Best Creative — Curated from The Hiro Report

I'm an EXTREMELY amateur field recorder, especially when traveling. When I'm out and about and hear a unique sound, I like to pull out my phone and record it. Could be the sound of a muezzin call early in the morning in Morocco, particularly animated grackles outside of the Central Market at sunset, my kids running and laughing in the backyard. The problem is I never really do anything with these recordings, I just hoard them. This app looks like a great tool to start to play with all these sounds for making loops, aleatoric music, etc. You can make extremely high-fidelity recordings directly in the app and then manipulate the tape both during recording and after the fact, and use this as an audio unit in other music production apps like Logic Pro.

Insta360 waded into the space currently dominated by the Osmo Pocket series of gimbal cameras this last week. It competes squarely with the new Osmo Pocket 4 that is sadly not available in the U.S., and in some ways surpasses it by adding some cool new tech like a detachable 2" rotatable OLED touchscreen that pops off for remote framing and control. The camera pairs two Leica lenses (a 20mm equivalent wide angle and 60mm equivalent telephoto) with a Triple AI Chip system, covering five focal lengths up to 12× zoom and reportedly great low-light shooting capabilities. While it sounds like they're still working through some early firmware issues here and there, I'm super intrigued by this one, especially since it's unclear if/when the Osmo Pocket 4 will ever be available stateside.

The mad men and women at Teenage Engineering introduced the APC-2 this week— a professional record-cutting lathe for making one's own vinyl records. It features a direct-drive motor on a polished tungsten shaft, DAW-controllable pitch for locked grooves, and as one might expect from TE, it's all wrapped in 140kg (308 lbs) of gorgeous powder-coated aluminium and granite. The fact that they make you email them for a price gives you a sense of just how absurdly expensive this thing will be. If I win the lottery, I won't be audacious about it, but there will be signs...

The makers of countless iconic samplers/drum machines of all time have released a more portable and approachable entry-level version at last to compete with the Teenage Engineering K.O. II. It costs just a little bit more, but looks to be easier to learn and use, and features Akai's excellent drum pads. The Verge has a great review up on it already, where Terrence O'Brien says it's his new favorite portable beat maker. I want one.

This is a really cool web project that lets you turn your handwriting into a custom font— the best part is it's all done locally, for free, with no account needed, using JavaScript in your browser. No data leaves your computer. Simply print out the handwriting template, fill in all the letters, numbers, and punctuation, then take a photo of it with your phone and drop it into your browser. You'll get a bundle of OTF, TTF, WOFF2, and Base64 versions of your font you can use wherever you want. I'm eager to try it out.

The NanoLoop Q is a tiny pocket groove box that takes the shape of a retro game pad with a 4x4 grid of monochromatic orange LEDs. Those make up a 16-step sequencer. You get up to four channels to use built-in synthesizers to create your own catchy loops and beats. I'm a sucker for any small, good-looking, pocketable devices with buttons and lights on them. Bonus points for it making really fun sounds, being USB-C powered, and having over 30 hours of battery life and multiple years of standby battery life.

Santa dropped off one of my Christmas gifts early this year and I've been obsessed with it the last week or so… The Microfreak is a hybrid digital dual oscillator synthesizer with an analog filter with wavetable and granular sampling capabilities that is widely considered to be a great first hardware synth for anyone looking to experiment with building their own sounds and patches. Apart from being a good beginner's synth, it's also used by the pros like ambient composer Trentemøller.

A little out of the box, but rather than mailing a package across the world, what if you bought someone a really cool font they could use forever? $

This unique little device looks like an old-school calculator but is actually a fairly sophisticated sampler and sequencer for making beats on the fly… Plus it fits in your pocket! $$

This is one of the most fun toys I’ve gotten in recent years. It’s a great fun beat maker and sampler from the kings of fun physical product design. Think of it as the big sister of the PO-33 linked above. $$$$

Thanks to Andrew at ClicksNClacks for flagging this cool design portfolio/resume site/job board combo. Admittedly, it’s doing kind of a lot of things, but it’s beautiful to explore and is chock full of cool side projects and hobby websites made by people who really care about the design of what they’re making. Highly recommend a click around—who knows, you may find a great designer to hire for your next project or opening.

These stickers are guaranteed to level up your Apple devices’ cool factor by at least 42 points. $

A little out of the box, but rather than mailing a package across the world, what if you bought someone a really cool font they could use? $

Dan from SimpleBits Type Foundry just released Hubano, an all-caps display serif inspired by old Cuban cigar box lettering. It's gorgeous! Check out his other fun fonts, like Wilco Loft Sans and Dragonsteel. Dan also has a secret club with secret typeface meetings, but forget I said anything about that!

If you’ve downloaded iOS 18 and are enjoying the new customization features but are wondering how to make your home screen look even nicer , there are tons of designers offering custom iOS themes and icon packs to help take your personalization to the next level. I’ve bought a few packs from Lokki and really enjoy them—here’s my current home screen setup. Not into the modern, minimalist aesthetic? A quick Etsy search will give you hundreds of other options. With fall in the air, I’ve got my eye on this cozy farming sim-themed one— don’t hate me.

This is a generative AI tool that lets you create music in response to a text prompt. You can opt to have it create just instrumental music or come up with lyrics that fit whatever topic you desire. My (and my kids') favorite feature, however, is describing a genre of music, writing our own lyrics, and then it creates a whole song with vocal melodies singing what we wrote. It's pretty darn fun, and you get up to free 5 song generations a day if you're curious to try it out.

I've previously linked to the Rock Paper Pencil by Astropad, and was excited to see they have just come out with a new updated version that looks to be a significant improvement on the original. Like the first one, it's a cleverly designed screen that you lay on your iPad that adds a really rich, paper-like quality to your screen surface when paired with the Apple Pencil. I've tried a bunch of offerings like this, and Astropad's is the best.

I love this pack of Gameboy-themed iPhone wallpapers. I've been rotating them out with these Teenage Engineering-themed wallpapers.

One of my favorite niche genres of YouTube videos is producers-making-beats-on-their-Mac-or-iPads. (Cf. Nervous Cook$ and Henny tha Bizness) Anyway, I’ve been noticing a lot of the folks I follow using Koala Sampler and finally decided to try it out. It’s super fun and easy to use! You can record samples on the fly using your phone or iPad, record from other audio sources like vinyl, or import beats and samples from packs. Here's an example of Nervous Cook$ using it to great effect.

Speaking of sci-fi, Jason Kottke shared this fascinating series of paintings by Karla Knight this week. I think Jason came up with the best description for the series: "imagine Hilma af Klint as the production designer for Wes Anderson's Stargate."