Olympus has introduced the DM-620 digital audio recorder, featuring  the “Tresmic” 3 microphone system that’s designed to capture a wider range of audio.

The DM-620’s Tresmic system uses two condenser stereo mics and a center, omni-directional mic that’s capable of capturing lower bass ranges down to 20Hz.

A unique feature of the DM-620 is complete voice guidance functionality: the recorder can provide audio prompts for users with assistive needs.

This optional function helps the user operate the device without the need to see the menus or buttons. Languages can be set to English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

Other highlights of the digital audio recorder are 1,000+ hours of recording capacity.

The expected street price is $150 and availability is mid-March.

Specs for the Olympus DM-620 Tresmic recorder below. 

Apple today announced the iPad 2 and iMovie, a $500 mobile HD video studio combination.

iPad 2 features a new design that is 33 percent thinner and up to 15 percent lighter than the original iPad, offers Apple’s dual-core A5 processor and includes two cameras, a front-facing VGA camera for FaceTime and Photo Booth, and a rear-facing camera that captures 720p HD video.

Apple says that the iPad 2 still delivers up to 10 hours of battery life.

The also introduced a new version of iMovie that will run on the iPad 2 that offers deeper editing options, multi-track audio, support for YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo, AirPlay streaming to Apple TV, hardware video out and project sharing through iTunes.

The combination of more powerful mobile hardware and deeper video editing capabilities mean that a lot of people will be able to do their video editing for video podcasts and social media sites on the iPad.

Apple today introduced GarageBand for the iPad – a version of the company’s entry-level digital audio workstation, optimized for multi-touch mobile music making.

GarageBand for the iPad could be a great new option for mobile audio podcasting – turning your tablet into a mobile recording studio for $5.

Features:

• Musical instruments designed for Multi-Touch.
• 70 synth presets
• Arpeggiator
• “Smart instrument” features
• 8-track recording
• Guitar amp simulator
• Stomp box effects
• Track sharing via email or iTunes
• Tracks can be opened in GarageBand on the Mac

The iPad version of GarageBand will be available starting March 11th.

GarageBand for the iPad will work with the existing iPad – but it will be interesting to see how performance fares.

What do you think of Apple’s iPad GarageBand announcement?

More coverage at TechCrunch, AppleInsider

Apple’s iOS app review process has long been the source of criticism: It’s too slow, it’s too arbitrary or it’s biased.

Unfortunate news about the Android platform, though, suggests that maybe Apple’s app review process may not be so heinous after all.

Android Police reports that 21 popular free apps for Android phones, apps that have been downloaded 50-200k times in the last 4 days, are actually malware that will root your phone, steal your private data and open a backdoor to your system.

Android Police’s Aaron Gingrich notes:

It does indeed root the user’s device via rageagainstthecage or exploid.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: it does more than just yank IMEI and IMSI. There’s another APK hidden inside the code, and it steals nearly everything it can: product ID, model, partner (provider?), language, country, and userID.

But that’s all child’s play; the true pièce de résistance is that it has the ability to download more code. In other words, there’s no way to know what the app does after it’s installed, and the possibilities are nearly endless.

The fact that over 50,000 users got their phones rooted is horrible; the fact that this was predictable and the tip of the iceberg if nothing changes, even worse.

If you’ve downloaded one of the malware apps, the recommended solution is to stop using your phone and to ask your carrier to exchange it for a new device.

Does this incident make you reconsider the pros and cons of Apple’s app review process?

Apple will introduce a new podcasting application, Podcast Publisher, in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, according to a report at 9to5mac:

Podcast Publisher allows users to create as many shows as they want and within each show they can have episodes. Podcast Publisher lets you capture video and/or audio for your show, and you can even record your Mac’s screen in realtime if you want to demo something. You can even do some quick iOS-like editing of your clips (“trimming”) and the whole feel of the application is very user-friendly.

Once your podcast episode is complete you can export it as a file to your desktop, iTunes, or an e-mail. You can also easily send it to your Podcast library’s server or remote workflow. We think Podcast Producer is something a lot of people will use, as Apple’s is yet to implement a true podcast creation tool in Mac OS X for use by anyone.

Here’s what Apple has to say about Podcast Publisher:

Podcast Publisher allows users to create as many shows as they want and within each show they can have episodes. Podcast Publisher lets you capture video and/or audio for your show, and you can even record your Mac’s screen in realtime if you want to demo something. You can even do some quick iOS-like editing of your clips (“trimming”) and the whole feel of the application is very user-friendly.

Once your podcast episode is complete you can export it as a file to your desktop, iTunes, or an e-mail. You can also easily send it to your Podcast library’s server or remote workflow. We think Podcast Producer is something a lot of people will use, as Apple’s is yet to implement a true podcast creation tool in Mac OS X for use by anyone.

If you’ve worked with OS X Lion and have had the opportunity to check out Apple’s new Podcast Publisher, leave a comment with your thoughts!

Tascam has introduced the DR-05, a $99 portable stereo recorder with high-resolution audio.

Features:

• The stereo recorder features a pair of condenser microphones with sensitivity up to 125dB SPL and low noise.
• The design of the DR-05 is optimized for sound quality, from the dedicated power supply for the codec to bring out the full spec of the A/D and D/A converter to the separate analog & digital circuit boards and low impedance circuit design with noise resistance in its compact case.
• The DR-05 records to microSD or microSDHC media, recording in MP3 or WAV (BWF) file format at up to 96kHz/24-bit resolution.
• Peak reduction function sets the optimum recording level even in recording to avoid the over level.
• Quick Menu selects commonly used parameters in playback or record like auto level setting or limiting, while deeper settings are available through a full-featured setup menu.
• The 1/8” mic/line input can supply power for microphones.
• A Level Align function prevents uneven volume levels during playback through the 1/8” headphone output or built-in speaker.
• Variable-Speed Audition – which changes playback speed without affecting pitch – and looping are also available during playback for transcription or learning new music.
• 17.5 hours of longer battery life at 44.1kHz/16-bit, WAV (BWF).

Rain Computers has released Venturi, a high performance computer designed for media editng and production.

Performance features include:

• a quad-core or optional 6-core Intel Xeon processor
• DDR3 triple channel memory a
• Serial ATA drives capable of streaming up to 6 gigabits per second.
• Window 7 Pro 64-bit, tuned by Rain for peformance.

Venturi is available now starting at $2399 through select Rain Authorized Dealers.

Macgasm’s Joshua Schnell has posted his thoughts on using an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad as an iOS podcasting rig.

Count him as converted:

Today my system consisted of Mic > Mixer > iRig > iPod touch. It worked out a lot better than I thought it would. So well in fact that I might continue using the setup moving forward.

The benefits that I’ve found with the iPod touch setup is that it frees up my computer from recording, and gets the audio files directly onto a mobile device. You can then send the files one by one directly over email, or sync your computer to get the files into iTunes.

It’s not the best setup on the planet, but it goes to show that you don’t need much more than an iOS device and a decent microphone to record an audio podcast these days.

An iOS podcasting rig won’t replace the capabilities of a computer-based solution and won’t be a good fit for many podcasting situations.

But that doesn’t mean that an iPod touch or iPhone, combined with a decent mic and a multi-track recording app, can’t be used to create a great-sounding podcast.

Have you tried podcasting from a mobile device? Let us know what you think of it!

Tech news aggregator Techmeme has notified a short list of new media heavyweights that it has ‘whitelisted” their twitter accounts and will be reposting their tweets as headline news:

If you tweet something and include a Techmeme permalink, your tweet *will* appear in “Discussion” under the headline you’ve linked, because your Twitter account is on our whitelist!

That’s right. If you’ve got some blog or Twitter clout, Techmeme *will* now parrot anything you tweet, as long as you link directly to their their permalinks.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, who regularly offers some of the most astute tech analysis around, is wowed by the change:

The press loves to pounce on the Twitter updates of well-known people in all kinds of fields, from Hollywood to US foreign policy. Imagine if other media outlets created a direct pipeline for those people to post their comments on coverage directly to the coverage itself!

Might the front page of The New York Times someday include an appended quote like: “This article gives too much credit to the Republican party’s strategic thinking.” – @BarackObama.

Unfortunately, this sounds more like a Techmeme link-building campaign than a way to improve the news.

Giving tweets equal weight to news headlines doesn’t add anything to our understanding of stories:

This fundamentally confuses the idea of comments with news stories, forcing you to wade through offhand tweets, with their garbled syntax, when you are scanning headlines. This doesn’t improve Techmeme’s news aggregation, it makes it harder to navigate.

Worse yet, clicking through on these tweets adds nothing to the headlin, breaking the usability conventions of the site.

Techmeme is a great tech news aggregator. But let’s hope that people recognize the site’s latest move for what it is – a clever link building campaign – and that the site gets back to doing what it does best, aggregating tech news.

Publishers of The Daily – the major new new app for the Apple iPad – have published a mea culpa at their blog, admitting that their app is buggy and saying that they are working on improving it:

We’ve had massive uptake since Wednesday’s launch, and with that kind of audience scale in such a short period of time, we’ve seen some stability issues and bugs that need to be addressed. We’re working as quickly as we can to find these problems and fix them. The beauty of the application ecosystem is that we can constantly iterate on and improve our product, and we’re aiming to put out an update within the coming weeks.

We value feedback and would like to thank our readers for what we’ve received to date. Our goal is to push this medium to its limits, experiment with new forms of content, and deliver a product that seamlessly balances great content with new technology. We want The Daily to be unlike anything else out there: intuitive, informative, entertaining, reliable and easy to use.

We’re on our way, and without your continued feedback we won’t get there. Keep it coming. We are addressing the technical issues that we’ve seen and we want you, our readers, to know that this is a major priority for us.

Thanks,

The Daily team

While the publishers acknowledge bugginess of their news app, though, they don’t discuss the core problem of The Daily: the app prioritizes magazine-style page layout over speed.

And is any font worth waiting 60 seconds for?