My thanks to Creative Labs for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. The Sound Blaster Roar is the epitome of audio quality, features and great looks combined into one device.

Musicality, accurate timbre, tonality, with deep, tight bass within a portable Bluetooth wireless speaker shouldn’t be a pipe dream. Creative Labs boasts of defying these laws of acoustic engineering with their Sound Blaster Roar.

Through their innovative acoustic chamber design with an impressive 5-driver speaker setup consisting of 2 amplifiers and 1 built-in subwoofer, the Roar proves that it is possible to have powerful, balanced, and well-defined sound with heart-thumping bass from a device no larger than a booklet. All this, without sacrificing battery performance.

Not just a wireless speaker, the Roar also comes integrated with a whole host of useful features:

• NFC-compatible
• Supports aptX and AAC high definition codec
• microSD MP3 Player
• Voice Recorder
• Speakerphone
• Bedtime Listening Mode
• 6000 mAh Li-ion battery with 8 hour battery life also doubles as a portable battery bank

The #1 Amazon bestselling Sound Blaster Roar has received consistent 5-star reviews on Amazon since its launch. Now available, at an attractive price of $149.99 via Creative.com and Amazon.com.

Rich Tozzoli has some great advice on ways to make your acoustic guitars stand out in the mix of a song. He doesn’t just get into panning, but also talks about when to record as well. For instance, he says to record the acoustic part as soon as you’re done with the electric guitar recording. Smart piece of advice simple because you’re going to play it the same way, capturing the little nuances in the strumming.

An interesting piece from Om Malik on what he thinks Google could do to help the news and media industry.

Contact Center is from the same people that developed Launch Center Pro. I had a look at the video on the Web site and this looks like a solid app. Great idea bringing what they learned in Launch Center over to this new app.

With 100 icons available in multiple colors and resolutions, our set will let you add a touch of personality to your OmniFocus 2 custom perspectives. Whether it’s for work or play, team management or that trip to Italy you need to organize, Perspective Icons 2 has the right icon for the right context.

These look really well done and the price is definitely right.

For many people the Flint Center for the Performing Arts is not a familiar venue for Apple events, but Apple has held previous events at this location. […]

When I saw that Apple was going to hold their Sept. 9 event at the Flint Center for Performing Arts, I thought I would take a drive over and see if anything was happening. To be honest, I didn’t expect much because all of the work would be going on inside—I was wrong. […]

Apple on Thursday sent out invitations to a special event being held on Sept. 9, 2014 at 10:00 am. […]

I’ve always like this app—nice interface and easy to use.

Shawn King fills in for Dan, Jim talks 13” iPads, The iTunes Festival and his favorite headphones!

Sponsored by MailChimp (use code and send 12,000 emails per month, to 2,000 subscribers, forever), Harvest (start tracking your time painlessly and if you use the code 5BY5 by October 15th you’ll receive 50% off your first month), and Iconic by Ridgewood Publishing (visit for 20% off select editions).

Hot For Teacher, I’m the One, The Full Bug, Ice Cream Man—all classics in the Van Halen catalog. Strap a jet engine to the tried-and-true blues shuffle and you get an uptempo sprint that defines the Van Halen sound. The fast and furious pace make these some of the most challenging rock songs to play on the guitar—unless you know the secrets!

Alex Vollmer is a great guitarist and I really like his lessons—they’re professional, explained clearly and very detailed. You can preview and purchase this lesson on his Web site.

REmatrix combines five individual IRs to create dense, complex and unique spaces. The reverb is then processed with an effects chain designed to add liveliness, create warmth, or even completely reshape decay and create a reverb character that cannot be obtained with any other tool.

TextExpander is a great app and the folks at Smile are among my favorite developers. If you want to help beta test the new version, you can contact them directly.

Columbia Journalism Review’s Chris Ip interviews John Siracusa, one of the industries most respected writers. John’s OS reviews are simply epic in length and detail, but it’s also nice to see what motivates Siracusa in his reviews.

The Sound Blaster Roar is the epitome of audio quality, features and great looks combined into one device. Musicality, accurate timbre, tonality, with deep, tight bass within a portable Bluetooth wireless speaker shouldn’t be a pipe dream. Creative Labs boasts … Continued

Apple on Monday announced a number of new artists that would be joining them for shows at iTunes Festival London in September, including Mary J. Blige and the legendary Tony Bennett.[…]

A California bill requiring all smartphones sold in the state to have antitheft technology installed was today signed into law by California governor Jerry Brown. Introduced in February, the SB-962 Smartphones bill, which mandates a “kill switch” for cellular devices, was initially approved by the California State Assembly in early August and passed a final vote in the California Senate shortly after.

I’m in favor of this.

Sony said on its PlayStation blog that its PlayStation network had been taken down by a denial of service-style attack, which overwhelmed the system with traffic, but did not intrude onto the network or access any of its 53 million users’ information.

The cheap worthless prizes that come with burger meals sure have changed from when I was a kid.

Unfortunately, there are designers who continue to do free work on the vague promise of “exposure,” “paying work later on,” and the client’s “rich friends” who will see your designs and “pay big fees” for your work.

The truth is, when you do free work, you have set your value and that client and his/her rich friends will also ask for free design work because you “did it for so-and-so.”

Nobody should be expected to work for free.

This is why we love Gruber. Fascinating.

Many thanks to our friends at The Blueprint for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. The Blueprint is an online retail site for the next wave of connected devices and wearables. Check out the Blueprint today to discover beautifully designed products like Drop — the iPad connected kitchen scale. Drop is a smart scale that makes perfect baking easy with interactive recipes, smart substitutions, recipe rescaling, and more. Say goodbye to #BakingFail forever. With Drop, you’re on your way to creating one perfectly yummy masterpiece after another.

Pre-order Drop today for 20% off retail.

This guy goes off on an epic rant about how much the auto-tuned vocals and instruments are ruining today’s music.

You have to respect the amount that went into this by Harry Roberts.

It’s amazing how much better the story looks when wrapping the text using a circle instead of just a square block.

I love my Borders.

I figured I’d post another perspective, this one from Tyler Hayes at Fast Company. He, um, didn’t like it so much.

Knight thought for a bit, then asked when the Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster occurred. He had long ago lost the habit of marking time in months or years; this was just a news event he happened to remember. The nuclear meltdown took place in 1986, the same year, Knight said, he went to live in the woods. He was 20 years old at the time, not long out of high school. He was now 47, a middle-aged man.

I doubt he is the last hermit roaming the woods of America.

This graph shows the challenge that faces Android developers; over 18,000 distinct devices can immediately use their app, making optimization a real challenge. Compared to last year, fragmentation has risen by around 60%, with 11,868 devices seen last year compared to 18,796 this year. Compared to our first report, in 2012, device fragmentation has more than quadrupled – with our first report showing that there were ‘only’ 3,997 distinct Android devices. Another way of looking at how fragmentation affects developers is to see what % of the market is occupied by the top 10 devices – as developers generally only own a few devices to test on. Last year having the 10 most popular devices in the market would represent 21% of the devices out there, this year that number has fallen to 15% – making testing on a few devices less representative.

Some very interesting numbers from OpenSignal.

John Martellaro recently published his review of Amazon’s new phone and seems to like it. I haven’t even seen one of these in person, so I don’t have much to add either way.