Digidesign Name is Gone, But Avid Reassures Customers in Open Letter

Avid users of the future? From the Vancouver Film School Sound Design for Visual Media program (CC-BY). A big motivation behind the push to unify its brands, says Avid, is that a new generation of independent producers is blurring the lines between video and audio work. Get used to saying “Avid Pro Tools.” Avid is […]

Of MIDI, iPhones and iPads, and a Restrictive Future for Hardware?

For years, in music technology and computing, we’ve relied on an idea so ubiquitous, we take it for granted. That notion is that you can use things together, and they work. At its soul, MIDI gives us the power to assemble different sounds, to record ideas. It means the investment you make in one device, […]

Reactive Music of the Future: RjDj on iPad, Your Computer, Beyond

For many musical artists, the frontier of reactive, interactive music has been a long time coming. RjDj, an app which we first saw as a series of interactive musical scenes on the iPhone, is now being expanded by its developers into a mini-ecosystem of interactive music tools for creation and distribution. I don’t think it’s […]

KORG Brings ElecTribe to iPad: Preview Video

KORG Japan has been embracing mobile platforms even as other traditional music manufacturers do not. First, it was the KORG DS-10, which brought a unique interface for sequencing and synthesis to the Nintendo DS. Now, they have an iPad app, available now on the iTunes Music Store. The iELECTRIBE has a hardware interface, emulated in […]

Eye-Tracking Interfaces and More April Fools’ Creations We Could Have in Real Life

I enjoy a little April Foolery now and then – see Google.com at the moment. But I had a funny revelation about some of the April Fools’ jokes out there today: they could be real. Some even already are. For starters, consider the EyeDJ. The video is hilarious, a spot-on parody of the hype level […]

"Broken Fingaz" Graffiti Stop Motion for The Glitch Mob

Broken Fingaz -Graffiti Stop Motion from Broken Fingaz on Vimeo. The Glitch Mob, a talented team of musical artists based in LA, are readying their debut album, and along with that comes a range of collaborations with visual materials, too. I covered The Glitch Mob’s upcoming activities, complete with a free song download from the […]

More Mac OS X 10.6.3 Graphics Details Trickle Out, But Is It Any Surprise News is Lean?

Jean-Francois Roy of Apple Tweets today: Amazed I haven’t seen more reports about the new OpenGL extensions we shipped in 10.6.3. Nearly 100% of the GL 3 extensions are now in. Jean-Francois describes himself thusly: “I work at Apple on OpenGL, and I am writing Riven X, MPQKit and other bits of Mac software.” “Shipping” […]

iPad and Screen Real Estate for Music Making: bleepBox Developer on Process

After years of bitmap-based graphics and tiny knobs, making interfaces scalable could be the next challenge for music software, regardless of platform. Today, it’s the iPad; tomorrow, it could be a new generation of touch-equipped devices, or greater sensitivity to people with aging eyes and vision problems. Musicians, translating invisible sound to the metaphors of […]

Shruti-1: DIY Digital Synth with Vintage Filter, as Dev Turns from Palm to Hardware

For all the hype around mobile music creation, here’s a story with an ending in the opposite direction. Independent developer Olivier Gillet is the reason a lot of people see handheld gadgets as potential music making devices; he’s the creator of the brilliant Bhajis Loops for Palm. But, as if to prove that hardware can […]