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Ableton Live is, as you may know, an extremely powerful piece of music software. You can produce, mix, master, and even DJ inside of it with ease.

With Live’s Audio Warping engine and friendly “Session” layout, DJing is a very real possibility. Whether you’re sidegrading from turntables/CDJs to an all digital setup or are an existing Live user looking to use it for all aspects of your musical work, chances are you’re going to need to build a type of live performance/DJ rig.

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I recently dealt with a client that was in need of a 12 channel mixer for use with hybrid live and recording situations. They were looking at either the Soundcraft M12 or the Allen & Heath MixWizard WZ3 12:2. I wasn’t sure what to tell them. I’ve used the 16 channel MixWizard and, as far as smaller format live mixers, I loved it. I’ve never used anything from the M series, but I do know Soundcraft makes solid (and great sounding) gear. So what do I suggest? I had to do a comparison for them, and why not share it with you?

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Applie Acoustics Systems are announcing native 64-bit VST plug-ins for their Professional and Session series instruments on Windows 7 and Vista. This new feature allows for 64-bit VSTs to be supported without the use of any “bit bridge” technology.

The update will take place in the form of routine maintainence and will be out in the first quarter of 2010 to all registered AAS users.

My wife works retail and has worked for a few different clothing retailers. Her favorite job when we lived in California was Anthropologie. Think of it as the more grown-up Urban Outfitters.

Since we’re newly married, broke 20-somethings, she does a lot of online window shopping. Yesterday she pointed me to a couple of really cool wood-based audio gadgets that are sure to turn heads (and can’t sound that bad, either):

• Barky Turntable: Yep. It’s exactly what you think. A turntable made completely out of wood. For a cool $1,298 it can be yours. It’s made with high-quality turntable parts and looks absolutely amazing.
• Skullcandy Wood Earbuds: For $98, you can have these pretty amazing little earbuds by Skullcandy. They’re said to have the “natural acoustics of wood,” but I bet they sound like nice iPod headphones.

Not really ground breaking news, but if you’re looking for some cool accent pieces for your home or portable (read: iPod) setup, check out these devices.

So you thought FLAC was the best sounding thing you could get right now, didn’t you? Well, according to apt-X, you may be wrong.

Here’s a list of what apt-X says are the advantages of their new lossless codec:

Highly scalable and dynamically adaptive coding mechanism
High-performance lossless compression – up to 96 kHz sampling rates
Mastering-grade audio – sample resolutions up to 24 bits
Extremely low coding delay
Low computational complexity, run-time overhead and device power consumption
Hybrid lossy coding for communications links with stringent bandwidth constraints
Easily portable across multiple hardware and software platforms

Interested in the press release? Check it out after the jump.

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