CNet:

[Apple] on Wednesday doled out 150,000 shares each to most of its senior vice presidents, short of recently-minted SVP Eddy Cue, who received a slightly smaller 100,000-share bonus, and design guru Jonathan Ive, who is an SVP, but does not fall under the SEC’s section for directors, officers, and principal stockholders. That works out to just over a $60 million payday to those who got the 150,000 shares, with Cue’s cut coming out to a little more than $40 million, all based off today’s closing price.

Not a bad payout for Apple’s executive team. Given the company’s performance, it’s hard to find fault with the stock windfall. It’s dependent on them sticking around for another five years, however. The intent is clearly to continue stability in Apple’s senior management.

Please say it’s a new album.

But even expert mastering engineers can only accomplish so much, and it’s largely dependent on the raw materials they’re given to work with. With that in mind, here’s a look at some of the top mistakes people make in preparing their mix for mastering, with the help of veteran engineer of Universal Mastering Studios West, Pete Doell.

I use Universal Audio plug-ins in every track of every mix I do. It’s great to see the company do these types of articles. Not only do they tell us what the top mistakes are, they tell us how to fix them too.

The Samsung Galaxy 4.0 Android MP3 Player looks absolutely nothing like the iPod touch. Nothing.

I’d like to thank ChronoSync for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop.

ChronoSync is the automated synchronization and backup application for Mac OS X and ChronoAgent for Mac is a utility that runs on the destination Mac and communicates directly with ChronoSync, giving you full root access to the destination Mac. Download and try the demos, or purchase ChronoSync for $40 and ChronoAgent for Mac for $10. All updates are free, forever.

FierceWireless:

U.S. Cellular turned down Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone because it did not make sense for the company economically, CEO Mary Dillon said on the company’s third-quarter earnings conference call.

Who?

GQ:

Because what I really believe is, let’s spend a little more time leaving everybody alone. These people who are making a big deal out of gay marriage? I don’t give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We’re making a big deal out of things we shouldn’t be making a deal out of.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Barrons.com:

Canaccord Genuity’s Mike Walkley this morning raised his already fairly high estimate for this quarter’s sales by Apple (AAPL) of its iPhone from 27 million units to 29 million units, after his “checks” last month suggested the iPhone 4S was the top seller at AT&T (T), Sprint-Nextel (S), and Verizon Communications (VZ).

Such a disappointment indeed.

If you have EZDrummer then you’ll know there is no way to do this natively inside the plugin. There are however workarounds to this and I’m going to show you how to do this in Logic Pro. Although I’m in Logic this concept will work in any DAW that can feed a record input from an internal source.

Step-by-step instructions from MacProVideo.com.

Ryan Lawler at GigaOM:

Apple had long been rumored to be working on a subscription streaming service that would aggregate content from multiple TV networks and compete against more traditional cable and satellite services. That product ended up never coming to market, as Apple was apparently unable to convince enough content providers to join. But no one had publicly confirmed that such an offering was actually in the works until today.

I would definitely pay for this service from Apple. I hope they can convince the networks to take the leap.

Pro Tools 10 is chock full of new features and functions that will dramatically speed up your workflow and production time. Pro Tools guru Michael Costa takes you step by step through each new feature and function, in-depth, leaving no stone unturned.

I’ve watched several of Costa’s videos before and he is a really good trainer.

Engadget:

Based on leaked slides that we’ve received, the Nook Color will be dropping to $199 by November 16th, but the $50 price savings ain’t all that B&N’s throwing your way. The Nook Color v1.4 update will bring along some pretty intense extras, including the addition of Hulu Plus, “millions of songs” from services like Rhapsody, Grooveshark, Pandora and MOG and a litany of new tailored apps (with Scrabble called out in particular).

As Amazon gets ready to ship the Kindle Fire and as holiday sales heat up, Barnes & Noble isn’t taking it lying down. They’re bound and determined to keep their own tablet very much in the minds of consumers.

New York Times:

It wasn’t just Gawker. The waters quickly muddied after the first wave of obituaries passed. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, anyone with a beef against Mr. Jobs or Apple found a platform to sound off about an industrialist who doubled as a pop star.The Steve Jobs backlash began as quickly as the mythmaking had. Candlelight vigils were just starting to form outside Apple stores worldwide when bloggers began their assault.

I suspect it’s a combination of the ever-shortening news cycle and bloggers’ and news posters’ understanding that everything to do with Apple is link bait.

Simply beautiful.

It’s hard to imagine that the PlayBook isn’t catching on with this type of interface.

Hugo Miller and Matt Walcoff:

Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM)’s decline below book value for the first time in nine years leaves the BlackBerry maker worth less than the net value of its property, patents and other assets in a sign of investors’ lowered faith.“This is a wounded puppy,” Timothy Ghriskey, who oversees $2 billion as chief investment officer of Solaris Group LLC in Bedford Hills, New York.

Investors had the chance to kick the co-CEOs to the curb at the last annual meeting and they didn’t. Instead they asked the pair softball questions and accepted their lame explanations. The downfall of the stock is as much the fault of the investors as it is the CEOs at this point.

Chris and Michael, Fusion’s previous owners, have done a great job building and running the network. We’re honored to be the new owners, and plan to build upon the great work they have done. We will continue to run Fusion Ads as it’s own standalone network. The value we bring for Fusion publishers is our ability to run these types of networks efficiently, profitably, and with great care toward the community that they help support. The value we bring for advertisers is similar, but with the added benefit of our software running their campaigns that will have real-time insight into performance and hassle-free billing and creative management. We look forward to working hard to serve the Fusion Ads advertisers and publishers for years to come.

I was with Buy Sell Ads for two years before joining Fusion in September. Now I’m back, sort of. The BSA people were always good to me and the way ads are done on The Loop under Fusion will not change.

Joshua Schnell:

For instance, the iPod nano doesn’t have built in Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, so wirelessly connecting it to your audio systems is out of the question.Well, at least, that was a problem. A new Kickstarter project, named The Proof, has the lofty goal of changing all of that by including not only Bluetooth into their iWatch case design, but also waterproofing.

Lots of cool Kickstarter projects around. Good find by Schnell.

Microsoft’s Tom Rizzo:

In cancelling this group of social media-like services, it is clear that Google is not in tune with the market needs and does not have a product roadmap and clear vision for productivity for their business customers. The Microsoft Office team does. Our vision demonstrates a clear focus on what business customers are looking for, such as intuitive interfaces across a wide range of devices.Google releases experimental products and tracks adoption to determine whether to continue providing them. Its products are like spaghetti, Google throws them up against the wall to see if they stick.

Michael Gartenberg’s take on Twitter is classic. “pot to kettle, you’re black.”

Matt Alexander:

I have nothing against Android, but I find it brutally frustrating to watch Google flounder in the face of the professionalism offered by iOS, and even Windows Phone.

Matt brings up some good points in his article about Google’s massive Gmail failure yesterday. People trust Apple and their products, which makes them talk about them, which makes more people trust their products.

Sam Oliver:

A total of seven domains featuring hardcore pornography have been targeted by Apple in a new complaint filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization. As noted by Domain Name Wire, all of the sites feature the word iPhone, but perhaps the most troubling is the iphone4s.com website, which features the same name as Apple’s latest handset.

I would have thought Apple had that one locked up.

Smashing Magazine:

Frequently, when I discuss CSS3 with other developers, the issue of stubborn clients comes up. They tell me that even though they personally don’t think a website should look the same in all browsers and they’re eager to try all of these new techniques, their clients insist that their website should look the same, so the developers are stuck with the same Web development techniques that we used five to ten years ago. Their clients just don’t “get” graceful degradation.

When we were doing the redesign for The Loop last summer, I told Phil that I don’t care about old browsers. Modern browsers only.

BGR:

Following a meeting with the pair of Apple chief officers, Reitzes delivered a note to investors suggesting that the company sees Amazon’s forthcoming tablet as good news for the iPad. The Kindle Fire’s low price point makes it accessible, but Apple believes it further fragments the Android ecosystem, which may cause consumers to flee to the iPad.

This is just what I said back in September. Kindle Fire will be successful, but it’s not an iPad killer.

Federico Viticci at MacStories

What’s interesting about this folder when used with two Macs under the same iCloud account is that it provides a basic “drop box” functionality for files that don’t necessarily belong to an iCloud-enabled app.

You knew it was hidden in there somewhere.

Air Users Blog:

Avid are sticking to their Pro Tools 10 pricing guns (see what I did there?) and I’m told that they are internally patting themselves on the back for such a great product launch. I’m also told that Avid team are sending YouTube links around on the internal messaging system, that compare this with Steve Jobs’ handling of criticism at an Apple event some years ago. Well I hope for their sakes the wishful thinking proves true, especially where the stock price is concerned.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a company take so much heat after a product launch.

Arnold Kim at Mac Rumors:

Developers of these sandboxed applications must take special measures to break up their application into individual processes that only are able to do exactly what they need. Apple still allows user initiated actions to perform as expected and override the sandbox, but app-initiated actions in sandboxed applications will be restricted. This means that system wide file access and inter-app scripting and interactions will not be allowed.

Arnold wrote a great piece about Apple’s plans to sandbox apps. While it was supposed to happen this month, Apple put it off until 2012. It’s definitely worth a read.

Reuters:

Costly hardware failures are more common on Android devices than on Apple Inc iPhones and Research In Motion Inc BlackBerry phones, which have strict control over the components used in their devices, WDS data showed.

You get what you pay for.