Renoise, the reawakening: the tracker for the rest of us hits beta 2.0, as seen above. (Screen grabs by Wallace Winfrey.) While better-known software names may get the attention, Renoise, a music making tool in the mold of a tracker, has long had a lot going for it. It runs on every platform you own […]

Another lovely shot by VDMX user przemion. Look over someone’s shoulder at VDMX and prepare to be confused — the modular interface means you can put loads on the screen. But spend a few minutes with the tool and its tutorials, and you’re likely to find it surprisingly intuitive. It’s a big leap from generations […]

What’s in for this season in music software? Cellular automata. You may have been exposed to a cellular automaton in the classic Game of Life; it’s basically a very simple biological simulator exposed as an intuitive, 2-dimensional grid of squares. If tic-tac-toe, Charles Darwin, and a petri dish of bacteria got together in one wild […]

Times are tough, and folks are turning out those pockets for free… wear. Photo: Bert Heymans. There’s a strange debate going on over the free software (as in freeware, not necessarily open source) issue of Computer Music magazine. After seeing the magazine’s top 10 reasons to use free software, commercial developer IK Multimedia got surprisingly […]

Like to cut up and sample video? Sick of all that time-consuming scrubbing, slicing and rearranging in Vegas or Premiere? Well I’ve figured out a workflow using a collection of After Effects scripts which turns lots of tedious editing into a very quick process to output a series of video clips for your VJing pleasure. […]

Every time you turn around, someone else is holding some sort of promotional music contest. But this week, we have not one but three contests I think will really appeal to CDM readers — and I’m especially eager to hear what results you might submit. Guitar Rig action shot, by way of Felix E. Guerrero. […]

In memory of Minazo: bucket lover, iconic animal superstar, Web meme, elephant seal among elephant seals. Daz Diamond is back with another wacky, experimental effect. When we last joined Daz, he was sharing strange and wonderful granular, delay, and sidechain effects. Now, he’s been thinking about buckets (as in brigades, as in sets of delay […]

Using video in Processing is, sadly, really painful. You can do absolutely wonderful things once it’s working — pixel-by-pixel manipulations that are hard to do elsewhere, and easily-coded OpenGL manipulations that should help generate powerful eye candy. But the list of issues runs something like this: Windows doesn’t support capture without the addition of the […]

Richie Hawtin actually topped the list of people CDM readers don’t want us to interview at NY’s Minitek this weekend, which I’m tempted to take as a challenge. (Hey, I’m all for combating hype and talking to the many talented but under-appreciated artists out there. I just find it amusing how much negative energy Hawtin […]

Integration with this hardware is Steinberg’s current pitch, with DSP in a FireWire audio interface and controller integration with point-and-click access to parameters. Cubase 4.5 is here, with CC121 controller and MR816 audio I/O hardware integration, some new sample content, and a mysterious new “media management” format called VST Sound. It is nice to see […]