In the never-ending quest to find just the right combination of faders and knobs for piloting your music, here’s a thought: add expansion capabilities. An upgrade to the Block, a grid grid and knob control surface by boutique Texan maker Livid, does just that. And for good measure, they’ve got a short-run iPad dock alternate, […]

Killer app: live HD visual performance. Okay… yeah, we’re crazy. While it’s not relevant to this story, this particular graphic of the Xoom has an interesting feature – the gray areas illustrate thumb range on the form factor. Photo (CC-BY) Nick Butcher. Clear all the tablet hype away, and consider this: if someone told you […]

Apple users may not know the name – FL Studio, formerly Fruity Loops, is a favorite on Windows – but FL is a favorite music making tool of the bedroom computer producer everyman. (Everywoman?) So, its imminent appearance on the iPad tablet is eagerly anticipated, even in the aftermath of GarageBand. Developers Image-Line, an independent […]

Image: mindBuffer. From an Australian curator comes a diverse compilation of “experimental electronica” spanning artists from down under, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Selected by artist / Enig-matik founder SUN IN AQUARIUS, it’s some finely-produced, “glitch-tinged” music covering a gamut of personalities, a nice sampling of some of the kind of quality work getting […]

The wonderful, sometimes-inspiring, sometimes-daunting capability of the computer is to make any sound you like. Give someone an open toolbox, and they really limited only by skill and imagination. Graphical modular environment Reaktor by Native Instruments has a reputation for crunchy granular sounds and elaborate, multi-layered glitches, and those are to some of us certainly […]

Ed.: He’s worked to translate classic hardware like the landmark Rutt-Etra to digital media – in that case, working with its original co-creator. He’s been a virtuoso of Mac visual development, building his own tools and working out an innovative way of piping live textures between applications in ways never before possible. And he’s been […]

Android just got a whole lot more interesting for hardware development. We can already run music apps and tools like Processing and (via libpd) Pure Data patches on Android. Now, you should soon be able to plug in joysticks, custom hardware, sensors, and other devices and make Android a go-anywhere live music and visual platform. […]

In the blurring areas between gaming and creation, toys and tools, there’s certainly a lot of action, spurred on by platforms for sharing software. Pulse is a new title for the iPad, an ambient rhythmic gaming experience with a unique interface centering around a series of concentric circles. The graphic design looks gorgeous in its […]

What makes music software popular? Simple recording, DJ, and remix apps unsurprisingly do well. But perhaps as a testament to the importance of individual music expression, some stranger entries do, too. And those less-typical software creations can give you new ways of exploring music creation and performance. Just take Nodal. GarageBand sits comfortably at the […]

Speaking of vvvv and audiovisual work, Boris Vitazek sends his thesis project Lucid, built with vvvv and Kinect. The documentation is a bit rough, but as an experiment, the project shows some great potential. I find myself drawn to seeing the image of the camera in the work – something that has been more present, […]