I hate ending on sour notes. So, instead, let’s look at some positive opportunities for music distribution. Indie labels and music makers alike on this site I know have no love for Digital Rights Management, but let’s look at some alternatives, from Mozilla-based iTunes alternatives to music on sticks (and reasons to dump iTunes).

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing responds here to my commentary on platform-agnostic music listening. On a basic level, I’m not saying anything different than what Cory originally did: Windows DRM is broken and frustrates customers, and the MTP connection cripples Windows Media devices by limiting interoperability. (Try plugging a recent MTP device into a Mac […]

My first MP3 player, an original Creative Labs Nomad (one of the first MP3 players), was simple to operate. I took MP3s I’d ripped and dropped them on the device like a drive. So, what’s happened since then? Now music players have grown much more complex, deeply tied to Digital Rights Management. Some new Windows […]

Quartz Composer is a fantastic tool for interactive visuals, and it’s free with Mac OS X (you’ll need to install the developer tools). With MIDI and audio inputs, you can hook custom visuals up to your musical performance. But the program has some limitations: mapping MIDI is generally slow and arduous because of limited MIDI […]

Poor Monome, with just 64 buttons. Back in the 90s, Nicholas Fournel (who just sent us his MIDI tablet software) built a massive plexiglass touch-screen instrument called the Semekrys. Two of them were sensitive to a 1000×1000 grid. (Okay, not quite the same as 64 buttons, but then this is transparent and looks absurdly cool […]

Whether you’re a graphics artist wanting to make music in new ways or just trying to rationalize the purchase of a shiny new Wacom tablet, graphics tablets are worth a look for music control. They’re highly sensitive, intuitive instruments, and they’re fairly cheap (US$100 and up). We’ve talked about doing this before, but new and […]

It’s time to make sense of brand names / bundles / pricing / feature sets again! Today’s victim: Ableton Live. Here goes; let me know if I make this make sense. If you bought an M-Audio or Digidesign interface with Ableton Live Lite and haven’t upgraded to the full version of Live, Ableton has a […]

There’s never enough Commodore 64 music. While I’m waiting on my Prophet64 cart to arrive (see previous story), here’s some musical C64 reading (and listening) for you:

Programming offers incredible possibilities for music creation, and with the free Processing development environment for Mac, Windows, and Linux, even non-programmers can get into the artistic horizons of code. But code doesn’t always think like composers do. That’s why the new sound library jm-Etude looks promising: New sound library: jm-Etude [Code & form] jm-Etude for […]