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As NAMM gets ready to kick off in Anaheim on Thursday, Apple released updates for two of its music apps, Logic Pro X and GarageBand for iOS.

I don’t use WhatsApp but if you do, Fleishman does a good job of explaining the false headlines and how you can keep yourself secure on the platform.

Interesting list. There aren’t many places in the bottom half I’d actually want to live in though.

From a music industry perspective, what Apple is attempting to do is extraordinarily messy and difficult and mostly out of their control.

The new year is underway and we’ve opened up sponsorships for the first couple of months. If you want to get your product or service in front of The Loop readers, this is the only way to do it. Weekly sponsorships are exclusive, so you’ll be the only sponsor on the site. We have some great pricing to kick off the new year as well, so check it out.

Apple: “Feel the magic of AirPods on iPhone 7”

This makes the kid in me very sad (I still remember the first circus I ever saw as a little kid in Nova Scotia) but the adult is happy the animals will no longer be forced to perform.

I watched some of this yesterday and it’s very cool.

I really liked Avid’s Eleven guitar software, but it seems they didn’t do much with it for the past couple of years. Now they have—A new version of Eleven powers the Headrush pedalboard. I can’t wait to see this at NAMM.

In the list of iconic recording studios, Music Shoals Sound Studio is right up there with the most famous. During its heyday of the 70s, the studio hosted a wide array of artists that produced dozens of hit records, including Aretha Franklin, Cher, Boz Scaggs, The Rolling Stones, the Staple Singers, Bob Seger, Traffic, Willie Nelson, Rod Stewart, Paul Simon, Leon Russell and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The studio closed in 1978, but thanks to a grant from Beats By Dr. Dre, the studio is set to reopen once again.

I am so incredibly happy to hear this—Muscle Shoals was part of some amazing music.

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Not “potentially”. Definitely. It’s just a matter of when. I predict at/by WWDC 2017.

Consumer Reports is an irresponsible organization that rushed to publish its faulty MacBook Pro results before Christmas only to be caught and have to backtrack. I don’t trust a word these people say about anything.

Today, we’re starting to roll out an updated ride services experience to make it even easier for you to book a ride directly from Google Maps, on both Android and iOS globally.

Having it take you out of Google Maps and into Uber or Lyft was really clumsy. This will work much better and offer a better solution. I did try the same feature in Apple Maps, but every time I used the feature, it crashed the app, so I just stopped.

iPhone app purchasers may sue Apple Inc over allegations that the company monopolized the market for iPhone apps by not allowing users to purchase them outside the App Store, leading to higher prices, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday.

Wait a minute. People want to sue Apple because they feel they could buy the apps cheaper if Apple didn’t have a monopoly on the App Store? This is absolutely insane. Apps cost under $1 in a lot of cases—how much do people think developers work is worth? The clear answer is nothing—they want it all for free.

What the protections Apple provides in the App Store? Specifically apps free from malware and other malicious code. The safety and sense of security purchasing from the App Store is very important.

This is ridiculous.

I didn’t see the dramatized version of the O.J. story but I really enjoyed this documentary about it.

Tremolo systems first started appearing on guitars in the 1930s and have evolved multiple times in the ensuing decades.

Utilizing tremolo can be an integral aspect of your sound—see: Duane Eddy, Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour, Jeff Beck and Eddie Van Halen—or add a splash of color to your style.

But what is a tremolo system, how does it work and what are the benefits of one system over another?

Some of my favorite guitarists used a tremolo a lot, but I never really used it that much in my own playing. Using it properly is definitely an art.

I agree with Fleishman. When CR found its results to be so out of whack with what would be expected, they should have held off publishing their results until they figured out the issue.

A spate of top engineers have left Apple for Tesla and other companies over the last few months. What’s going on?

The moves to Tesla are certainly interesting, but I wouldn’t read too much into the overall trend. Apple gains and loses people all the time and we never hear about it. It’s always been like this.

We’ve all seen that video so it’s great to hear from someone involved as to the story behind it and the early iPhone development.

I’ve known Sal for years and there is no better person in the Mac Community. I wish I could go to this event.

Today, it seems like anything that can be imagined can be done through CGI but in the days of silent films, they had to use old school technology to create the “special” effects.

In Fender Collection 2 you’ll get all of the glorious “tweeds” from the ’57 Custom Series, a refined, player-centric take on a classic platform that includes the ’57 Deluxe, the ’57 Champ, ’57 Pro, ’57 Twin and ’57 Bandmaster.

Plus you get a spot-on model of an original 1953 Bassman and a 1965 blackface Super Reverb.

It’s hard to argue how iconic some of these amps are. IK has done a great job in the past bringing some of the most sought after amps to the public in its AmpliTube products.

We will start with an overview and work our way to create a Koala in pure CSS.

There’s also a video you can watch as well as the written instructions.

We would like to welcome Chris Lattner, who will join Tesla as our Vice President of Autopilot Software. Chris’ reputation for engineering excellence is well known. He comes to Tesla after 11 years at Apple where he was primarily responsible for creating Swift, the programming language for building apps on Apple platforms and one of the fastest growing languages for doing so on Linux.

That explains what happened.

This is an oddly specific job posting.

This video, even with its annoying as hell music, shows what truckers go through trying to drive in winter conditions. I don’t envy them. This road is the Trans-Canada Highway about 30 miles east of where I live. I love riding that road in the spring in summer (it’s one of the prettiest in British Columbia) but you couldn’t pay me enough to drive it in the winter.

I’m happy to announce that Ted Kremenek will be taking over for me as “Project Lead” for the Swift project, managing the administrative and leadership responsibility for Swift.org. This recognizes the incredible effort he has already been putting into the project, and reflects a decision I’ve made to leave Apple later this month to pursue an opportunity in another space.

As Gruber says, I’d love to know what the other opportunity is.

Over the years, Sonos has weathered competition from better known rivals like Apple and Bose to find a devoted audience among audio enthusiasts. But lately its wireless speaker has lost ground to an unexpected competitor, Amazon’s Echo.

Now it faces another challenge: a change in the corner office. After 14 years leading the company he helped found, John MacFarlane has resigned as chief executive of Sonos and has been replaced by one of his deputies, Patrick Spence.

I don’t understand the competition. To me, Sonos and Echo serve different purposes—Sonos is a wonderful wireless speaker system and Echo is more of an assistant.

China’s largest mobile social media network WeChat is offering its 768 million users a function which allows them to by-pass app stores such as Apple’s.

I’m not really clear on how they implemented this, but bypassing the App Store is certainly not something Apple is likely to look kindly on.