Two common services are the biggest culprits for “disk churning” behavior in Vista, and they’ll be familiar from XP. Now, tame that disk access! A common complaint of users who have just installed Vista is that the disk starts churning endlessly. Any kind of frequent disk access on the same volume on which you have […]

Is the UI in Vista taking far too big a toll on your system? For now, under some circumstances, that seems to be the case. Here’s what I’ve seen, plus how to turn ths crud off. (It’s unscientific, so take it with a grain of salt, but this CPU graph actually did this just moving […]

Imagine the Apple TV as live music and visual instrument, and not just a way of watching archived Battlestar Galactica? Our friend Jeff Gambera has been busy hacking his Apple TV for just such unusual purposes. He’s gotten the real-time audio and music workstation Ableton Live working; even the demo song runs. (Plenty of people […]

JazzMutant’s Lemur touchscreen turned a lot of heads, at least as a concept: precise, multi-touch tracking that could follow all ten of your fingers independently, and interactive, custom controller touch layouts looking like something out of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was the good news. The bad news: difficult assignments for OpenSoundControl (OSC), extra […]

Ronald Stewart, creator of the mobile, Linux-powered Trinity DAW device, writes to tell us the prototype had its first public appearance at the recent Linux Audio Conference: We ran the device for 7 hours (3.5 hours battery/3.5 hours on wall power supply) with zero hangs and everything worked under various multiple applications running. USB device […]

Sometimes the best way to fix something is to break it. That applies to development processes as well as software itself. After some audio developers and users raised frustrations over compatibility issues with Audio Units and Mac OS X 10.4.9, a member of the Apple Core Audio team responded on the Core Audio development list […]

This week in synths with Matrixsynth, the obsessively-prolific synth lovers’ blog: a master modular synth builder on how modulars could be more affordable, a blog time capsule full of out-of-print music, and a “Welsh Minimoog” model E. Here’s Matrix: Grant Richter of Wiard on Cutting the Cost of Modulars A Modular Renaissance The following is […]

Move over, Adobe — Ubuntu Studio, due in April, promises to put a full, completely open-source graphics package together for Linux. The OS and apps will all be bundled together for easy installation. We recently covered pure:dyne, a high-performance visual OS. Ubuntu Studio looks a little friendlier and broader for newcomers; it’ll be interesting if […]

Linux is looking better and better as a fully open-source, multimedia-optimized operating system for visualists. Adobe has announced the availability of Flash Player for Linux. The bad news is, it’s x86 only, and as expected, there may be some issues. But the good news is, it’s here, and early reports indicate it works. Even as […]