We had a blast (ahem) Saturday night at the Yuri’s Night party at NASA Ames Research Center; stay tuned for video and more, including the results of the Futuristic Musical Design Challenge. But that’s no reason the party has to end. If you’ve listened through all 55 songs on the 45 Tribute and want still […]

Everywhere I go, people bug me about when they’ll see better support for OpenSoundControl (OSC) in applications. Why use fancy-schmancy OSC when MIDI does the job? Well, OSC supports higher resolutions of data when needed, maps variables elegantly (when you’re controlling something like visuals and descriptions like musical pitch or filter cutoff make no sense), […]

Here’s a phrase you won’t hear often on, say, Download Squad: "PS The AmigaOS port will be up in a few days." Welcome to the wacky world of trackers, the music production tools time forgot. While the rest of the world frets over the environmental impact of computing and the cost of digital tools, the […]

While we’re having a Nintendo DS-laden week, I thought I might mention that I got tipped off (thanks, Laurence) that the popular, multi-platform tracker Chibitracker has made its way to the DS. Consider this a rumor posted in the hopes of prodding the developer to release the ROM file. That said, readers, what’s your favorite […]

Hardware sequencers were a fantastic idea: you had a box that did nothing but sequence other gear. Then along came the computer, then the idea of trying to make the computer do absolutely everything all the time, and the standalone MIDI sequencer disappeared. In a bizarre twist of fate, it’s back — on Nintendo DS. […]

Aforementioned visual synthsizer slash exercise tool WiiWhorld has been released for public consumption. Jeff Mission has tied together GlovePIE (for Bluetooth/Wiimote input (previously on CDMo)), Whorld, and his own secret sauce (a GlovePIE script to control Whorld). Put them all together with a dash of virtual midi port, and you get this: Or as Jeff […]

Arise Brisbane visualists! For too long have our Melbourne, Sydney and Perthian sistren and brethren been meeting up, drinking beers and collaborating while we Briswegians remain locked away, alone, learning new stuff from textbooks and crying ourselves to sleep… Sorry, bit of a depressing start there. Let me rephrase: After a year touring with a […]

One of the things I’ve really grown to appreciate over recent months is the rich communities on Flickr and Vimeo — Flickr for stills, Vimeo for videos. Each of those, incidentally, has very active groups around free visual tools vvvv (for Windows) and Processing (for everything). Unlike "big bucket" sites like YouTube, Vimeo in particular […]