Preparing for battle: it’s all in the mind. Photo: Aaron Landry. Two modular patching software packages for programming multimedia software visually, Pure Data (Pd) and Max/MSP/Jitter have long had a friendly relationship. The tools share code, are reasonably compatible in patches and external objects (sometimes with some adjustment), and are basically open source (Pd) and […]

Here’s some very good news from the UK: pioneering electronic music composer, sound designer, BBC Radiophonic  virtuosa and Doctor Who theme creator Delia Derbyshire left us more recordings than previously thought. Some 267 tracks of music and documentation were found in her attic. The Radiophonic Workshop’s Mark Ayres – who has been single-handedly leading the […]

TRACTOR from tsaworks_martin Böttger on Vimeo. Composer/electronic musician Bruno Dias sends us his latest collaboration, with visualist Martin Bottger. It was a distance collaboration – so just the kind of thing you could be working on with musicians and visualists you know. Bruno writes: We never had the opportunity to meet face-to-face and this work […]

vvvv, the free-for-non-commercial-use patching environment on Windows, already has a cult following among visualists. Now, it’s looking more interesting for music, too, with the 4.0 beta 17 release. VST plug-in support for adding audio/music instruments and effects Multichannel waveplayer eCue Lighting Control Support In case you haven’t worked this out yet, what this means is […]

Some smooth, stretchy After Effects work mixed with spot-on sound design gives us Tales of the Unexpected, by More Soon. Tales of the Unexpected from More Soon on Vimeo. Here’s the only clue so far on the techniques used: Yeah pretty much.. it’s a really long video made in After Effects layered over a series […]

Mathieu Garci of Intua answers some questions we had about features in BeatMaker. CDM: What about MIDI export? A lot of us want to be able to compose something on the road, then save MIDI patterns for use on our main computer. Mathieu: BeatMaker v1.0.0 (current AppStore release) does not supports MIDI. We have v1.0.1 […]

I’m not an E3 so I’ll have to rely on others for coverage, but Nintendo has announced the long-awaited Wii Music at their press conference today. Now, of course, a number of readers here are already making Wii Music of their own, using custom software to turn Wii remotes into controllers. (Finally got my Balance […]

Intua is the first to get a full-fledged music creation app on the iTunes App Store, with an MPC-style sampler and step sequencer, plus effects, for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This isn’t just a toy for triggering sounds or a useful utility like a guitar tuner; it’s an actual music app on which you […]

Labels and artists are only now catching on to the idea of letting fans remix their music, and are even slower to give those fans access to individual stems. But where musicians have embraced this idea, they’ve gotten surprisingly big outpourings of support — thank a culture that’s gotten savvy with digital music tools and […]