because of the contribution from offshore generation with japan's long coastline," agrees Tetsunari Lida, founder of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies in Tokyo, who advocates a 100 per cent switch to renewable energy by 2050.

At present japan produces just 3 per cent of its electricity from renewables: solar; wind and geothermal. Nuclear contributes 30 per cent.

Taking into account wind strength, available land and the potential for offshore farms, the report estimates that japan could install wind turbines with a capacity of up to 1500 gigawatts. More realistic estimates in the report suggest that with appropriate financial incentives, turbines with a capacity of 24 to 140 GW could be installed. Assuming the turbines operate a quarter of the time, this would provide up to 35 GW of electricity on average, matching the combined output of about 40 of japan's existing 54 nuclear reactors.

Next in line is solar energy, which the report estimates could provide between 69 and 100 GW without taking up any productive agricultural land.

Perhaps surprisingly, given japan's 120 active volcanoes and the 28,000 hot springs associated with them, geothermal energy scarcely figures in the ministry's report. At best it says, only 14 GW is available, but much of that is inaccessible because of restrictions on development in national parks. At other sites, exploiting geothermal energy would disrupt springs currently used as spas.

A switch to renewables will require huge amounts of new infrastructure. This will need to be paid for by offering special tariffs as incentives for providers to feed energy from renewable sources into the grid. By coincidence, on the morning of 11 March - the day of the earthquake the japanese cabinet approved proposals that would achieve this. "It's under review by the parliament and could provide a really big push for renewables if it's passed" says Lida.

The contribution from renewables to japan's electricity supply is currently almost static, having increased from 3.1 to 3.3 per cent between 2008 and 2009. Lida blames "poor policy support'' for this lack of growth. So it is possible that as the shock of Fukushima fades, support for renewables will go the same way. However, polls reported this week suggest that two-thirds of japanese back a shift away from nuclear power.

Making the upgrade

This time, sensation-seekers, I'm going to talk about the three different bits of hardware in my office that I considered upgrading, and how I walked myself through each decision.

Device 1: Compact digital camera.

Reason for upgrading: A maturing technology. My three-year-old, but highly-beloved, Nikon P6000 pocket camera is exactly the sort of camera I like: small enough to slip into a pocket, but big enough to operate comfortably, and with a sprinkling of advanced features that allowed me to use it as my sole travel camera.

Last year, I did some work for a pal and he generously gave me his Olympus PEN E-P1 camera as a thank-you gift. I soon fell in love with the Micro Four Thir-ds system. It filled a gap for me: I travel a lot and take a lot of photos. and I am hellaciously fussy about the results. As great as my Nikon is, there's no ignoring the facts: it has a tiny image sensor and you can't swap out its fixed zoom for a more appropriate lens ... like Panasonic's magnificent 20 mm f1.7.

With that lens on the Olympus' body, I had nearly the optimum travel camera. It had most of the important features of my Nikon and it wasn't that much larger.

One problem: the Olympus doesn't have a built-in flash. What a pain in the butt! Also, the E-P1 was one of the first Micro FourThirds cameras made and I was eager to see how far the cameras have come after two years.

February seemed like the perfect time to upgrade. Olympus and Panasonic released new Micro Four Thirds cameras. The new Olympus was much like the E-P1, but it had a flash; the new Panasonic was barely larger than the Nikon. After a temporary dalliance with Nikon's fairly awesome P7000 (with its heroic assemblage of mechanical controls), I knew it'd be one or the other.

What I did: I bought an external flash for my Olympus.

Why: After poring through technical specs and advance reviews, I couldn't get excited about either new camera. I was hoping for a major advancement in Micro Four Thirds that would materially improve the Olympus, but I sure didn't see it in the reviews.

The clincher came when I found a couple of intense hardware teardowns and learned that both cameras were using two-year-old image sensors. I want the next-generation component: the one that'll allow next year's Micro Four Thirds cameras to shoot gorgeous photos in low light. And honestly, my big problem with the E-P1 was no flash. Fine: buy a flash. Sometimes you're so enamoured with having The New Version that you forget that the point of the expensive exercise is to solve problems.

Device 2: iPad.

Reason for upgrading: Er ... it's the iPad 2! I love iPad! That's, like, one whole iPad better than my iPad 1!

What I did: I stuck with my original iPad.

It's not that the iPad 2 isn't a huge improvement. Its CPU is a monster. When I ran it through its paces for a review, I didn't test its speed with an engineering benchmark suite. I used real-world apps. One task that took my old iPad more than three and a half minutes to process was chewed up and spat out by the iPad 2 in just 52 seconds. Whoosh!

Oh, yes, and the cameras and the Smart Cover and the gyroscope. I duly tested and wrote about it all. After I filed my review and I started thinking about the iPad like a consumer instead. I recognised all of those features as Nice Things that nonetheless I didn't really need.

But the speed!

Yeah. Well, Apple does a great job maintaining iOS as One Platform, With liberty And Time-Wasting Apps For All. Any app written in 2011 and probably even 2012 will work on my iPad 1. In the end, the speed of the iPad 1 isn't a handicap; the speed of the iPad 2 is a bonus.

Given that I wouldn't do anything with an iPad 2 that I can't already do, I'll wait until next year to upgrade.

Device 3: MacBook Pro.

Reason for upgrading: My current MacBook Pro is three years old. That's like having 125,000 miles on a car. You don't drive it to the scrapyard, but you know that it's entered its zone of Obsolescence.

There's always a faster CPU on the horizon. Tastes change, too. My 2008 MacBook has an ExpressCard slot. In theory, it'd open up a world of hardware enhancements. In practice, I wish it were an SD card reader.

Plus, my MacBook is my daily-use computer. I pound on it for hours a day, seven days a week and I've carried it around the world. Wear and tear is starting to show. The trackpad button hasn't worked since I splashed some coffee on it, and I'm lucky if the battery lasts 15 minutes.

What I did: I bought a new MacBook Pro.

If I'd upgraded last year, I would've had a slightly faster Mac, an SD slot, a working trackpad, and a nine-hour battery. Nice ... but this year, I got a CPU whose architecture is a whole generation ahead. It's clear that Apple's investing heavily in this new ultra-high-speed. multi-channel Thunderbolt I/O port. too. If the standard takes off, my new Mac Book will work with all of the great new high-performance hardware that's going to be released in the coming years. And if Thunderbolt fizzles ... who cares? It's still a functioning Mini DisplayPort.

This is a Mac that will get me through the next three years. That's a big deal given the scale of Mac OS X 10.7 and the OS to follow. I just need to not spill a drink on it.

The past month served as a reminder that hardware should only be replaced if it's about to stop working (whether it's worn-out or just not up to challenges that didn't exist when you first bought it) or if the new one can transform the way you work. Otherwise, you're just being a big, dopey consumer.

I did the smart thing. I thought my way through three potential upgrades, and only made one purchase. lucky me: it was the $2,000 item.

Use your iOS device as a MIDI control surface

If you don't want to wait for a commercial iOS-device control surface for your favorite DAW or virtual instrument, and you're willing to forgo some advanced features (two-way communication, for example), designing your own is much easier than you might think. You'll want to use OpenSound Control (OSC) because it is designed for network communication, and if you're not targeting an application that supports OSC, you'll need to convert the OSC messages to MIDI.

Hexler TouchOSC ($4.99 from the iTunes store) is an iOS application that hosts OSC control surfaces and handles WiFi communication with your computer. The free downloadable companion program TouchOSC Editor lets you design the control-surface GUI on your computer (Mac, Win, or Linux) and upload it to your iOS device. OSCulator ($39, Mac, osculator. net) lets you easily map OSC messages to MIDI messages and provides a MIDI port for routing these messages to your MIDI applications. The process for Windows is a bit more involved; it is documented on the Hexler website (hexler.net). Here are the details for a control panel that I use frequently with Propellerhead Reason.

Combinators Ready

TouchOSC Editor offers graphic elements for use as buttons, faders, knobs, labels, and LEDs. You can get as device specific as you like in your design, but you'll save lots of time and probably build a more useful control surface if you keep it generic. One way to do that with Reason is to target the Combinator module. That lets you control any Reason device by wrapping it in a Combinator and mapping its controls to the Combinator's.

Figure above shows the layout I use on my iPad. It controls as many as four Combinators along with four mixer channels into which the Combinators are routed. I've avoided labeling any of the iPad elements for the Combinators, relying instead on the labels on the Combinator to remind me of their function. I can use this iPad control surface with any Reason song that has a Combinator in it, ignoring any unused Combinator and mixer controls.

Once you design a control surface and upload it to your iOS device, launch OSCulator and ensure the iOS device's TouchOSC outgoing port matches OSCulator's input port (8000 by default). Touch the iOS device graphic controls one at a time and each will appear as a separate message line in the OSCulator window. These lines are ordered alphabetically by control name, so if you rename the controls in a logical fashion as you create them in TouchOSC Editor, you'll be able to easily identify the line corresponding to each control. (Edit only the part of the name after the last slash and limit yourself to lowercase letters and numerals.)

The next step is to set the MIDI event type, number, and channel for each line. Then lock the OSCulator document (Command + L) and save it. You'll need to open this document each time you use the TouchOSC control surface.

You can use your target's MIDI-learn function to map OSCulator's MIDI output to the desired controls, but in Reason, it's easier to set up OSCulator as an Advanced MIDI input and use Reason's built-in MIDI routings. Use a different MIDI channel for the mixer and each set of Combinator controls, and use Reason's Hardware Interface panel to route the controls by channel to the corresponding Reason devices.