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 […]

Mackie has released a free-for-download version of their C4 Commander software. Before we start warping this to our own purposes, let’s start with how Mackie likely intends this to be used. The C4 Commander software maps knobs and displays to a wide variety of software, plug-ins, and external MIDI hardware (new and vintage), either via […]

Apple has been making a big push to get its developers into OS X’s eye candy, including Quartz 2D and OpenGL 3D graphics. Here are two Mac applications that take advantage of gorgeous UI elements for audio analysis.

As I predicted, summer 2006 looks like the timeframe in which most Mac music software will ship with Universal binaries for Intel Macs. (All is going as I have forseen, erm, and whatnot.) Linplug is shipping their flagship RMIV analog/sampled drum machine and Albino synth first. The RMIV is available now, with new, lightweight acoustic […]