Multimedia Technologies Newsletter by Intellixis :: Latest Technology News and Information

Guitar master Larry Coryell loves neatness and speed of Sibelius

Larry Coryell knows a little something about musical innovation: as a multi-decade "guitar god" who pioneered jazz-rock fusion, he's recorded more than 70 albums and left his mark on a generation of artists. So it's no surprise to find him embracing another innovation, Sibelius, to harness his creative output.

"I had seen a Sibelius demo at the NAMM show, and it had such a quick learning curve," he says from his home in Orlando, just back from gigging in Japan with Lenny White and Victor Bailey. "Once I had my own copy of the software, I was inputting notes in five minutes, and the first thing I composed on it was a giant concerto."

That would be "Sentenza Del Cuore" (Sentence of the Heart), written in 1999 to commemorate the anniversary of a 1980 terrorist bombing in Bologna, Italy. But take a step back - why would an artist who's been pumping out charts since the late 1960s turn to a new way of putting notes together?

"Because my writing was so illegible," he laughs. "The best thing about Sibelius is that when I write charts, very often it's not very legible because I write so quickly. But with Sibelius it's right there. It has a lot of things that anticipate your needs, and with the use of the Internet you can send files across town or across the globe and everyone can exchange files a lot easier."

For example, he used the software heavily when he wrote the instructional book Larry Coryell's Power Jazz Guitar: Extending Your Creative Reach, the second such work to his credit. "Before, it was all writing by hand and erasing and correcting, then mailing it and faxing it - shoving page after page in the fax machine and sending it to New Jersey."

The Texas native came to prominence in New York in the 1960s, where blues, rock, country and bop flowed into the emergence of his wide-ranging, technically brilliant guitar style. A 1967 stint with the Gary Burton Quartet shone the national spotlight on the young talent, and for the next decade he was in high demand from colleagues in rock and jazz alike.

He was a founding member of fusion mainstays The 11th House in 1974, and has recorded at a brisk pace ever since, down to last year's well-received Tricycles (Favored Nations Records, 2004), half of whose tracks are his own compositions.

"I use Sibelius for charts, and when I'm doing a big project it's perfect for the orchestral score," he relates. "The sequencer playback makes it possible to self-correct your arrangements. I write a lot of stuff that's very involved; some stuff is basically a lead sheet and that's all you need, but other stuff is quite involved and you need to work out a detailed chart."

"The speed feature is really good," he notes. "And you're able to hear things back on the sequencer. That pushes the creativity forward; you can hear something and get a much better idea right away. They have the tablature worked out very well, especially in the later versions. It's very user friendly, and it just kind of does everything itself once you have the controls down."

"Sibelius is also great for practicing," Coryell says. "You can set stuff up and play it over and over again using the sequencer feature. That's how I learned some of the parts that I wrote for myself on the guitar concerto."

A quick meal, a night's sleep, and after less than 48 hours at home he's off to Spain, where trio dates with drummer Paul Wertico and bassist Mark Egan await, along with a guest appearance alongside the man he calls "the great John Williams." A new recording has a planned August release date, and his autobiography is slated to appear in 2006 from Backbeat Books. A Larry Coryell retrospective concert, complete with guest stars, is in the works for later this year in Los Angeles. For more information on Larry Coryell, including upcoming tour dates, please visit his website at www.larrycoryell.net.

"My life is my music," he says. "The technical side of my producing sheet music is divided into two parts - one is before Sibelius and one is after, and it's much better now."

About Sibelius
Sibelius Software Ltd. is based in London, England. Its U.S. subsidiary, Sibelius USA, Inc., is located at 1407 Oakland Blvd., Suite 103, Walnut Creek, California, 94596 and has offices in Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis and Nashville. Sibelius products are available worldwide in more than 100 countries. For more information, contact Sibelius USA at phone (925) 280-0600; fax (925) 280-0008; on the Web at http://www.sibelius.com; or via e-mail at infoUSA@sibelius.com.

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Making Email Talk with NextUp.com's TextAloud

NextUp.com (www.NextUp.com)announces the release of TextAloud 2.051, an update to the leading text-to-speech software tool for consumers, educators, and business customers. TextAloud converts text into spoken audio for listening on a PC, and can also save to MP3/Windows Media files for easy playback on portables like the iPod®, or use in the creation of Podcasts. This newest version of TextAloud offers new and specific enhancements for users who use the program to listen to their emails in Microsoft Outlook®.

Thanks to TextAloud, users can listen to their email read aloud with a variety of available premium text-to-speech voices. In TextAloud 2.051, the new toolbar provides the user with easy, friendly VCR-like controls as well as voice selection options, making it easier than ever to select and hear email messages while working in Outlook®.

"Email has become an important and nearly universal part of most people's lives over the last few years," comments Rick Ellis, President of NextUp.com. "With TextAloud's seamless new integration with Outlook, now users can easily listen to their emails instead of spending all day reading them."

Other new features in TextAloud 2.051 include:
• An improved File-Splitter Utility to facilitate handling of larger text documents
• Enhancements to the Batch File Converter for processing multiple documents with ease
• Support for new additional premium voices from NeoSpeech® and Cepstral®
• Additional proofreading features and capabilities, to help writers produce error-free documents.

About TextAloud 2.051
Recently nominated for a 2005 Shareware Industry Association Award, TextAloud is a full-featured Text-to-Speech tool offering direct support for Word, PDF and HTML formats, as well as advanced pronunciation tools, an Internet Explorer Plug-In for easy listening of favorite web pages - and more. TextAloud is also used by many to create a podcast from text content.

NextUp.com also offers TextAloud with optional premium voices from AT&T Natural Voices™, NeoSpeech and Cepstral® for the most natural-sounding computer speech anywhere.

About NextUp.com
NextUp.com, a division of NextUp Technologies, LLC, provides award-winning Text-to-Speech software for consumers, business customers, educators, and those with visual impairment or learning disabilities.

In addition to TextAloud, NextUp.com markets other innovative Windows software designed to save time and deliver vital information. NewsAloud™ is a talking personal "news agent" that finds the stories users want, and then reads them aloud or to portable MP3 files. WeatherAloud™ is a weather application that lets users select and listen to personalized weather forecasts, while StocksAloud™ reads stock updates and related news headlines aloud for specific companies of interest. Most recently, NextUp also released NextUp Talker 1.0, an easy and affordable program that allows people who have lost their voices to use the latest in high-quality computer voices to communicate with others.

Evaluation copies of TextAloud 2.0 are currently available upon request. To receive a review copy, or for more information on NextUp.com or TextAloud, please contact Rick Ellis at rdellis@nextup.com.

All companies and products referenced in this press release, including TextAloud™, iPod®, Rio®, Outlook®, Windows®, and more are the trademarks of their respective owners.

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Apple hints at big music announcement

Apple Computer is preparing a major announcement next week, dropping hints of something as critical to the company's future as the release of the original iPod in 2001.

The company sent an invitation to reporters on Monday morning for a "special event" being held Sept. 7 in San Francisco.

"1,000 songs in your pocket changed everything," the invitation reads, referring to the release of the first 5GB iPod nearly four years ago. "Here we go again."

As with any planned announcement from Apple, details are scarce and rumors are running rampant. However, some potential clues have emerged.

Record company executives have said recently that Apple has been seeking licenses to distribute a wide variety of music videos through the iTunes music store, and that the computer company has told them of plans to unveil an iPod that plays video.

Research firm iSuppli recently reported that Samsung Electronics was dedicating a large amount--perhaps as much as 40 percent--of its flash memory production to Apple, leading to speculation that the Mac maker was preparing a larger-capacity version of its flash-based Shuffle player, or even switching its iPod Mini to a flash-based technology.

Apple sold 6.1 million iPods in its last fiscal quarter, and the company has ridden the demand for the music player to its strongest financial position in years.

Other Apple-linked products are also nearing market release. Motorola has said that a long-promised iTunes cell phone will ship before the end of September. And the latest version of iTunes, version 4.9, contains hidden references to mobile-phone features, adding to the expectation that an iTunes-compatible cell phone is coming soon.

The Federal Communications Commission has granted regulatory approval for Motorola to start selling one iTunes-capable phone, although it is not certain that handset will be the first model Motorola introduces.

Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg cautioned against expecting anything too far out of Apple's existing product line, saying that a video iPod is unlikely. The iTunes-compatible phone is a likely candidate, he said, but added that the company could have surprises in store.

"When it comes to Apple announcements, expectations are often set unrealistically by Apple enthusiasts," Gartenberg said. "But Apple has been known to pull rabbits out of the proverbial hat. It may be a new category of device altogether."

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US Albums Sales Continue to Struggle, Weekly Figures Dip

Album sales in the US continued to struggle last week, dipping below 10 million units. The weekly tally of about 9.6 million units is a near-low for 2005, and represents a significant drop of 11 percent over same-week figures last year. Overall, cumulative 2005 sales are dragging behind comparable 2004 tallies by over 8 percent, part of a pronounced slide. Meanwhile, a greatest hits album from Hilary Duff led the rankings with over 101,043 units, which follows a debut week performance of 207,577 discs. Other heavy-sellers included Mariah Carey, Jim Jones, Black Eyed Peas, and Brad Paisley.

The story of the last few years has been a continued CD sales slide, created in part by heavy file-sharing levels. But despite the drops, CDs still account for a vast majority of total revenues, while digital revenues are growing but modest. While white earbuds may be the norm in metropolitan areas like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, the phenomenon is less prevalent in many other regions of the country. That makes it hard for the industry to embrace digital models that could encourage further CD cannibalization, despite the growing and inevitable transition towards digital formats.

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