While out of the budget of many home musicians, Pro Tools HD remains the lifeblood of the studio, broadcast, and live worlds. Make no mistake – even in a slow-moving economy, that’s still big business. Users sometimes accept Avid’s hardware grudgingly, but revisions are significant news. Avid has promised a series of new products for […]

This image, via The Bridge 1.0 manual, reveals the “Ableton Panel,” by which Live appears as a sort of virtual device inside the Serato DJ app. We’ve known since January that Ableton Live, the live production software, and Serato Scratch Live, a leading virtual vinyl and DJ app, were to be connected with new software […]

Great music vendors think alike? Denon also aims for the all-in-one DJ market, and those ready to drop a grand on one piece of kit that solves everything. Photo courtesy Denon. This week, DJing is in the spotlight as DJ Expo, a significant trade show, hits Atlantic City, New Jersey. So it’s a good time […]

Milkymist One is an all-in-one visualist workstation with a permissive open (Creative Commons) license. (The license note says, “Commercial use within the terms of the license is encouraged” — emphasis theirs.) The design is still in-progress and not available for sale, but it looks promising, with complete MIDI and DMX support, plus integrated video input […]

Somehow in May, I missed the introduction of Codanova’s VMX V64. With a huge jog wheel in the center, button grid, and lots of faders and knobs, it presents an interesting, visualist-friendly MIDI controller alternative to Livid’s Ohm64. Like the Ohm64, it takes the square button trigger design cue from the monome, but eschews that […]

Somehow in May, I missed the introduction of Codanova’s VMX V64. With a huge jog wheel in the center, button grid, and lots of faders and knobs, it presents an interesting, visualist-friendly MIDI controller alternative to Livid’s Ohm64. Like the Ohm64, it takes the square button trigger design cue from the monome, but eschews that […]

As expected, Native Instruments has announced Traktor Kontrol S4, an all-in-one integrated hardware controller and software system for digital DJing. The hardware does look extensive. Highlights: Integrated audio interface Four-channel mixer section Full support for looping, effects control, browsing for tracks in the library Sample Decks, controlled from the hardware, allow beat-synced sample manipulation, with […]

The iPad may be the catalyst, but look beyond the platform, and you’ll see a reinvigorated examination of how to think about musical interfaces. If you’re looking to relax and make some musical noises on your iPad, check out the videos above. It isn’t actually necessary to fully understand the design work behind the interface […]

Digital memory, circa 1960s NASA, would be unrecognizable to us today. But it is digital. Photo contrasts an Apollo memory core (back) with modern avionics circuitry. Photo (CC-BY) Steve Jurvetson. The always-thoughtful Marc Weidenbaum of Disquiet picks up on my tongue-in-cheek comment, in which I question my own wisdom in dubbing this site “Create Digital […]

Visual Music Collaborative 2010 from Aaron Meyers on Vimeo. Aaron Meyers and Aaron Koblin, each with their own background in expressive code and the connection of music and visuals, offered a terrific workshop last month at the Eyebeam research center here in New York. They involved Ghostly International, a label that has enlisted designers, interactive […]