Image courtesy Abstract Data. Rockstar sparkle not included. Operating small runs out of his basement, Justin Owen is on a mission to bring his idiosyncratic, all-analog sounds to musicians in affordable, portable form. “Affordable” and “portable” often aren’t associated with analog, though even players as big as KORG have gotten in on the game recently, […]

Vimeo has long been a favored site for visualists sharing their work, but while sites like rival video host Blip.tv and photo sharing site Flickr added an option for Creative Commons licensing, it’s been conspicuously absent on Vimeo — until now. Now, when you upload video files to Vimeo, you’ll see options for all the […]

Reaktor 5.5’s refreshed interface. Click for a full-sized image. Reaktor 5.5, the software that’s both a giant bundle of out-there effects and synths and a visual development environment for making your own creations, has entered public beta. Despite the “point-five” appended to the name, it’s a major, new release, with new sound modules, streamlined multi-pane […]

Matthew Dear (teaser for the album “Black City,” below) and Flying Lotus (video for “MmmHmm” off Cosmogramma, above) each get rich, evocative video worlds to accompany their music. As a lot of music videos turn to gimmickry to try to go viral – tending to be either blindingly awesome, as with OK Go, or things […]

Image: Livid Instruments. Livid Instruments has just revealed their next hardware controller. Well, sort of revealed – this evening on Twitter, they declared that it was a “Top secret sneak peek of our new controller.” Top secret – you know, just on the Internet. No one will see it there. It’s full of encoders, if […]

Avid is updating their M-Audio Axiom line of USB controller keyboards. New in this version is DirectLink, which provides automatic mappings for software like Ableton Live, Logic, Cubase, and of course Avid’s own Pro Tools, similar to what’s in the Axiom’s big-brother Axiom Pro. The controller itself has also been improved, with lower-profile faders on […]

Matthew Dear – Black City Teaser from Ghostly International on Vimeo. Matthew Dear is one of electronic music’s great sonic innovators and impresarios, co-founder of Ghostly International and Spectral Sound (Ghostly recently celebrating 100 landmark releases), and recording extensively under musical identities Audion, False, and Jabberjaw. But for all that, I think it’s his voice […]

Veta just reminded me that the CDMo RSS feed has been broken for a while in some browsers. I use Google Reader so I never noticed that anything was wrong. It’s now fixed. Which brings me to other, server-related CDM news. If you’ve been keeping an eye on CDMusic, you may have noticed Peter mentioning […]

David Pogue made the immensely-successful Missing Manual book series in order to fill in for the manual that should have been included with software. But an impassioned fan of MOTU’s BPM drum sampler went further than that – a lot further. Simon (ssp/plastikaudio) has constructed an entire hardware controller for BPM. It gives MOTU’s software […]

The Moog badge, as seen here on a foot pedal, is probably the only one that could spawn a festival. Photo (CC-BY) Audiotecna. You have to hand it to Moog – what other brand in music these days inspires this kind of passion, let alone an entire music festival? Moogfest itself seems to have gone […]