Politics and economics are well beyond the scope of this site and ridiculously far out of my area of expertise. But at what point does economic confidence start to impact music technology? That’s a question I know colleagues and industry figures are starting to wonder about. Here is an entirely non-scientific “temperature test” — even […]

Vista, launched in an ice house in Toronto. That’s where I want my project studio this winter, for sure. Photo (CC Sam Javanrouh. On a purely technical level, how does Windows Vista work with a leading pro audio application? A lot of that depends on just how much the developer does to tune their software, […]

Filament @ Tyneside Cinema Launch – The Wall from Steve Holmes on Vimeo. Dan Shiffman’s Run Lola Run creation, built in Processing, appears here at Tyneside Cinema in the UK. This is how to watch a movie: 1400 frames on screen at a time. Cuts cascade across the screen, colors shift as the in-frame palette […]

Game Of Life Sequencer in Processing from wesen on Vimeo. Coding-for-artists tool Processing is already popular for visuals, but MIDI and sound have been a serious blind spot. Speaking of our friend Wesen of Ruin & Wesen, he has solved that with a new library called rwmidi, which makes MIDI programming far easier and more […]

Wesen of Ruin & Wesen has been doing some amazing stuff with the MachineDrum – and sharing every last detail with friends via the Web. Ruin & Wesen blog We’ve already seen his DIY hardware, including a joystick for the MonoMachine. Here’s my favorite hack so far, though: using the MIDI Command hardware, he’s set […]

Decibel Festival :: Thursday Quickie from momo_the_monster on Vimeo. Ed.: Visualists are constantly looking for better exposure and better fusion with musical events. In the US’ Pacific Northwest, one highlight of the North American calendar year is unquestionably the legendary Decibel Festival. Our own Momo is there, at an event that also attracts the likes […]

Decibel Festival :: Thursday Quickie from momo_the_monster on Vimeo. Ed.: Visualists are constantly looking for better exposure and better fusion with musical events. In the US’ Pacific Northwest, one highlight of the North American calendar year is unquestionably the legendary Decibel Festival. Our own Momo is there, at an event that also attracts the likes […]

Low depth of field, high frame rate, high resolution. These are the technical hurdles which have traditionally separated consumers from creating film-quality video. HD video has been within consumer reach for quite a while now. 2008 has already seen high frame rates fall to Casio, and in the last couple of weeks, both Canon and […]

Todd Bailey’s “Where’s the Party At?” wants to return to a simpler, glitchier era of sampling. When CDM spoke to Hank Shocklee, Public Enemy’s legendary producer, he talked about how those artists really preferred earlier samplers because of, not in spite of, their flaws. And because lo-fi is a little easier to pull off, this […]

Earlier this week, I talked about some of the consumer-oriented feature improvements in Adobe Creative Suite CS4. But the most interesting development from Adobe is actually more on the developer side. Pixel Bender is a new format for making GPU-accelerated (and CPU multi-threaded) filters, which means fast blends (with different blend modes) and special effects. […]