3D modelling is one of my visualist achilles heels. I don’t seem to have the kind of brain which can deconstruct objects into geometric solids. So it comes as no surprise that I’m extremely interested in 3D scanning (CDMo tag). We’ve previously looked at the work of Kyle McDonald, who’s dealing in “Structured Light” scanning. […]

Trifonic: Editing Beats – Part 1 from Next Step Audio on Vimeo. No more secrets: that could well sum up the zeitgeist of music making in 2010. So it is that Trifonic, aka virtuoso beatmeister brothers Brian and Laurence Trifon of San Francisco, share their technique for chopping up and glitching out audio. Their new […]

Screenshot of an early build by goatmilk on reddit. Some open source software, fairly or unfairly, has acquired a reputation for being “poor man’s” clones of commercial projects, outside the popular acceptance of Linux servers and Firefox browsers. Video software, worse, has typically been labeled unusable, because of the primitive state of some early projects. […]

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 […]