Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross working together in their home studio, in 2006. Photo (CC-BY) Aaron Tait. Lots of music hitting the inbox this week, from Reznor scoring a movie about Facebook to Ghostly giving away rarities. Trent Reznor and bandmate Atticus Ross have scored The Social Network, and created a shadowy, throbbing musical landscape […]

Photo (CC-BY-ND) verityatthedisco. Remember the music industry? We used to talk about radio play and record deals. Now, we’re talking developers, APIs, and analytics. Of course, the test, now as then, is whether there’s actually substance for music listeners and artists. On Friday, we looked at Apple’s Ping and how, via TuneCore, artists who aren’t […]

There was a time when Tascam was associated with cheap, solid mobile gear for recording, like the Portastudio. The handheld DR-03 could be a landmark for a more digital age. It’s just US$99 for a microSD recorder with built-in stereo mic in a package Tascam describes as “smaller than an energy bar.” It’s designed to […]

Whether or not the ability to use TuneCore as a way to get an iTunes Ping page piqued your interest, if you’re generally interested in selling your music online, here’s some more interesting news. SoundCloud has teamed up with TuneCore to allow you to sell singles and albums in a variety of online stores, including […]

Look, it’s not Katy Perry! Yes, individual artist pages are possible on Ping. TuneCore can help make the process easy. Shown here: singer/songwriter Andrew Belle, who helped TuneCore document the process. Check out his artist page in iTunes. What’s a social network for music discovery if there aren’t any artists? As covered previously, Apple’s Ping […]

Syphon Teaser from vade on Vimeo. In the audio realm, piping audio and MIDI between apps is commonplace (see ReWire, JACK, Soundflower, IAC MIDI, etc.). But imagine if you could take textures and frames from one app and share them, live and real-time, with another app. That’s the vision of Syphon, a Mac-only, open-source framework […]

Mapping projections to shapes other than rectangles should be an essential technique, but while live visualism and VJing are all about being improvisatory, the process can be laborious. Enter an elegantly-designed tool that makes the whole job easy, distorting your projected image to any shape you like with the aid of keyboard and mouse shortcuts. […]

The quickest route to expressing an idea remains the gesture of a hand. That gesture may be crudely interpreted through today’s touch displays, but the immediacy remains. Presumably because of some of the device’s limitations, a lot of the experiments with the iPad have involved controllers that operate independently from sound software, like a remote […]

(CC-BY) Stefan Lins. I’ll be in Stockholm the week of 27 September, speaking at Stockholm’s Android Only conference Wednesday/Thursday 29-30. I’m particularly excited by the lineup, because it emphasizes pushing the envelope of Android and cross-platform development. I’ll talk about how Processing for Android can allow “sketching” audiovisual apps on mobile. Martin Roth of RjDj […]

Trigger, mix, effects… there are certain things you need to do as a visualist, and the combination of buttons with faders and encoders on the Ohm64 controller from Livid was clearly designed by visualists. The monome-style grid does indeed lend itself well to triggering, but you also need parameter control for mixing different channels and […]