Preview: Light, Inflatable Outdoor Projection on the Cheap

Live visuals are all about projection, but perhaps part of the reason visual work hasn’t become nearly as commonplace as music is that screens and projectors are tougher to come by than speakers and PAs. Naturally, the appeal of a really high-quality mobile rig is obvious – especially one that can work outdoors. Yesterday, I […]

Big Updates for Handheld Homebrew Music: NitroTracker 0.4, PSPSeq 3, PSP Rhythm 8

iPhone what? There’s big stuff happening in homebrew music development for Nintendo DS and PSP. NitroTracker 0.4 (Now) First up, on the uber-popular Nintendo DS, NitroTracker 0.4 adds some big features. Creator Tobias Weyand writes: I wanted to tell you that I just released NitroTracker v0.4 with lots of new features and improvements, the coolest […]

Audiovisual Remix as Politics, and Psychedelic America with David Last and Brian Kane

We hear a lot about remix culture, but what does it actually mean – and does it mean anything? The founders of RemixAmerica.com hope to promote video mash-up as political discourse, by feeding Web denizens clips historical and new and remix, videocasting, and discussion tools. They’re lucky enough to have Sanford and Son and People […]

Fine Print: What Do Royalty Rates Actually Pay?

  As an addendum to the Last.fm story today, what are the actual royalty rates we’re talking here? They’re not much – precisely the reason musicians will have to get broadcast-style play counts to ever see anything worth counting. For instance, Last.fm makes the comparison with the BBC in the Wired story. The BBC has […]

Aurora: Gorgeous, Open Source DJ-Style USB Controller; Details from the Creators

The Aurora 224 is a DJ-style controller geared for software like Ableton Live. The design is, as you can see, gorgeous: not only is it at the high end of aesthetics in open gear, but it celebrates its DIY nature by exposing the circuit board. It’s USB powered, and offers easy mixing control functions in […]

Non-Digital Inspiration: Flipbooks at Etsy

Lots of motion in the non-digital world can inspire digital visuals. (Hey, that pretty much sums up all digital photography and videography, eh?) Keeping with this theme, I’m really taken by the flipbook work featured by my friend Bre Pettis at Etsy.com’s online magazine: The Flipbooks of Etsy: Motion Picture Objects [The Storque] Bre has […]

Ableton Live Beer; Music Tech Beverage Nominees

Ben Rogerson and the blokes at Future Publishing / musicradar.com in the UK got a nice piece of swag: a Pilsner, to be specific. Thank UK distributor Focusrite for this one (which I assume means the brew has not yet graced Ableton’s office here in NYC.) They did miss the obvious opportunity to offer an […]