iPianos ’05: 5 Mac Grand Pianos, $55

Post Musical Instruments has won acclaim for its piano sampling banks; now US$55 buys you iPianos '05, five of its piano samples for use in Apple's GarageBand and Logic (Express and Pro) — a major upgrade from the instrument that comes in the box. That's PMI's Bosendorfer 290, Yamaha C7, Steinway D and the EMPEROR […]

OS X Tiger Coming; How’s Audio Doing? (and Windows?)

Apple's Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger should be out very soon; eWeek reports shipping is likely by mid-month or end-of-month at latest. So far, the only major application CDM knows to be compatible with Tiger is Ableton Live 4.11, which introduced compatibility tweaks versus 4.1. We're still waiting on a long-promised update to Apple Logic […]

Moog, Prophet Clones: From Software to Hardware

Our coverage of the new Creamware Moog/Prophecy-5 hardware continues with a look at the previous Creamware offering . . . You thought all hardware was going to be transitioning to software plug-in? Think again. By using hardware DSP chips, Creamware has been able to create perfect emulations of original Minimoog and Prophet-5 hardware. The original […]

Memory (Free): Sample and Loop with P5 Data Glove (Win)

Good news: White Noise Audio Software's free Memory plug-in lets you sample loops of audio in real-time, adjusting both loop length and filter cutoff for some crazy live loop-playing. Did I mention it's free? Insanely great news: You can control this mayhem using a $20-30 P5 Data Glove game controller. I leave it up to […]

NoteGraphica: Draw Your Own Waves (Win)

Boring bits: Windows VSTi, 8-voice polyphony, two oscillators plus one noise generator, eight envelopes, 1 filter, 2 LFOs, built-in delay/chorus FX — all important, but you've seen it before. Cool bits: You can drawn in your wave shapes, and it's free. Now has NoteGraphica got your attention?

Nintendo, Interactive Artists — Whither the Stylus?

Convincing people to embrace new control methods is hard. Just ask Nintendo. Sure, here at CDM we talk about making music with a graphic tablet input, sock puppets — you love that. But the gaming market is conservative; many still don't get the inclusion of a stylus on the Nintendo DS. And that, friends, has […]

Tabletop, Block-Based Music Making: The List

There's been an explosion of so-called "tangible interfaces" for music: the basic scenario is, there's a table, possibly with projections, and little blocks or objects or projected thingies you can play around with and move to produce sound. (Tangible = something physical you can move or touch, as opposed to an interface that's intangible, like […]

Creamware’s Minimax, Profit-5: Analog Sounds in Cheap Packages

As the industry trends toward digital sound and plug-ins (or so we were told), we increasingly have . . . wha? More hardware emulating old analog classics? And now at prices under US$1000? Believe it. Creamware has previewed two new hardware boxes, the Minimax ASB and Profit-5 ASB. They don't mention the Minimoog or Prophet-5 […]

SxSW: Trick Out Your iPod Video

Reader Chad points out that, among video coverage of the likes of Al Franken and Luke/Owen Wilson, you can watch random video clips of our 'How to Trick Out Your iPod' panel (hi QT / lo QT) Edited in, how shall we say, an unusual way — mostly random bits of me talking and curiously […]

04/01: Wing Endorses M-Audio

No . . . not Wings, Wing, one of the hotest vocal artists on the planet. If you haven't heard this Hong Kong native yet (she was recently featured on South Park, a TV show that has launched . . . or re-launched . . . many a pop superstar), you're missing out on incredibly […]