Who says technology doesn’t last? The Apple II platform will be 35 years old in April, yet it’s still going strong. It even gets a brand-new drum machine software, launched this month, complete with eight wavetable-based drum sounds, and a clever sequencer. The surprise: the whole combination, delivered on a 5 1/4″ floppy disk, can […]

In a marvel of DIY engineering, one intrepid user of the tracker-made-modern music making environment Renoise has reconstructed the basic elements of the Ableton Live interface. With quantized clip launching on channels and even a crossfader, it’s unmistakably a copy of what Ableton does. I don’t think you’d dump your install of Ableton for this; […]

I was actually pleasantly surprised to see our MeeBlip open source synthesizer make a cameo in the latest teaser video for Lemur on iPad, the app I saw in action at Berlin’s Watergate. I expect we’ll have full details soon – and I hope to visit the MeeBlip-in-a-book again soon; even apart from being flattered […]

“Folk music of the 21st Century” – radio broadcaster, jazz aficionado, and jazz-based Ableton Live instrumentalist / remix artist Nick Francis really sums up what this whole site is about. As he chops up jazz greats in Ableton, his mash-up music chops are as much musical analysis as they are performance. He walks through his […]

More than anything, a tablet resembles a piece of paper. Apple’s iPad rests easily on a music stand, and – while in this generation, it’s a bit small and low-resolution – is at least the beginning of an ideal score reader. We took a look at Avid’s Scorch, a leading contender for your iPad score-reading […]

Mapping Festival is a real-world hub for visuals, a place where photons against surfaces and human visualists converge in the physical realm, and not just online. So, we’re very excited to see what happened in 2011 – and to look forward to 2012. We’ve been watching some of those videos in the past two months: […]

Deep thought: if this is what this young person’s baby toy looks like, what will his computer look like? Father Matt Durant writes to share a surprisingly spacey, expressive solo by his 16-week-old baby son: My baby son, Austin, touched an iPad for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I loaded up Moog’s […]

3D developers had real reason to be thankful last week, on the occasion of American Thanksgiving. Doom 3, after some wrangling, was set free with a GNU GPL open source license. The game data itself isn’t free, covered by the existing proprietary EULA, but you get all the logic and rendering of the game on […]

The stream of iPad and iPhone apps for musicians gushes endlessly, but among that river of software, there are some visible trends. Demanded by users, features for sharing between apps – and other mobile artists – flourish. Hardware heavyweight KORG has been one of the developers that’s been especially good at offering that kind of […]

Revealing a deeper understanding of what sound means in our world, how it works as “currency” and “ghost,” Performance Artist Christine Sun Kim explores sonic media without the benefit of hearing. She finds how to make its presence more physical, to find greater dimensions of movement, and to make a personal connection beyond what most […]