VirSyn have announced one of the nicest effects I’ve seen yet on a mobile platform in the form of iVoxel, a vocoder for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad. On the handhelds, it looks like something you could easily hold up to your mouth and rest atop a synth; on iPad, you get a nicely-sized touchable keyboard […]
Music
In Tbilisi, music is on pause because democracy is on the line
Music Stories October 25, 2024
In music video, Lebanese duo Rust captures emotions of “Diaspora”
Music October 11, 2024
Go support these Lebanese releases on Bandcamp
Music October 4, 2024
Apple Magic Trackpad as Multi-Touch Input, and Cross-Platform Multi-Touch
Apple today, alongside beefed-up iMacs with quad-core and Mac Pro towers with twelve, introduced a $69 Bluetooth trackpad accessory with multi-touch gesture support. http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/ I’m not a huge fan of trackpads over mice, but yes, this does give you a cheap multi-touch input to play with. And we haven’t seen much in the dirt-cheap, under-$100 […]
CoGe, Quartz Composer Modular: New Beta, How to Use It for Visuals
CoGe 1.0 – Tutorial 2 – Using the preview window to forward key/mouse events from luma beamerz on Vimeo. CoGe, the semi-modular, Quartz Composer-powered, free visualist tool for Mac has gotten a significant new beta build. Added in this version: MSAA anti-aliasing for rendering (very nice). OpenSoundControl support (OSC is natively supported in QC, but […]
Deep Synthesis Made Free, Easy: QuteCsound
In this guest column, we turn to veteran synthesist and music tech expert Jim Aikin. When Jim wants to do digital synthesis, one of the tools to which he turns is a veritable favorite with a direct-line legacy to the beginnings of computer sound. That doesn’t mean Csound hasn’t kept with the times, though, or […]
Free Shigeto EP Explores More Textural, Narrative Worlds
Michigan-born, Brooklyn-based artist Shigeto is one of my favorite artists on Ghostly International. AKA Zach Saginaw, Shigeto has been making collages of electronic beats, richly-textural releases, many of them following the narrative of his family’s experience in Japanese internment camps here in the US during World War II. “What We Held On To” is a […]
Symphony I/O: Next-Gen Apogee High-end I/O, Works with Any Mac DAW Via USB
Looking for all the world like a high-end audiophile stereo radio receiver as much as pro audio equipment, the shiny, new Symphony I/O has arrived from Apogee. It’s a top-of-the-range audio interface designed for low latency, high-quality digital-to-analog conversion, and quality clocking, as well as flexible input and output, coming from a company known in […]
Better Windows Screencasting: Open Source CamStudio with Expanded Support
Don’t let this happen to you. Photo (CC-BY) christa connelly. Recording a screen just isn’t as easy as recording sound, presenting challenges for everyone from visualists documenting work to software imagineers developing software. That means any news in this area on any platform is good news. CamStudio is an open source project descended from the […]
Brilliant LEGO Mindstorms Drum Machine, NXT-606 – New Video
Peter Cocteau’s NXT-606, an 8-bit, sample-based drum machine built on LEGO’s Mindstorms prototyping platforming, has already been making the geek blog rounds. But let’s consider it here as more than just novelty. First, there’s a new video which better demonstrates the instrument, how it functions, and how it was developed. Second, there are design features […]
Ableton Users, Grab Gigs of Custom Instruments for Free
Inside an Ableton instrument sample. Photo (CC-BY) Cliff Beckwith. Live’s Instruments can be a terrific way to explore Ableton Live – rather than simply giving you black-box preset sounds, these include custom racks that can be customized, disassembled, and warped to your own applications. I’m a fan of the work of some of the folks […]
MOTU DP Gets Native iPhone, iPod, iPad DAW Control Free
Mixing, transport, and other shortcuts now appear on Apple mobiles with the newest version of MOTU’s Digital Performer (DP) DAW on Mac. Photos courtesy MOTU. First-party touch control is gradually coming to big-name DAWs. There are plenty of third-party applications that allow control of music software, but until now, we’ve only seen Cubase iC from […]