The original promise of digital music distribution was supposed to be greater variety, the availability of out-of-print music, communities serving specific interests that had been under-served by mass culture, high-quality audio, and lots of choice. Slowly, I think, that promise is finally being delivered. Readers of a music technology site may not think much about […]

Java loves music and multimedia, but — well, we may actually have to let it die on the Mac in order for it to be reborn. (For the uninitiated, that triangular thing is the open-sourced Java mascot, Duke. Shown here with Project LookingGlass’ brilliant creator.) Photo: yuichi.sakuraba, via Flickr. Java may not be on the […]

Pioneer have broken new ground in overstatement with the announcement of their upcoming Video/Audio mixer, the US$6000 SVM-1000. World’s first mixer for 4-channel audio and video. I guess they completely missed the AVM02 then? I’m not sure how, it’s rather big and heavy. Does anybody actually believe marketing people? Do they even believe themselves when […]

Native Instruments and MOTU have each posted compatibility update pages for Mac OS X Leopard. There’s not a whole lot of information yet (particularly form MOTU), but now’s the time to bookmark those pages! Be sure to watch comments from readers for other helpful compatibility information — much of it positive at this point. Native […]

The Monome‘s clean-slate grid of light-up buttons has proven a huge hit, not only among musicians but multimedia artists in general. It’s been such an Internet sensation that many people assume some significant company is behind it. In reality, part of the clarity of the design comes from the homemade approach to design and construction, […]

Seeing through walls in Chris’ Out of Bounds. Photo by the artist, via Flickr. Chris O’Shea (also of the blog Pixelsumo) has a brilliant installation that allows people to see through walls. It’s an idea I’ve seen done before, but Chris actually makes the effect convincing, by giving visitors an infrared torch (what we’d call […]