Not everyone agrees with all my raves about FL Studio 8 — including some loyal FL users. Whereas Ableton Live has taken some flak in recent upgrades for catering to requests for more conventional functionality, even some FL lovers are frustrated with the program’s quirkier bits. Evan X. Merz writes a rant on FL Studio […]

This has been making the blog-o-rounds, but if you haven’t seen it, the Yellow Drum Machine is a brilliant musical robot — brilliantly musical, and brilliantly simply technologically. (There’s something to be said for elegant design.) It rolls around, looks for objects nearby, bangs on them, and samples that sound. (Hmm, it’s like a little […]

It’s been 2 months since artificialeyes announced their new Mac-only visualist tool 3L ("Thrill"). The ae guys have just pushed out a new beta release, updated the 3L manuals, posted a new features page with screenshots, and the word from Michael is that the commercial release will happen as soon as they have the infrastructure […]

It’s been 2 months since artificialeyes announced their new Mac-only visualist tool 3L ("Thrill"). The ae guys have just pushed out a new beta release, updated the 3L manuals, posted a new features page with screenshots, and the word from Michael is that the commercial release will happen as soon as they have the infrastructure […]

I’ll be doing a two hour workshop in Boston on Processing for a conference on graphic design in education. My goal: get a group of educators and students unfamiliar with the tool up to speed as quickly as possible. I’m assembling a “90-minute” Processing code kit for the purpose, indebted to some of the existing […]

Gibson headquarters. I’m sure some rational thought is going on in there, but search me to tell you what the (*&$# that thought is. Photo via mmwm Gibson Guitar may require a new column here on CDM, titled something like “what the $&*((*&$ can you possibly be thinking??!” Sure, it was strange enough when Gibson […]

The revelation of a Korg synth for Nintendo DS was big news for modern-style soft synths on mobile Nintendo game systems. But what about some good, oldskool 8-bit Game Boy sounds? Most cartridges have focused on sequencers, not synths and performance — that is, not playing your Game Boy like an instrument. The Pixelh8 project […]

A scrapbook of awesomeness: Toby spreads the *spark around the world, from sparkav.co.uk. Our friend Sean Healy, aka Jean Poole, has a great interview with visualist *spark (Toby Harris of London). We love *spark for many reasons — for founding AVit, for being a wildly-talented artist, for reintroducing the idea of narrative to visualism, for […]

Generally, if a venue at which you’re VJing can be described as containing a large pool of liquid, something at the club has gone horribly wrong. (And, hey, haven’t we all been there?) But this is Winter Music Conference time, and the pool is actually inviting and swim-worthy, courtesy the Beatport Pool Party. Edirol is […]