NI Discontinues Kore, Focuses on Maschine: What Happens Next, Q+A with NI

Kore is dead; long live … Maschine. Native Instruments announced this week that they’re discontinuing the Kore product line, focusing those energies on the host-plus-sampling groovebox Maschine. Kore was an approach to making instruments and processing more manageable and tactile, coupling a hardware interface and standard control mappings with a hosting tool. What first drew […]

Sociable Music Gadgets: Networked Android + Arduino Sequencer in a “Hack of Concept”

Yesterday, we saw a bit of the idea of making mobile gadgets more sociable with each other. The idea is, through network/wireless and cabled connectivity, you extend possibilities for expression, control, and collaboration with yourself and others. It’s the same thing that makes a recording studio useful: tools work together to let people work together […]

Androidcontrollerism: Hardware Options on Android, in Detail; Android Player Piano

Adding hardware to tablets, as it has with decades of computing technology, can open up new worlds for software and music. It can animate a conventional piano, or provide new physical interfaces for touching music. But let’s not wait for it to happen; let’s get hacking. Following on today’s line of thinking about hardware-augmented touch, […]

Polycode, New Open Source Framework with C++ and Lua; Awesome Pixel 3D Game Sample

Creative coding is rapidly moving from the domain of a handful of gurus to a broader audience, powered by lightweight, flexible frameworks that quickly translate code to visuals. Now, that said, the thought of another framework to learn could be overwhelming, what with the superb Cinder (C++, Mac, Windows, iOS), OpenFrameworks (C++, Mac, Windows, Linux, […]

Touch, Plus Tactile: In Gaming as in Research, Physical Controls Augment Touchscreens

The gaming industry has made their bet, and it’s that touchscreens go better with tactile controls. Might digital musicians reach the same conclusion? A funny thing has happened on the way to the touch era. The vision of a device like the iPad is minimalist to the extreme: an uninterrupted, impossibly-slim metal slate, as impenetrable […]

Platforming as Musical Interface: Jonathan Mak Shows Sound Shapes for New PlayStation Vita

Load up an Ableton set or mix samples, and you’re already in the domain of interactive music. With joysticks and arcade buttons and other controls, the blending of game and musical interface into generative compositional fusion is even clearer. It’s little wonder many electronic musicians take an interest in the nexus of gaming and music. […]

Reforge, iPad Audio Editor, Updated; 5 Ways to Make Tablet Audio Editing Workflow Work for You

Reforge, an iPad audio editor, has gotten a major update with version 2. It’s a ground-up rewrite with a new audio engine, and adds support for Sonoma’s increasingly-popular AudioCopy/AudioPaste API, which provides clipboard functionality for sound between iOS apps. The novelty of running an audio editor on a tablet is clear. But how would you […]

Motion-Controlled, Motion-Tracked, Single-Shot Music Video: Cowper – Morning Prayer

Hello CDMo! Long time no post! Apologies for my extended reclusion. In between buying a house and changing full time jobs from Web Guy to Video Guy, it’s been an exciting time to be a Jaymis. Happily, I now find myself in an ideal situation: Working as part of a small team, on interesting and […]

TuneCore: Apple iCloud will Transform Industry, Make Streaming the Norm (Wait, Really?)

This could be the biggest shock to the industry since the iPod, argues TuneCore. Photo (CC-BY-SA) strollers. Jeff Price, writing for TuneCore, has a different take on Apple’s iCloud. He thinks it will both transform the industry and shift consumer listening from downloaded files to streams. That would mean I’d have to substantially revise my […]

How’d Apple’s Cloud Do? Four Questions, Answered

Earlier today, as indie music advocates expressed concern over Apple’s iCloud today, I asked a set of questions about what I thought was relevant about these services. Those were questions not just for Apple, but any new “cloud” service. I don’t want to leave those questions dangling, now that we know more about Apple’s upcoming […]