Max4Live Jitter-MIDI demo from Greg Lorincz on Vimeo. Ableton’s Max for Live places not only the audio and MIDI capabilities of Max/MSP in Live, but video and 3D as well, in the form of Jitter. There is one significant caveat, in that you can’t live-patch in Jitter when running inside Live – you can’t get […]

(CC) Giulio Zannol. Sampling and online reuse are enormously common in our culture today. But if you really believe in making some of that culture freely accessible, it follows you must also make free licenses explicit. Simply taking something because it’s there isn’t fair to the person who created the content, whose rights should come […]

(CC) Pikturewerk. Minor releases and bugfixes don’t generally make CDM news, but this is a special occasion. Ableton founder and CEO Gerhard Behles got everyone’s attention this week by making the rare public announcement that Ableton’s development team was temporarily halting work on new features to focus on fixing bugs. That has prompted some seriously […]

Free tools like Processing and OpenFrameworks have provided elegant, quick coding for live graphics, but their interfaces have tended to be code-based. One exception has been the Mac-based Field, which provides graphical patching. Now, you can add NodeBox to that list. This free graphical creation toolkit, built on Python, had long allowed tinkering with and […]

Another calendar clicks by. Printable calendar and photo by Joe Lanman. Visualists: it’s time to talk about the work that inspired you over the past year. As I go through the top electronic music albums of the year, it occurs to me that a similar compilation is badly needed in the world of visuals. What […]

So, your human drummer can’t bang out the elaborate breakcore beats you’ve composed, huh? Build your own robotic replacement, putting the magic of positronics into rhythm. That’s what the folks of Texas Central Positronics and the David Crowder Band have done with Steve_3po, the robotic drummer. It brings new meaning to “drum machine,” blending acoustic […]

Yes, folks, NAMM is big. Photo (CC) bigdrumthump.com If you’re introducing or demonstrating new products at NAMM, and you’d like to be considered for CDM’s curated NAMM products guide, let us know. Incidentally, since I don’t represent the NAMM organization, that can mean anyone in LA around NAMM or otherwise timing announcements that week, whether […]

Killing bugs dead, as pictured in a sign in Ikaho, Japan. Photo: Rick Hall. New features are great, and yes, it’s often us users asking for them. But reliability and stability are more important to most of us. It’s therefore a welcome surprise to see Ableton’s CEO post the following message on Ableton’s forum today, […]

Major new goodies include, from left to right, mask blends, keystone plug-ins for your projection mapping enjoyment, and effects like the lovely Cube Tile. Resolume in 2009 set out a new course for the visual performance software, and more than many of its live visual rivals, was particularly ambitious about melding audio and visual media. […]

There is technology, and then there is the popular imagination of that technology. Even in our increasingly-tech-savvy society, there’s often a gap between the two, conscious and subconscious. The imagination of how image processing might work, though, is especially incredible. If you haven’t seen the video above, it’s hilarious – and familiar. Perhaps the greatest […]