Mac Pro On Sale Now, Shipping February; What it Brings to Audio Applications

It looks like a machine from the future. It is a machine you’ll only be able to get in the future. And it may be further off before we really see music applications that reach its full potential. But it does paint a picture of a music machine that’s futuristic, and it isn’t so far […]

Apple's Final Cut Pro X 10.1 Update is Huge News, From 4K Wonders to Fewer Headaches

All of Apple’s pro apps get updates this week. Compressor adds GPU optimizations; Motion does hardware H.264 encoding and adds 4K export. But Final Cut Pro X 10.1 is the big news. It’s finally the payoff of the painful transition to the X generation. At the same time, combined with a steady parade of updates […]

Apple’s Final Cut Pro X 10.1 Update is Huge News, From 4K Wonders to Fewer Headaches

All of Apple’s pro apps get updates this week. Compressor adds GPU optimizations; Motion does hardware H.264 encoding and adds 4K export. But Final Cut Pro X 10.1 is the big news. It’s finally the payoff of the painful transition to the X generation. At the same time, combined with a steady parade of updates […]

Prophet 12, 12-voice Synth, Now as a Module, and Demonstrated by Dave Smith Himself

Strictly speaking, the Prophet 12 isn’t news. It’s just a module version of the Prophet 12 keyboard introduced earlier this year. (You can add ears and rack-mount it.) And yet, it’s getting lots of buzz online. I was thinking for a bit about why that was, and eventually arrived at this solution: for synth lovers, […]

Elektron Analog Four, Analog Keys Get Polyphony and More in Firmware Update, Available Now

A funny thing happened on the way to the resurgence of analog gear… The digital bits are still mighty cool to have. Yes, the next time someone asks you about whether the return to analog is some sort of regression to the past, you might point out that what we’re seeing is a fusion of […]

A Tangled Sculpture of Lightbulbs, Stage to Elaborate Synchronized AV Performance

In a tree-like cluster of wooden branches, 60 electronically-fired lightbulbs glow in tightly-choreographed pulses along with music. The light sculpture becomes the setting for a kind of AV dance theater, forming an otherworldly environment for narrative movement. “A Man Named Zero” is the work of Nocte and a team in the UK of performers, pairing […]

Amiga is Back: DJing with Two CDJ-Style “Turntables” will Amaze Your Friends

Eat your heart out, Traktor. Take that, CDJs. The dream of the 90s is alive, again, with new Amiga software. Akira Kei shares the project, which he and hoffman co-created and have dubbed the PT-1210 MK1. It mimics some CDJ-style features, but uses MOD files – a clever music format that employs samples and sequence […]

10 Great Releases From 2013 You Might Have Missed

Happiness is a list of new SoundCloud links to follow, records to go buy, artist names and sounds that are new – not the reappearance of repeated artists and musicians, usual suspects, and expected names, but something to actually discover. So, we’re grateful to CDM contributor Matt Earp, aka Kid Kameleon, for his selecting talents. […]

Surveilled, Controlled, Exhausted: Augmented Dance on Machine-Human Interface's Dark Side

If BODYLINE BORDERLINE takes your breath away, perhaps you can thank the fact that it takes the dancers’ breath away. Computer vision in dance is now an accepted trope, to the point of being nearly cliché. The challenge is in part that the human eye’s capacity to follow nuances in movement contrasts to the crude […]

Surveilled, Controlled, Exhausted: Augmented Dance on Machine-Human Interface’s Dark Side

If BODYLINE BORDERLINE takes your breath away, perhaps you can thank the fact that it takes the dancers’ breath away. Computer vision in dance is now an accepted trope, to the point of being nearly cliché. The challenge is in part that the human eye’s capacity to follow nuances in movement contrasts to the crude […]