Today, at last, we can announce an evolution that’s been a long time coming.
CDM is one site, with one name. And we return at last to both music and motion coverage – all in one place.
The name of the site is CDM. Since nearly the beginning, many readers in the know called this site by its acronym. It’s short, it’s easy. No one has ever gotten the other names right consistently. (Believe me; I have to shout the name regularly at clubs and such.) “Digital” was never really something that mattered to me.
So now it’s CDM.
Meet cdm.link. createdigitalmusic.com is a terrible URL – hard to read, too long. Now, all content on CDM can be reached here:
All the old URLs still work, but you can substitute this shorter domain.
Music and Motion are together at last. One of the things that has kept me going over a decade is the passion of people who believe in visual expression – not just interactive art or design, but in making visuals a live instrument on the same level as instruments that produce sound. This is something that the music community connects to in a unique way.
But I made a critical mistake ten years ago this summer when first delving into this area, and that was making this a separate site. The whole beauty of Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion was the overlap between the two.
So now, stories can be Motion stories, or Music stories, or both. And you can get all of them in one place.
If you head now to
http://createdigitalmotion.com
— you’ll discover something rather nice. All the old Create Digital Motion content is finally back online (and all the URLs work). And you’ll see that we start a new commitment to visual content again. I’ll talk more about that new direction later this week.
Wait, so why was this ever Create Digital Music in the first place?
I actually never intended the site to particularly favor “digital” tech. It was an artifact of a proposed book title for the former Peachpit Press. They wanted a book on making digital music. I wanted the book to be called Create Digital Music; the publisher went with Real World Digital Audio. In fact, I never actually intended CDM to turn into what it did; it was just meant to be the companion site to the book – but then it turned out to be more, once I got feedback from what people wanted.
But from the start, I never was particularly interested in the digital versus analog question, to be perfectly honest. I think now we live in a world that freely mixes the two more than ever; it’s actually a shame the name so long implied anything else. (I’ll save the misuse of the term “analog” for another day. If you mean “opto-mechanical,” say it!)
CDM now I think has a mission that speaks for itself. And that’s not really so much about me as it is about you. Readers passion for not just making music, but making tools that make music and appreciating the people who design them, for not just producing in the studio, but finding ways to make new tools perform live, for understanding expression and performance not just in the conventional musical mold, but in visual expression – this is what has driven the identity of this site for over ten years. Your feedback and your ideas, all those times you’ve said, “hey, look at this” — they’ve allowed us to form a small tribe together of people who believe in exploring these areas.
Now I’m pleased we have a better structure to feed all our collective curiosity. And it means that as we approach fall 2016, there’s more than ever to do.
And now, freed from people saying “created digital … media” and so on, I … will only have to resolve confusion between this site and CTM Festival. Eep.