Will Someone Else Please Blog the Microsoft Songsmith Video For Me

CDM has been publishing for over four years. For once, I actually can say … nothing. Please provide your own snark in the comment space below. The CDM family thanks you. Beamz ad, there’s a new sheriff in town. Gizmodo: Beamz Infomercial Is Most Stupid Promo Video in History [Published in the more innocent times […]

The Year of Slow Motion: Casio Drops Sub-$400 1000FPS Cameras

It’s no secret that I’m obsessed with slow motion video, and you people aren’t doing a very good job of hiding your interest either – “high speed camera price” was our #5 search term for the last month. The article that search result points to is from August 2006, and back then a camera shooting […]

Microsoft Research’s Songsmith Will Sell for $30, Match Accompaniment to Your Singing

In a surprise announcement (well, surprising me, at least), the experimental MySong shown by Microsoft Research earlier this year will be available for sale. US$29.95 will buy you a downloadable auto-accompaniment tool. Windows-only, but it sounds as though a Mac release is in store (seriously). It’s a bit like Band-in-a-Box for singers: sing in a […]

Generative Music Interfaces of the Future – Look to Games?

I’m going to make this a minimalist post because I’ve said what I’ll say about Kodu, the one really cool part of Microsoft’s keynote yesterday, on Create Digital Motion. (Am I the only person who wishes Sparrow had just done the whole keynote?) But have a look at the shot above. One of the complaints […]

You Know, For Kids: Game Design, World Creation as Microsoft Research Previews Kodu

“This is my tree. It makes music.” It took “actual 12-year-old girl” (as Microsoft described her) Sparrow to rescue Microsoft’s drab CES keynote (and drab tech news week) and get us back into the Future again. That future is one in which the dazzling interactive 3D world of games becomes a playground you can shape. […]

Toward the Hackable iPod: BUG Labs, Now Wired for Sound

It’s looking like 2009 is set to be a great year for open source and hardware hacking. Likely lost in a lot of the CES news, BUG Labs, makers of open source, Linux-based hardware you can snap together like Lego bricks, now has a range of new modules. Most interesting to readers here: there’s an […]

End of an Era: Music Thing on Hiatus

It’s official: Music Thing, the benchmark music tech blog, is no more – at least for now. Post volume had dropped off of late, so it’s not a complete surprise. And Music Thing’s voice, Tom Whitwell, has gone on to shake up the online world in other ways: running the online output of The Times […]

Bug Labs Open Source Linux Hardware Gets a Pico-Projector Module, More

Previous modules include GPS, screen, camera, proximity/accelerometer, and some powerful features on the core hardware unit. But a projector? Now we’re really interested. I just recently got my BUG developer hardware from Bug Labs and have begun to work with it. The idea: a Linux-powered, open source mini computer with little modules you snap on […]

Getting Started in Flash Augmented Reality

Grant Michaels points to a lovely post on getting started with augmented reality using Flash. FlarToolkit/Flash Augmented Reality [Mikko Haapoja] It’s all free for FlarToolkit, and with free tools for Flex out there, you could build a whole free toolchain. Of course, we tend to like Java and Processing round these parts, so I can […]

Happy New Year with Augmented Reality, Flying Words of Wisdom

Need some New Year inspiration on several levels? dickypan points to this brilliant New Year’s video. It’ll make you feel good about all dimensions of 2009. Motion graphics fly out of augmented reality, triggered by small objects on the screen. The work is based on an open source framework. Here it’s running in Flash, as: […]