While out of the budget of many home musicians, Pro Tools HD remains the lifeblood of the studio, broadcast, and live worlds. Make no mistake – even in a slow-moving economy, that’s still big business. Users sometimes accept Avid’s hardware grudgingly, but revisions are significant news. Avid has promised a series of new products for […]

Handmade Music returns August 29 to New York City – now in Manhattan at the new Culturefix space on the Lower East Side. Beginners, this is your chance to learn about electronics and sound making, with a newcomer-friendly workshop on making a photo-theremin – and yes, you’ll even learn to solder. (Like knitting, you’ll find […]

From our call for CDM reader studios, Eric Beam’s studio. In his setup: Windows 7 64-bit, Cakewalk’s SONAR 8.5 DAW (with native 64-bit support), and the excellent modular patching environment Plogue Bidule. Click through to Flickr for a closer look. Photo (CC-BY) Eric Beam. This week, while we poll readers to find out what platforms […]

Image (CC-BY-SA) by opensourceway, who has a particular bias — but, as it happens, our poll can be returned on both of these devices. So there. We hear your opinions in comments (sometimes loudly). Now it’s time to be counted. Which computing platforms do you own, and which do you use for music – desktop […]

Ah, Mondays. If you’re looking for a way to brighten your work week and you’ve got an iPod touch or iPhone you can drop into your pocket, iOS music and audio developer Pulse Code tells us they’ve made four of its apps free for this week only, through August 8. That includes BtBx [iTunes], a […]

Apple today, alongside beefed-up iMacs with quad-core and Mac Pro towers with twelve, introduced a $69 Bluetooth trackpad accessory with multi-touch gesture support. http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/ I’m not a huge fan of trackpads over mice, but yes, this does give you a cheap multi-touch input to play with. And we haven’t seen much in the dirt-cheap, under-$100 […]

CoGe 1.0 – Tutorial 2 – Using the preview window to forward key/mouse events from luma beamerz on Vimeo. CoGe, the semi-modular, Quartz Composer-powered, free visualist tool for Mac has gotten a significant new beta build. Added in this version: MSAA anti-aliasing for rendering (very nice). OpenSoundControl support (OSC is natively supported in QC, but […]

In this guest column, we turn to veteran synthesist and music tech expert Jim Aikin. When Jim wants to do digital synthesis, one of the tools to which he turns is a veritable favorite with a direct-line legacy to the beginnings of computer sound. That doesn’t mean Csound hasn’t kept with the times, though, or […]

Touch DJ, one of the early DJ entries on iOS. These apps could tie more closely into iTunes libraries on the device, broadening their appeal. Photo (CC-BY-ND) William Brawley. Following mobile music making means keeping up with technical details that are complex and changing. And because the Internet is open, when you post a story […]

Yeah, for a lot of the northern hemisphere, one of these kinds of weekends. Photo (CC-BY) Frenchman Julien Haler. (Oh yeah, we really don’t say it enough – thanks, France! In fact, jeez, double thanks!) Summer days and evenings for a lot of us are a perfect time for buying new records, listening to new […]