This program gets a lot right at the beginning. First, it's pretty obvious what you're supposed to do with it: You pick your iPhone like it was, uh, a piece of pizza or something and bring it to your mouth, with the mic acting as a mouthpiece. A helpful onscreen indicator tells you to blow into the mic and when you do, the ocarina makes a sound, indicated by green sonic waves emanating from a little radio tower thingy. It's all pretty intuitive, and you can change the key and style of ocarina. I set it to Zeldarian, of course. I'd like a little more explanation as to what each style means, but the video tutorial included is helpful.

The tone is not incredible, and I detect a slight portamento effect—the notes sort of slide back and forth between each other—which doesn't seem terribly realistic. When I turned up the volume all the way, the tone got distorted, so it's best to roll your ocarina out at 3/4 volume. Also, you have to blow into the mic, and I'm not totally sure I've perfected that technique. It definitely translates how hard you blow into the instrument's volume, but I never got it to be perfectly consistent. Practice makes perfect, I reckon.

Here's where things get mega-nifty, though. Ocarina can pinpoint your current location to track you down and broadcast your song to anywhere. You can click the little globe icon and listen to what people around the world are playing on their ocarinas at that moment! Do you know what I discovered? I'm a terrible ocarina player. Some people were getting all Prokofiev up in there, so let's just call what I do "free jazz."

As far as Ocarina goes, it's a bargain at 99 cents. You can buy it at the iTunes Store.

[HT: Gadget Lab]

Although Ritscher, who was in his early 50s, had played music off and on over the years, he was best known for his devotion to documenting other people's shows. Several nights a week for at least the last decade he could be found at places like the Empty Bottle, the Velvet Lounge, and the Hungry Brain; by his own count he recorded more than 2,000 concerts.

Over the years he invested more money in equipment and as his skills improved, many of his recordings went to be used on commerical releases—by Paul Rutherford, Gold Sparkle Band, Isotope 217, Irene Schweizer, and Ken Vandermark among others. Ritscher was fiercely modest about these pursuits—I once tried to do a piece on him for the Reader but he declined, saying he didn't want publicity.

The full story is below, and for anyone interested in how one person can affect can entire music community, it's a must-read (as are the reader comments). We don't pretend to know a whole lot about the bands that Ritscher followed so passionately, but we do recognize that kind of uncontrollable passion for music. It's hard to find a postive in all of this, but if anyone's putting together some sort of benefit compilation, put us down for two copies.

Anyway, sorry to throw you the heavy so early in the morning. We'll get that new Gwen Stefani video up soon, we promise!

Malachi Ritscher's apparent suicide [Chicago Reader]