April Fool’s, San Francisco style – with a parade. Now that’s more fun than sitting in front of blogs. Photo: Patrick Boury. Here’s a cruel joke for you: the first day of Frankfurt’s Musikmesse trade show? The date on which all the music tech press releases for the show have dated their embargo? April First. […]

motion distortion 2 from andrew benson on Vimeo. Datamosh? (The “forbidden” but harmlessly meaningless word?) Video squishification? Mushy data? Call it what you will, but applying real-time distortion and displacement to video so that video textures become flowing layers of pixels looks absolutely beautiful. Andrew Benson of Cycling ‘74 has only just begun playing with […]

Music lovers now have Max for Live coming later this year. But how about running custom visual patches inside your VJ app? That’s now possible using your own Jitter patches inside Cell DNA, Livid’s new, lightweight live visual tool. Livid has released a “DevKit” with some example patches and documentation to get you rolling if […]

The age of the high-density screen has begun. You can bet these will start to replace the tired (and functionally limiting) LED readouts of the past. The upshot: hardware with usability rivaling computers. Oh, and it’ll look damned purty. Teenage Engineering has this gorgeous vid of the Operator-1 “OP-1” controller/synth prototype in action: NOW talk […]

A real highlight for me at the Game Developer Conference was getting to hear Satoru Iwata deliver the keynote. Aside from being CEO of Nintendo as they have launched their most successful console ever, Iwata-san has left a sizable development legacy as a veteran of HAL Laboratory (Balloon Fight, Kirby). In the game community, I […]

The iPhone 3.0 SDK is a fantastic update, bringing a lot of what was on developer wish lists for the device. But some of the early speculation – that the so-called “library access” would enable music games and DJ apps — may have been premature. Jordan Balagot writes to let us know that, at least […]

The player piano has come, oddly, full circle. Peer into the editing pane of a music sequencer, and what you see is an abstracted virtual player piano. The editing views are even dubbed “Piano Roll” views (sometimes officially so). The MIDI protocol by which most music devices and apps communicate is itself a kind of […]

Up close with an MPC screen. Now you can make your computer screen your MPC slicing interface. Photo: regueifeiro. Want to load ReCycle REX sample files onto your MPC? Or looking for a better solution for chopping up samples – that is, firing up ReCycle on your screen? Joe Lambert writes in to share his […]

The new Intuos graphics tablet from Wacom ticks some very attractive boxes. The scroll wheel and OLED “multifunction” buttons look great, but I’m most impressed that the tablet is smart enough to flip the screens when being used by a left hander. I own an Intuos 2, and while I don’t use it very regularly, […]