Beats Electronics

Beats Electronics is a division of Apple that produces audio products. Headquartered in Culver City, California, U.S., the company was founded by music producer and rapper Dr. Dre and formerInterscope Geffen A&M Records chairman Jimmy Iovine.

The subsidiary's product line is primarily focused on headphones and speakers. Beats' original product line was manufactured in partnership with the AV equipment company Monster Cable Products; following the end of its contract with the company, Beats took further development of its products in-house. In 2014, the company expanded into the online music market with the launch of its subscription-based streaming service, Beats Music.

In 2012 NPD Group reported that Beats' market share was 64% in the U.S for headphones priced higher than $100, and the brand was valued at US$1 billion in September 2013.

For a period, the company was majority-owned by Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC—the company reduced its stake to 25% in 2012, and sold its remaining stake back to the company in 2013; concurrently, Carlyle Group replaced HTC as a minority shareholder, alongside Dr. Dre and Iovine, in late 2013. On August 1, 2014, Apple Inc. acquired Beats for US $3 billion in a cash and stock deal, the largest acquisition in Apple's history.

Beat

Beat or beats may refer to:

Business and organisations

Common usage

Beats (video game)

Beats is a rhythm-based video game for the Sony PlayStation Portable handheld gaming system. It was released in 2007 at the PlayStation Store.

Description

In addition to downloading music from the Internet, users may also use their own music to play along to in the My Music Challenge mode. Beats automatically loads the track titles and artist names of the songs it finds on the user's PSP. However, the game will only read up to 127 tracks for the user to choose from. There is as yet no explanation from Sony for this limitation, nor is it obvious how the game determines which 127 tracks are loaded from the library. (What is known is that the game loads the same set of tracks from the user's /MUSIC directory each time.)

During the game, three stationary targets, or landing points, (just one in Novice mode) are spaced evenly at the center of the screen. Symbols appear from off the screen and glide towards these targets in rhythm with the music. The symbols represent notes that players are meant to synchronize their button presses to and are identified by the four PlayStation face buttons: circle, "x", square, and triangle. These notes are generated based on the rhythm of the music using a beat tracking algorithm. While often occurring on the beat, notes can also occur off the beat at times. Tracks with greater emphasis on rhythm, especially techno songs with a strong, well-defined beat or powerful bass lines, generate the best in-game beat patterns.

Beat (music)

In music and music theory, the beat is the basic unit of time, the pulse (regularly repeating event), of the mensural level (or beat level). The beat is often defined as the rhythm listeners would tap their toes to when listening to a piece of music, or the numbers a musician counts while performing, though in practice this may be technically incorrect (often the first multiple level). In popular use, beat can refer to a variety of related concepts including: tempo, meter, specific rhythms, and groove.

Rhythm in music is characterized by a repeating sequence of stressed and unstressed beats (often called "strong" and "weak") and divided into bars organized by time signature and tempo indications.

Metric levels faster than the beat level are division levels, and slower levels are multiple levels. See Meter (music)#Metric structure. Beat has always been an important part of music.

Downbeat and upbeat

The downbeat is the first beat of the bar, i.e. number 1. The upbeat is the last beat in the previous bar which immediately precedes, and hence anticipates, the downbeat. Both terms correspond to the direction taken by the hand of a conductor.

Electronics

Electronics is the science of how to control electric energy, energy in which the electrons have a fundamental role. Electronics deals with electrical circuits that involve active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive electrical components and interconnection technologies. Commonly, electronic devices contain circuitry consisting primarily or exclusively of active semiconductors supplemented with passive elements; such a circuit is described as an electronic circuit.

The nonlinear behaviour of active components and their ability to control electron flows makes amplification of weak signals possible, and electronics is widely used in information processing, telecommunication, and signal processing. The ability of electronic devices to act as switches makes digital information processing possible. Interconnection technologies such as circuit boards, electronics packaging technology, and other varied forms of communication infrastructure complete circuit functionality and transform the mixed components into a regular working system.

Electronic musical instrument

An electronic musical instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronics. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical audio signal that ultimately drives a loudspeaker.

An electronic instrument might include a user interface for controlling its sound, often by adjusting the pitch, frequency, or duration of each note. However, it is increasingly common to separate user interface and sound-generating functions into a music controller (input device) and a music synthesizer, respectively, with the two devices communicating through a musical performance description language such as MIDI or Open Sound Control.

All electronic musical instruments can be viewed as a subset of audio signal processing applications. Simple electronic musical instruments are sometimes called sound effects; the border between sound effects and actual musical instruments is often hazy.

Electronic musical instruments are now widely used in most styles of music. Development of new electronic musical instruments, controllers, and synthesizers continues to be a highly active and interdisciplinary field of research. Specialized conferences, notably the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, have organized to report cutting-edge work, as well as to provide a showcase for artists who perform or create music with new electronic music instruments, controllers, and synthesizers.

Electronics (magazine)

Electronics was an American trade journal that covered the radio industry and its later spin-offs in the mid-to-late 20th century. Its first issue was dated in April 1930. The periodical was published under the title Electronics until 1984, when it changed temporarily to the new title ElectronicsWeek, but then reverted again to the original title Electronics in 1985. The ISSN for the corresponding periods are: 0013-5070 for the 1930–1984 issues, 0748-3252 for the 1984–1985 issues with title ElectronicsWeek, and 0883-4989 for the 1985–1995 issues. It was published by McGraw-Hill until 1988, when it was sold to the Dutch company VNU. VNU sold its American electronics magazines to Penton Publishing the next year.

Generally a monthly magazine, its frequency and page count varied with the state of the industry, until its end in 1995. More than its principal rival Electronic News, it balanced its appeal to managerial and technical interests (at the time of its 1992 makeover, it described itself as a magazine for managers). The magazine was best known for publishing the April 19, 1965 article by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, in which he outlined what came to be known as Moore's Law.