While the 8-bit music crowd are reimagining Kraftwerk as covered by Game Boys (more on that soon), 8-bit is getting its own acoustic treatment. No, not that dude who plays a Mario Brothers medley on the piano (though adding the blindfold is a bit kinky). One-man band Jason Cox last week took Super Mario World […]

Games Week continues with the introduction of a new regular column by sound designer and game composer W. Brent Latta. First up, Brent introduces game music as an art form and ideas about how to listen to it. It’s fitting that Brent would launch his first column with a tribute to why the NES is […]

A terrific, free audio tool is lurking in Mac OS X Tiger’s developer tools. AU Lab is intended for testing Audio Unit effects and instruments, but it’s feature-packed enough to be useful to end users, too. If you haven’t already, install Xcode Tools from your Tiger install disc. Then launch Developer > Applications > Audio […]

If you haven’t seen it yet, The History of Sampling by Jesse Kriss lets you interactively navigate the links between sampled songs and samplers. Jesse’s site pulls data from the-breaks, a huge collection of sampling rap music. The real story, though, is how this site, and many other nifty new sites making rounds on the […]

If you haven’t seen it yet, The History of Sampling by Jesse Kriss lets you interactively navigate the links between sampled songs and samplers. Jesse’s site pulls data from the-breaks, a huge collection of sampling rap music. The real story, though, is how this site, and many other nifty new sites making rounds on the […]

Radio streams are just the start: there are countless reasons why you might want to sample audio from an application that lacks recording capability, from Game Boy emulators to experimental soundware. Last month, CDM shared a few tools and asked you for tips for app-to-app recording. Here are the results (which I’ve tested further): Mac […]

Keeping up with acquisitions these days is darn near impossible. We wake up this morning, and Adobe has acquired Macromedia. A few humble suggestions from the digital music / interactivity / VJ side of things (and, no, one of them is NOT "bring back SoundEdit" — you'd be amazed how many times I hear that, […]

Details have leaked out about a prototype Numark DJ mixer that can mix two iPods. I know what you're thinking: Wow, what a scoop! Where are the lawyers? Is it a fake? In fact, in a gesture of spectacularly poor industrial secrecy, it seems Numark showed off an early prototype at the Musikmesse show in […]

Dance Wednesday continues, so get your dancing shoes on. You can trigger audio and video with a Dance Dance Revolution pad (or any USB game controller). Resources: You'll want some kind of PS2-to-USB converter so you can plug it into your computer, for starters (here's an example). Then check out software like STEIM's JunXion (Mac […]

Friday we looked at a big roundup of game controllers for music, courtesy Chris O'Shea. Ready to look like a cyborg when making music? Want to keep your entire budget under US$20? Here's where to get started (thanks to atariboy for some link pointers here): Get the hardware: Pick up a P5 virtual reality gaming […]