Quartz Composer/VDMX tutorial no 1: The bouncing ball from goto10 on Vimeo. Trying to learn Apple’s free visual patching tool Quartz Composer, useful for making your own filters and simple generative effects? Or perhaps you’re learning VDMX, the brilliant, semi-modular Mac-friendly visual tool – which also happens to host Quartz Composer compositions as effects or […]

Ilias Bergstrom has created a tool for mixing Processing sketches live in performance. (Thanks, Bart!) The resulting tool lets you cross-fade between sketches and easily host a series of sketches in a gig. The process is pretty straightforward: 1. Use the included Foetus library with your sketch to prepare it for use (your sketch needs […]

ExpressCard slots on new Mac and PC notebooks look tantalizing, but buyer beware: adding FireWire audio can be perilous. Multichannel FireWire interfaces work beautifully with the proper drivers and controller, but get some element of that equation wrong, and you may find your high-end interface is rendered unusable (think glitches and dropouts). The chipset in […]

A LiveBook on the test bench at Rain Headquarters, photographed for CDM. One of the things that attracts me to computers: choice. So it’s worth noting that you do have choices when looking to laptops, PCs included. (This sounds like those lame “We know you have a choice in your travel plans” announcements you get […]

Better support for music and audio is still evolving (as well as lots of stability and compatibility improvements), but I have faith open-source coding tool Processing [site | on cdmu | on cdmo ] could yield wonderful new visual interfaces for music. Daniel Piker has the latest addition, inspired by a recent post here: FizzyNumberMusicMaker […]

Sound designer, technologist, and remix artist Francis Preve sends us some gifts of techno and technology to celebrate his first solo release. For your brain, we’ve compiled the tutorials he’s been working on for Beatportal, which together provide a really great look at some basic music production skills. For your ears, we have his new […]

Hello, harp feedback! I love my job. I get to watch as Peter Dines, contributor on our Kore/Komplete site for NI, constantly cooks up brilliant ideas for sound design. His latest screencast plumbs the depths of Native Instruments’ Massive synth, which he uses in conjunction with Kore. We’ve already seen Peter make song arrangements out […]

CONTAKT @ Amsterdam from Ali M. Demirel on Vimeo. David Lublin at Vidvox points us to this fantastic video from CONTAKT, playing live in Amsterdam with Richie Hawtin: I’ve started to use Kineme plugins for Quartz Composer in my live set. Here is a good example based on ‘tb soundflower’ composition by alx toneburst. I’ve […]

Cypod sends his simple but handy adjustable tremolo plug-in, which he’s made available free: Tremolo Audio Unit [Cypod blog] But that’s only half of the reason this is cool. He used the SuperColliderAU tool, which allows sonic effects built in the free, open-source audio coding language SuperCollder to become standard AU plug-ins. (He demonstrates it […]

Keith, maker of a wearable wristwatch Theremin, sends his Ars Electronica-winning project Moving Mario. Yes, this is just the sort of thing you might think of, but not actually do. He did it:   It’s a gimmick, of course, but I really like the questions it raises. By making Mario’s virtual space physical, you really […]