Bless Cakewalk. While most of the music software business lags behind on the latest computer tech, these guys are out on the bleeding edge. They’re one of the first developers in any product category (not just music) to take advantage of the 64-bit edition of Windows. And they’ve been busily testing all the high-end PC […]

Moog fever is now officially out of control. As anxious Moog fans wait for the announcement of — some new synth — March 29, they’ll take any tiny crumb suggesting details of the new instrument. Even when it’s wrong. Case in point: the Moog Solar, which sites like Gearjunkies have been declaring “the new Moog”. […]

Wallace Winfrey follows up on last week’s story on rackable PCs for music with more tips for building your own PC case. Add a 64-bit AMD CPU and a PCIe audio interface, and you’ve got a serious performance beast for audio production. The case/power supply maker Antec has a couple of rack-mount enclosures targeted at […]

Blog haze: it’s the dimmed state of consciousness that comes from reading too many blog entries about such and such a remix creative commons resampled installation art piece about intellectual prop . . . there, see I’ve already fallen asleep. But wait, this is really, truly, incredibly cool. If you don’t believe me, just watch […]

Reader Nat Slater, aka 601 (see band page and hear some tunes on his MySpace page) responds to our ongoing racked-PC rig series with tips from building his own rig: Love the blog; thought I would chip in on the current run of articles about rackmounting PCs. I have just done the same thing after […]

It sounds perhaps too good to be true. The RealThing is an external analog/digital hardware device that connects to computer VST plug-ins. For true analog synthesis, the hardware is controlled via 14-bit MIDI data (rather than 0-127 MIDI messages which would produce stepped sweeps). The box includes both digital and analog oscillators, as well as […]

Old, but worth mentioning . . . if for no other reason that you’re thinking about color in new ways as you stare into your green beer for St. Patrick’s Day. (Or even a green river, a la Chicago.) The Music Animation Machine renders familiar music as series of colored bars, in still image or […]

The quest to reinvent the piano-style keyboard continues. Inventors have updated two efforts to design button-covered instruments with alternative pitch layouts. Is this a musical revolution — or just an attempt to play faster scales with less practice that will result in repetitive stress injuries?

The one significant edge of the PC platform is the one it’s always had: wide-open hardware possibilities, whether it’s home-built PCs or the variety of PC makers. That means that when it comes to rack-mounting a PC, your options are quite broad.

Congratulations, digital musicians: you’re on the cutting edge. Your needs for performance, quiet, power-efficient systems, and reliability are well beyond the average PC user. For that reason, I asked custom audio PC maker Rain Recording for some thoughts on the new Intel Core architecture announced last week (which is also relevant to Mac users — […]