Apple slipped in some almost silent updates last night to its portable line: MacBooks have been updated to come pre-installed with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), and sport Intel’s Santa Rosa chipset. This provides frontside bus speeds up to 800Mhz (up from 667Mhz), and includes a new integrated graphics chipset, the Intel GMA X3100 which […]

Computers are endlessly flexible for music — but how do they function as actual, playable instruments? As computer software matures, finding a way to make these tools more fun to play is increasingly the aim. Native Instruments’ first crack at a “super instrument” with KORE 1 had some fans, but was a disappointment to many […]

MPC owners are definitely aficionados of their gear — but, be warned, Akai, they can be just as exacting with their MPC grievances as they are with their MPC love. The Cynic writes us with this news from the MPC community: Not sure if you guys are aware, but Akai has done a really shady […]

Create Digital Music got an interesting comment about allegedly, what really happened to Java in Leopard. Short version: nearly all of the development team is gone; the one Java 6 person left and many others were moved to, of all things, iCal. Java 5 is likely to be all you get on Leopard, and still […]

Java loves music and multimedia, but — well, we may actually have to let it die on the Mac in order for it to be reborn. (For the uninitiated, that triangular thing is the open-sourced Java mascot, Duke. Shown here with Project LookingGlass’ brilliant creator.) Photo: yuichi.sakuraba, via Flickr. Java may not be on the […]

Mobile, touch control of visual apps? We’ve seen one way to do it; here’s an even more compatible MIDI approach. I think I’d stick to the iPod Touch, personally, just to conserve battery on a phone. But it’s interesting. -PK Hot on the heels of Mrmr, ArtificialEyes (the Istanbul-based VJ collective) have released i3L MIDI […]

The iPhone and iPod Touch have big, pretty screens, plenty of space for touch control, and fit in your pocket for lots of other useful things (like, you know, calls or music or whatever these things were invented for). So, why not put them to use in performance? Just this week, Create Digital Motion has […]

Critter and Guitari, creators of the aforementioned DIY hardware Critter boards have released their PCB design files. Is it everything you need to make your own Video Critter? I don’t know enough about circuits to be sure, but it’s exciting that the information is now freely available. [via Make]

Click to play Mrmr is an open protocol for mobile devices. It is used to dynamically create user interfaces on your iPod Touch or iPhone which respond to client apps in a multi-user performance environment. Okay, that sounds awfully dry. Let’s try that again. Mrmr lets you control Quartz Composer applications (or really , any […]