We’re big fans of NIN’s new album, Ghosts. Now, visualists will get to freely interpret the album in an open YouTube “festival”… I’ve come out of my self-imposed solitary confinement only due to my man love for Trent Reznor. (Don’t ask.) Following up on the huge success of the Ghosts I-IV release (grossing a cool […]

We’ve got some additional details on the Edirol V-8 mixer. Pricing will be set at US$1995 list. For comparison, the V-4 lists for US$1029, but has a street price pretty close to that — perhaps due to the unit’s popularity rather than any minimum advertised pricing restrictions. The V-8 is shipping within a month. I’ll […]

The Edirol V-8 mixer is the big story as far as new VJ gear at Messe, but the P-10 “Visual Presenter” is an interesting piece, too. It’s a video sampler, basically, as was the now-discontinued Korg Kaptivator. The P-10 has a number of advantages over the Kaptivator that could make it a big hit for […]

Celemony’s Melodyne plug-in could already perform incredible feats of pitch manipulation with audio. But monophonic audio is one thing. Polyphonic audio has long been sound manipulation’s final frontier. With Melodyne 2, it seems Celemony’s audio wizards have finally cracked the problem. Celemony is showing their new technology at Musikmesse, and they’ve got demos online you […]

PC games — and even Windows customization utilities — make up a much larger market than music software. But in this parallel universe there have been echoes of the challenges facing music developers since the early days of PCs. Both have highly dedicated, niche audiences. Both face rampant piracy. Neither has the support of big […]

Breaking story from Messe — the V-4 video mixer, the gold standard VJ mixer that’s almost uncanny in its ubiquitous appearance on live visual sets, finally has a sequel. No word on pricing yet, but the V-8 is already tantalizing in that it ups the input and output count and finally(!) adds a 15-pin connector […]

Something interesting is happening in software synthesizer design: after years of trying to boast more of ingredient “xx” (whether it’s modulation, eight-zillion-point envelopes or other whiz-bang features), the new challenge is to make the user experience itself different. The challenge: don’t just do more sonically — make it easier to actually make music. I’ve personally […]

They’ve gone about as fer as they can go … Yes, just when you thought you’d seen every conceivable take on mods, customizations, clones, homages, robots, artistic reinterpretations, and other cultural artifacts inspired by Guitar Hero, there’s this — a Guitar Hero clone on Commodore 64. There’s a lot of chatting at the beginning, but […]