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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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?

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]