The middle child of audio technology, neither as hip as vinyl or as modern as the MP3, the cassette lives on in a massive online shrine called the C-90 Project. Odds are, if you’ve ever seen a blank cassette, it’s stored in here or soon will be. We saw its colorful compact novelties back in […]

Building and Using a Reaktor Grain Delay in Kore 2 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo. Let’s cut straight to the reason we use this stuff: we want crazy-sounding delays we can play with. Reaktor guru Peter Dines shows just how you’d build such a thing in Reaktor from the ground up for CDM’s Kore […]

Cranford Rose Garden Time-lapse at Brooklyn Botanic Garden from Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Vimeo. Whether at the scale of a frame, a tiny sample, or a period of days, digital is all about the manipulation of time. So it’s fitting that our friend Chris Jordan focuses in his work on the expressive potential of timelapse, […]

Something very funny has happened in the world of music controllers. It started with the rising popularity of Ableton Live, along with the likes of Reaktor and Max/MSP, as musicians started creating more dynamic, rich live performances with computers. Supposedly, this shift should have created new controller designs. If Live was the killer app, where […]

We’ve been eagerly awaiting the LinnDrum II since it was called the BoomChik. We called the non-functional prototype one of the best products of this January’s NAMM – reasoning being that, based on what we heard from showgoers, a silent LinnDrum still beat more evolutionary blandness from the rest of the industry. But I’d be […]

Machine Project is the wonderful gallery / multimedia educational center and maker of happenings in Los Angeles. They’re on a roll with Big Ideas this month, so I thought I’d pass them along — aside from participating, they may inspire similar stunts in your hometown. (Just make sure you hire professionals if they’re going to […]

The Monome is small and elegant, but there’s something to be said for traditional instrumental controllers like a keyboard. So why not combine them? David Phipps of the electronic jam band Sound Tribe Sector 9 did just that, and sends CDM this photo of the project in process. He’s off on a five week tour […]

We live and die by hard drives for music. There’s no substitute for redundancy and backups (hey, you could be Matthew Dear and have a drive stolen during your set). But it is helpful to know whether a drive is healthy or not. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring features built into drives can help. Lifehacker today points to […]

I think we’ve probably got a couple of years of tape-based video cameras left, but it’s starting to look like solid state is becoming a serious option for consumer use. So while we wait, Dansdata has a great history of home video, with a dose of DRM thrown in. Tivo is finally about to launch […]

Create Digital Music Night at ETSY LABS from Etsy on Vimeo. Handmade marketplace Etsy.com, DIY "mook"/blog Make, and createdigitalmusic.com again team up for another Handmade Music Night at Brooklyn’s Etsy Labs! For an idea of what it’s about (or perhaps inspiration for starting something similar in your corner of the world), see the video above. […]