Why shouldn’t a digital download be better, not worse, than a CD release? Sit in a studio as most of your favorite albums are recorded, mixed, and mastered, and odds are the digital material is being recorded at higher bit depths and sample rates. And while the perceptual record is more mixed, there’s also no […]

I’ve been following Maschine since prototype stages. The idea was at once obvious and welcome: build a software workstation, tightly integrated with pad hardware control, that fuses hardware sampler working methods with the on-screen flexibility of software. It’s software that focuses on working with sounds and patterns, outside the DAW-style metaphors. Of course, there’s one […]

The infamous FL Studio “giant screenshot.” Go ahead – eat up our bandwidth and have a closer look at what’s in FL 10, visually; click for the full-size version. FL Studio, aka Fruity Loops, has always been like opening a toybox of sound goodies for sound nerds – up to 30 instruments and 40+ effects […]

Through Thursday, March 31 at midnight, you can grab SoundToys’ Devil-Loc plug-in for free, concluding a giveaway that began at the TapeOp party at South by Southwest. Devil-Loc is a nice-sounding emulation of the Shure M62. Chris Conover, in thanks for a Record beta I sent his way, points to the offer, a code (which […]

There’s a special kind of genius that makes you transform any game system into a live visual tool. Whatever that force is, it’s strong with pikilipita. He’s build VJ software for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Game Park GP2X as well as the PlayStation 2, all released free. Now, he adopts the Korean game […]

There’s a special kind of genius that makes you transform any game system into a live visual tool. Whatever that force is, it’s strong with pikilipita. He’s build VJ software for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Game Park GP2X as well as the PlayStation 2, all released free. Now, he adopts the Korean game […]

Three tablets – iPad 2, Motorola Xoom, and HP Touchpad. Improving like wine with age, or corked? Photo (CC-BY) Justin Ried. We’ve been watching tablets for some time now, looking for the perfect, mobile visualist performance tool. For the first time, those results begin to look genuinely promising. But here’s a surprise: it’s the Android-powered […]

We looked at the arc controller, and interviewed creator Brian Crabtree, early this year. In a way, the design is as much conceptual, kinetic sculpture attached to a computer as it is music hardware. It’s not for everyone, but it does inspire some sound designers and composers whose work I love, giving it a secondary […]

Charming, original hand-draw illustrations by Peter Jungers spice up the title. Sound and music for games is already a growing frontier for professional music careers; mobile, then, triply so. But with the expanded opportunities come unique challenges. Learning about them requires real-world experience, and short of word of mouth, that kind of knowledge is often […]

If you’re in the NYC area, we hope you’ll mark your calendar; if not, we have some free listening for you to explore below. Hacking and inventing, creative musicians are making and modifying the tools of their performance to express the music they imagine, with stunning variety of results. And so it is that once […]