The new album is available today—great to see Dave Grohl making some new music.

Samsung is now reviewing its own products. I guess paying off bloggers and forum posters wasn’t direct enough for them.

On October 10, 2014, Avid announced that new Pro Tools and Pro Tools | HD Software purchases, upgrades and crossgrades will include 12 months of upcoming features—such as future cloud collaboration capabilities—as well as a support plan. Even better, customers who buy/upgrade and activate to Pro Tools 11 by December 31, 2014 will receive extended coverage through March 2016.

The only thing that could throw a wrench into this is that audio pros tend to find a version of software that works and stick with it. Upgrading studio hardware and software can be a dangerous proposition when you have clients that want to record music. We’ll see.

I love Field Notes notebooks. I have two with me in my bag wherever I go.

I don’t post about books very often, but I was listening to a CBC podcast called Writers and Company, where they interviewed the author, Martin Amis, and was very impressed. I’m going to buy this one.

I never really thought about this, but advertisers must be wondering what to do when the watch comes out.

Whether you know this as Remembrance Day or Veterans Day, it’s a time to give thanks to all those who fought or died for our freedom and to all of those who still serve in the Armed Forces. Thank you to both of my grandfathers.

I agree with Graham on this. Far too often I come across mixes that are just packed with plug-ins, and that takes away from the sound you’re trying to achieve. The best way to get yourself out of the habit is to use one channel strip plug-in and shape the sound with it. After you’re comfortable doing that, you can add the odd plug-in to the mix to enhance the sound.

I loved reading this story by Kara Swisher profiling Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber. It takes guts and a lot of belief in your company to do what Kalanick did to get Uber off the ground.

This is an absolutely fascinating, and scary, story.

BFD Oblivion is an expansion for FXpansion’s BFD3, BFD Eco and BFD2 designed to provide ready-to-use heavy rock and metal drum sounds.

Sold! I like BFD.

Much respect Sesame Street.

“Dollar for dollar, the Sound Blaster ROAR produces the best sound of any portable Bluetooth speaker I’ve heard.”

– Tom’s Guide

The compact Sound Blaster Roar boasts of two 1.5-inch high-frequency drivers, a dedicated 2.5-inch subwoofer, and a pair of side-firing passive radiators. Now, all these drivers will only sound as good as the music you play through them, and the Roar supports aptX and AAC over Bluetooth for high-quality audio streaming.

All this, while adding other features like NFC support, a USB port for charging, an integrated MP3 player through its microSD card slot that also allows you to record calls taken with the built-in speakerphone.

The Red Dot Design Award-winning Roar has received consistent 5-star reviews on Amazon since its launch. Now available at $149.99 via Creative.com and Amazon.com.

A very thoughtful post from Om Malik. I found myself nodding my head on more than one occasion while reading it.

Many thanks to Pixelmator for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed. Pixelmator for iPad is a powerful image editor that gives you everything you need to create, edit, and enhance your images. It lets you work seamlessly between Mac and iPad and even work effortlessly with Photoshop images. Packed with powerful creative tools and engineered to harness the full iOS and 64-bit architecture power, Pixelmator for iPad is a real image editor right at your fingertips.

I really like Unread on my iPhone. It’s all about gestures and swiping to navigate the app, which is a nice way to do an RSS reader. There’s an iPad version too—I bought both.

A lot of new changes for one of my favorite apps.

Jackie Gleason did a remarkable job playing Buford T Justice. I laughed out loud watching these quotes.

Talk about telling stories—CW McCall did it with this classic song. I can sing all of the lyrics of “Convoy,” including the CB parts.

I needed a good laugh today and this did it. We all hate spammers, so I have no sympathy for this guy.

Superior Drummer and EZDrummer are two of the best products on the market for people that want production-level drums in their songs. And Toontrack loves Metal!

Jim Croce is one of the great storytellers of our time. This is one of my favorites.

I have one of the older Satellite units and love it. I use it all the time, along with Universal Audio’s plug-ins when I record music.

Jim and Shawn talk Tim Cook, Surface Tablets as iPad stands, Dave Grohl and indie music

Sponsored by lynda.com (Start learning something new by visiting lynda.com/thebeard and get a FREE 7-day trial where you can access all of their 2,400+ courses).

Earlier today we posted news of new malware targeted at users in China. An Apple spokesperson sent this statement to me: […]

I guess in the U.S. this would be akin to trying to hire a hitman.

I don’t see the problem.

A wonderful pictorial by Doug Menuez with pictures of Jobs that I hadn’t seen before.

A friend of mine is selling this guitar and it’s a beauty. I wish I had the money to pick it up.

Pixelmator for iPad is a powerful image editor that gives you everything you need to create, edit, and enhance your images. It lets you work seamlessly between Mac and iPad and even work effortlessly with Photoshop images. Packed with powerful creative tools and engineered to harness the full iOS and 64-bit architecture power, Pixelmator for iPad is a real image editor right at your fingertips.