All That (Non-DRM'd) Jazz

It's striking that more and more DRM-free sites are starting to achieve prominence - and, one hopes, profitability. Here's another, AllAboutJazz.com, which has a very clever sample system: you can hear all the track, at high quality, but only in 30 second bursts; cunning. But be warned: once you start listening to this stuff, you may have an irresistible urge to buy something from its online shop.... (Via Boing Boing.)

Going Beyond: Ultra VioLet Composer

One of the common criticisms of the open source development methodology is that it only works for a limited class of software, namely those with big constituencies. According to this view, there are unlikely to be successful open source projects for niche sectors.

That may have been true in the early days of free software, but now that the number of developers who are prepared to get involved has grown, the overall scaling means that more such niches can be addressed.

A good example is VioLet Composer:

A modular multispace desktop music composer for Win32 (source available for porting). Features realtime wavelet processing, flexible arrangement, extensible sample types, autosaving and much, much more. Now with support for simple Buzz effects.

Great fun.