To start our Monday morning right, here’s some nice, rhythmic glitch in the Mac tool Quartz Composer, using a combination of custom and off-the-shelf plug-ins — bless you, modularity. It’s a lovely demonstration of how having an ample set of pluggable tools can help you to produce the results you want. PXN_richterizz from pixel noizz […]

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 […]

What’s New in Resolume 3.2 from Resolume on Vimeo. Resolume 3.2 is now out in the wild; this all-in-one audiovisual performance app for Mac and Windows continues to improve. (The most recent convert I know: Flying Lotus, better known for his music than his visuals, is having a blast.) The big news in 3.2 on […]

CoGe 1.0 Beta 2 Teaser and interactive Quad Warp demo from luma beamerz on Vimeo. CoGe 1.0 is now in its second public beta, bringing this modular, Quartz-Composer-based visualist app to Mac users. 1.0 introduced a new rendering pipeline, new user interface, new UI, and richer Quartz Composer support. Every single element of the visual […]

This cat is … slightly camouflaged. Photo (CC) Tambako The Jaguar (but yes, this is a snow leopard). Mac OS X 10.6.3 looks like it may be a significant update for graphics performance, but good luck trying to figure out what’s changed from the vague update log. There is mention of “compatibility issues with OpenGL-based […]

DMX (aka DMX512) is the lingua franca for lighting that MIDI is for music. (It even has a number of similarities to MIDI, and as with MIDI, I do hope eventually we’ll see more intelligent networked devices – but, for now, it’s what you use.) The folks at Synthe-FX have developed a mobile app with […]

Quartz Composer MIDI visualization from Greg Lorincz on Vimeo. Sometimes the first step is the toughest. So here, in just 60 seconds, is the simplest possible route to visualizing music by routing MIDI into Quartz Composer. For those of you just joining us, that’s the free modular patching environment for visuals that comes with Mac […]

GrandVJ, ArKaos’ Mac/Windows, ground-up new software (replacing the legacy ArKaos product) may have had minimalist beginnings. But recent builds have added some really powerful features. Most importantly, there’s more elaborate two-way controller support. There’s a preset for the Akai APC40, but other hardware – like Livid’s Ohm64 and recently-announced Block, the classic monome, and the […]

Ed.: Many of Snow Leopard’s improvements – new, under-the-hood enhancements for 64-bit and multithreading – don’t impact visual creation right away. But significant changes to Quartz Composer could be the most useful, most immediate reasons to look at the latest version of Apple’s OS. Resident Mac guru Anton Marini looks at those changes for CDM. […]