From behind the long-gone, so-called “iron curtain,” nearly-lost musical innovation is beginning to become available. But perhaps more than any geo-political change, the power of an Internet-based community hungry to share knowledge is making national borders that once isolated information melt away. Earlier this week, I shared reflections I wrote up for Amsterdam’s STEIM on […]

Readers recently observed that your writer/editor is biased toward the aesthetic design of certain controllers. If that annoys you, try to focus on the lighter elements in this article to take your mind off things, and remind yourself that the weekend is near, because you’re probably going to spot that bias arising again. Steinberg this […]

With laidback, exotic grooves and richly-coordinated interlaced cello, saxophone, turntable, and electronics, Archie Pelago’s music relies on some serious technological savvy. To be sure, all you really need to play instruments and computers and turntables together is to get into a room and start jamming. But to realize their specific musical vision, the trio of […]

Casper Industries’ Peter Edwards performs live at Handmade Music in Manhattan, at Culturefix. Why DIY, anyway? As we prepare for a special Handmade Music afternoon hosted by Amsterdam’s STEIM research center, my co-curator Takuro Mizuta Lippit (dj sniff) asked me to answer that question. Here’s what I wrote for STEIM’s international Patterns and Pleasure festival. […]

lofi Rosa Menkman – A Vernacular of File Formats View more documents from Rosa Menkman Can hacking the innards of a file give you insight into how the underlying data works – and how to unlock the aesthetic of a digital file? Here’s one way to look at that question. Rosa Menkman, presenting at the […]

ProRes encoding. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Satoshi Tomiyama. Big news for codec nerds – the major free video tool is adding support for Apple’s ProRes format. Spotted on the ffmpeg news feed: FFmpeg now has a ProRes decoder in master git. We want to support more raw or 10bit or broadcast codecs. We need samples of the […]

They’re not doing this with Reason – don’t get too excited – but Propellerhead are at least adopting this approach for upgraders from Reason + Record. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Oli Shaw. You’ve seen “pay what you want” pricing for self-released albums on Bandcamp, and independent donationware software. But you certainly haven’t seen it in a major […]

If you’ve got a whole bunch of colored lights, it seems only right to do something with them. Cacheflow sends a fun little hack with a Novation Launchpad. Of course, turning a Launchpad into a live EQ display means you can’t simultaneously use its lights to, like, play the Launchpad, but provided you have another […]

Click “Timeline” instead of “Sceneline,” and Premiere Elements 10 becomes a more conventional editor. Macworld has published the review I wrote of Premiere Elements 10. Windows users for some time have enjoyed budget-priced video editors from Sony and Adobe; the Mac user base has had only Final Cut Express. Then, Adobe brought their Premiere Elements […]

An Ableton rig with a dramatically-lit Novation Launchpad grid controller. Photo (CC-BY-SA) alexwire. Ableton Live fans hungry for sounds, what a good half-year it’s been. AfroDJMac alone has been busy putting together delicious-sounding, versatile racks of virtual Ableton-ready gear. After six months of contributing free downloads and videos – and discovering the use of this […]