Server Fixed: Everything Back, Peter Runs Away

It’s been an extremely eventful couple of weeks, from the inside of the site anyway. From the outside it probably just looked like downtime, reduced posting frequency, more downtime, images disappear, images reappear, more downtime, more images disappear, and now everything is fixed. This all came about when the (now ex-) CDM site host 1and1 […]

Temporary Maintenance: Comments, Forums Back Soon

As of about 3AM Eastern Time, CDM’s forums and comments are offline while we migrate to a new server. We’ll have them back within a few hours, and hopefully other than that, all you’ll notice is improved performance! Thanks for your patience. Note: We are experiencing difficulties with our integrated image system. We expect to […]

Korg President Michael Kovins Has Passed Away

We’ve just received sad news via Korg USA: Korg USA mourns the passing of company President Michael Kovins. Michael, who worked with the company for 26 years, served as Korg USA President for the last 14 of those years. A respected music industry figure, Michael was diagnosed with Leukemia nine years ago and fought the […]

Drums in Glorious Mono: Free Reason ReFill for Reason Drum Kit Owners

Ah, sweet, sweet mono: because two speakers is really too many. Part of the idea behind the Reason Drum Kits 2 was providing alternative sampled drums with different miking configurations for different sounds, so in that spirit, the Props are giving away a mono set to registered RDK users. (Hey, why not give it to […]

Composer’s Studio Goes Digital: Tech Toys and Inspiration

Now that the rest of our studio has gone digital, the approach to producing score for acoustic instruments has changed, too. Here’s a look at some of my favorite toys and tools for keeping music flowing. You’d have to be a true Luddite to argue that word processors are bad for writing. Blogs, perhaps, sometimes […]

How To: Solve Garbled Audio on Windows by Adjusting Driver Settings

Ever suffered garbled audio on Windows and couldn’t figure out why? Driver settings were likely to blame. Audio on the Mac is now essentially plug and play; I don’t remember the last time I even touched an audio driver setting other than to switch from one device to another (switching between devices also works better […]

A New Way of Learning Orchestration: Online, Free, Interactive

Talk about digital technology and music, and people are often skeptical: doesn’t technology get in the way of making music? But technology and music have always been interwined, and even for advanced composers, better understanding the technology of how acoustic instruments work is fundamental to realizing musical ideas. Unfortunately, orchestration books, despite their best intentions, […]

Free Listening: Making Instruments Panel, Kelp Horns, Circuit-Bent Teletubbies from Maker Faire (Updated)

Marc Weidenbaum of Disquiet writes to let us know that free audio is available of the Maker Faire panel on creating instruments: Instrument Panel MP3 and Commentary [Disquiet] Archive.org details and MP3 download Other featured speakers: Krys Bobrowski, Tom Koch (aka univac) and Chachi Jones, and they brought some really cool stuff: Bobrowski brought along […]

Macworld Verdict: MacBook Pro Blazes Through Logic

It’s the moment of truth: we finally get to see how Intel Macs compare to G5 and G4 Macs when running serious audio software. I got my first opportunity to work with James Galbraith and Macworld Labs to put Apple’s Intel-based Macs through their paces running the new Intel-native Logic Pro 7.2. The results were […]