One the more fun gadgets I've tested lately is Gear4's PocketLoops. With the portable keyboard and free companion app, users can create and remix loops. Gear4 is known for its variety of idevice accessories including cases, speakers and its UnityRemote universal remote.  

Once you slip an iPhone or iPad touch into the dock of the keyboard and launch the free PocketLoops app you have a MIDI device capable of creating and recording music.

Exploring PocketLoops is fairly intuitive. An onscreen tutorial does a good job of guiding you through the features. The PocketLoops app has a 4x4 grid available for creating drum loops or melodies.

The keyboard keys that trigger percussion are marked with corresponding icons.

When you are ready to lay down a track, you can record it as an m4a file and share it via email.

The updated software worked flawlessly with iOS 5 and iOS 4 devices.

PocketLoops should be a fun device for anyone. Serious musicians will want more, but may find it useful. Maybe Gear4 can expand upmarket? For the rest of us though, it is a fun gadget to create music and we're looking at how to bring the fun to you maybe in the form of a meetup or a PocketLoops throwdown so stay tuned.

Apple rather quietly launched its new music cloud service iTunes Match on Monday.

Costing $25 per year, the cloud service is supposed to make every song in a subscriber's iTunes library available online.

Matched songs can then be streamed or downloaded. To sign up for the service, users must update to iTunes 10.5.1.

Some attempting to subscribe were thwarted by messages that said the service was unavailable due to demand and were asked to check back later. There are also a few reports of iTunes Match not recognizing some songs among a few other complaints.

Meanwhile, Google has been preparing for a launch of its own. An announcement is set for Wednesday where Bloomberg reports Google is launching its own music store.
 

Speaker design has shifted from the monolithic towers of power of Hi-Fi's earlier days to sleeker and more discreet objects. Orb Audio's design is modern and stylish enough to be a design feature in one's decor, yet compact enough to be deployed stealthily.

Scotty McCreery's debut album "Clear As Day" is the top selling album on iTunes  for the week ending October 10, 2011. McCreery recently celebrated his 18th birthday and album release with hometown fans in North Carolina.

For those of you who like to keep up, read on for the iTunes' Official Music Charts for the week ending October 10, 2011.

UNC Library's Southern Folklife Collection houses an amazing collection of American folk music, with more than 160,000 sound recordings on cylinders, acetate discs, wire, 78 rpm and 45 rpm discs, LPs, cassettes, CDs, and open reel tapes. Musical styles include old-time, country-western, hillbilly, bluegrass, blues, gospel, Cajun and zydeco. Other materials include photographs, posters, and manuscripts related to the music. More background on the collection is available here.

All the materials are non-circulating, which means you have to be on site at Wilson Library to use them. Until now.  The library has created six streaming radio "stations" to bring many of these recordings right to your computer.  Take a listen to any of the following channels:

Channel 1: North Carolina

Channel 2: Memphis

Channel 3: Jimmie Rodgers, The Father of Country Music

Channel 4: New Orleans

Channel 5: SFC Mix

Channel 6: African-American Music

They're all good, but the SFC Mix offers a great sampling of the music of the South.

Mountain Music Festival, Asheville, September 1938. Photo courtesy NC State Archives.

Why buy the song when you can get the album for free? (Well, almost for free.)

Lady Gaga's entire "Born this Way" album is selling for $0.99 on Amazon.com today.

Demand for the album caused problems for Amazon, the Associated Press reported. Amazon experienced a high volume of traffic that caused delays for those downloading the album.

The new album includes the title track, "Born this Way," as well as top hit "Judas."

Perhaps the demand was due in part to this incentive: People who buy any album from Amazon through the end of the year can get 20 GB of cloud drive storage free for a year.

Read the fine print though; you will have to pay for storage *after* the first year's service.

For the unfamiliar, cloud computing is when a user's files are saved to and stored on a computer network, rather than a user's personal computer (or smartphone, or whatever device is popular today). It allows the data to be accessed by any device connected to the cloud computing service.

Cloud computing doesn't have to be just for storing music on the go. Here's how some high school students are using the technology to advance their studies.

Amazon, Google and soon, Apple, will have competing cloud computing services.

For other tech moves by Amazon, see today's Computers column by Paul Gilster.

The Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment has launched the National Jukebox, a collection of more than 10,000 digitized recordings from the first part of the 20th century. The recordings, which include music, poetry, political speeches and other spoken word recordings, are available to stream online.

Currently, only recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company are available, but later this year, the project will begin digitizing recordings from additional record labels, including Columbia and Okeh, along with selected master recordings from the Library of Congress Universal Music Group Collection.

The University of California, Santa Barbara has worked to create a searchable database of the recordings.

Learn more about this project with The Making of the National Jukebox slideshow, or just sit back and enjoy this 1922 recording of Carolina in the Morning.

Under the Milky Way by The Church  may not be new, but its a neo-classic ...and free for now. Check it out.

Amazon announced new media cloud services that enable users to store and access music, video, images and documents online.