Want to work on your coding chops, but get away from the slavery of your desk and your laptop? Want to stretch out on the couch – or the cramped confines of a bus or coach plane flight? (Hello, EasyJet!) We saw yesterday how you can work with your iPad and Processing, via Processing.js. Here’s […]

Want to work on your coding chops, but get away from the slavery of your desk and your laptop? Want to stretch out on the couch – or the cramped confines of a bus or coach plane flight? (Hello, EasyJet!) We saw yesterday how you can work with your iPad and Processing, via Processing.js. Here’s […]

We’ve seen fairly impressive work involving people waving their arms around at cameras, but at the end of the day, you still have people … waving their arms around at cameras. In a refreshingly different take, the world of the game Mimicry is the “ultimate sandbox game” – set in a literal sandbox. Participants manipulate […]

Computing technology is an inherently disruptive thing, wonderfully so. It solves problems you didn’t know you had. It creates problems, then creates new problems in even trying to understand those problems. Simply using a computer is a kind of design statement. You’ve seen questions about what happens with computer performance and audience interaction. But, in […]

In the never-ending quest to find just the right combination of faders and knobs for piloting your music, here’s a thought: add expansion capabilities. An upgrade to the Block, a grid grid and knob control surface by boutique Texan maker Livid, does just that. And for good measure, they’ve got a short-run iPad dock alternate, […]

I’ve been following Maschine since prototype stages. The idea was at once obvious and welcome: build a software workstation, tightly integrated with pad hardware control, that fuses hardware sampler working methods with the on-screen flexibility of software. It’s software that focuses on working with sounds and patterns, outside the DAW-style metaphors. Of course, there’s one […]

MacBook Pros, 64-bit, all. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Benjamin Nagel. I’m not one to post every single minor software update, but with the latest handful of free upgrades for Native Instruments software, I think it’s safe to say the 64-bit age has come to the Mac musician. Windows developer Cakewalk heralded just this sort of advance for […]

What can a new digital synth be in 2011? How will it work and sound? And given access to so many excellent tools, how can it stand apart? In place of a press release and some marketing-speak, developer Christopher Penrose (Leisuresonic, Cosmovox) sent us an extended essay explaining his thinking behind his just-released SynthTronica synth […]

The Lemur, seen here onstage with The Glitch Mob, rides off into the sunset. It’s not so often that I write obituaries for hardware, but this time, it seems appropriate. JazzMutant has announced that its Lemur, the multi-touch hardware controller, is officially at the end of its life. Their announcement:

The tracker for the rest of us – now more customizable. Click for full-sized version. Ever wish your music software could do something your way, something it can’t do now? Wish you could just get in there and change it yourself? That’s some of the ambition of Renoise 2.6, the multi-platform music creation tool. By […]