What, you say you don’t understand the ongoing obsession with MIDI control of games and game control of MIDI? Fine: here’s your killer app, likely to silence all critics. It’s MIDI-controlled Pong for Mac OS X. Now, truly: who wouldn’t want that? The real question is, can we get two MIDI guitars together and manage […]

If you thought the “keytar” went out with other 80s fads like legwarmers, think again. Roland not only still makes keytars, they’ve actually upgraded the tech. It seems some keyboardists still don’t want to be exiled behind a wall of keyboards while the guitarists get all the babes. “Just strap it on and you’re front-of-stage […]

SonicState has the scoop on an upcoming M-Audio palm recorder called Flash Tracker shown at MusikMesse, not yet officially announced. (Hint to manufacturers: if you’re trying to keep a product secret, don’t show it at a trade show.) The Flash Tracker is Compact Flash powered, like Edirol’s R-1 which I’ve covered here on CDM. Getting […]

Yes, CDM will be taking a brief broadcast break Friday April 22 through Monday April 25 as I’m on the road. I’ll be back Tuesday with several special reports, though, including the latest interactive wizardry from New York’s Studio IMC show at the Chelsea Art Museum. See you then!

The Ergodex DX-1 keyboard is a custom keyboard for adding up to 25 macro-powered keystrokes in any arrangement you like. Engadget, Music Thing, and Gizmodo are all talking about it. I’ve found out some more details that will be important to musicians: It’s Windows-only. Ergodex are “investigating” Mac or Linux support, their marketing person told […]

The turntable tables keep rolling in. Gizmodo has an entry from the Milan Furniture Fair which is beautifully crafted, though for some reason I imagine it surrounded by shag carpeting. Probably just me, but we’ll never know — no link to the designer. Todd Campbell writes CDM with

As readers pointed out, I got things a bit wrong on what Trent Reznor uses in the studio: it’s not a matter of Pro Tools OR Logic. It’s Pro Tools AND Logic AND Reaktor and Absynth and Traktor and GRM Tools and three Macs and three interfaces (with high-end HD Digi hardware) and a Minimoog […]

We had an early look last week at the upcoming Mawzer Control Surface, a modular box that lets you combine faders, knobs, and controls via plug-and-play modules to form whatever control box you can imagine. Since then, the Mawzer folks have gradually been feeding us more details. Finally we have a high-res image to drool […]

Color me lazy. I'm perfectly willing to settle for a software solution that lets you hook up PS2 controllers via USB to music, like PSmaX. Not Jeff Hoefs: he had to use Nintendo PowerGloves, PowerPads (mats), and Uforce controllers (infrared), which meant digging into a little DIY serial-to-MIDI conversion and assembly code (see MAKE:Blog for […]

I’ve been playing with the Nine Inch Nails track (reported by many, many sites in the last few days: NIN made their new single available in GarageBand 2.0 format). I have to say, this is a lot of fun. To me, the song sounds better with more tracks muted: the lesson here is, all of […]