First Max 5 Preview: Music Patching, the Next Generation?

Not just skin deep: Changing the Max interface should make it easier and faster to produce patches for beginners and advanced users alike. What’s this new Max about, and why was it such a big deal at the AES trade show? To really understand, let’s turn to gaming for a moment. When Nintendo described their […]

Ableton Live 7, Ableton Live Suite: Quick Look at What’s New

It’s the little things that matter. Hallelujah, Live 7 finally allows time signatures in Session View. Want more complex rhythms? Want full sets of songs in a single Session? Now it’s possible. There’s also time signature support in Arrangement view, which while anything but revolutionary, is a big relief. With various applications running roughly an […]

Zune 2.0 Does Video Out, Plenty Video Formats: Mobile VJing Continues

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2007/10/03/about-zune-2-0-video-compatibility.aspx

Microsoft Goes Non-DRM with Zune; Music DRM Now Completely Dead

The writing’s on the wall: DRM for music downloads is deader than the eight track. Okay, actually, that’s not fair: the eight track was relatively good technology. Just two weeks after Amazon launched their own DRM-free music store, Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon. DRM won’t be gone completely from the Zune store, but there […]

AES Tomorrow; AES Coverage All Weekend

I’m headed to the AES show. I can’t tell you anything, but here are some companies whose meetings I’m excited about: Apple Ableton Cakewalk Native Instruments Cycling ’74 Trinity Audio (the mobile Linux folks) I’ll let you figure this one out; some of those folks have made announcements, and some have not. Exhibiting at AES? […]

Microsoft Rolls Out USB Fixes for Vista Now; Not Everything Waiting for SP1

Okay, let’s just get this out of the way now: my initial experience with Windows Vista was hideously awful. Like, smoke and flames awful. Shuttle, the maker of my small form factor PC, pointed to an old version of the NVIDIA nForce driver for the chipset which repeatedly corrupted the device database, so eventually nothing […]

Intelligent Resizing: Seam Carving Publicly Available

Vade posted about the extremely sexy content-aware image resize “Seam Carving” a little over a month ago, and implementations for Gimp, Photoshop and a web2.0ish version – rsizr – are now available. The rsizr.com server’s being hammered a bit at the moment, so the “Save” function takes rather a long time to work. It’s easy […]

Logic Environments: Connect Logic to Nintendo NES via MIDINES

Logic’s Environment, a modular layer in the program for creating custom configurations, isn’t well known to many Logic users. But if you can get used to its slightly unusual interface, it’s capable of some really powerful stuff. You know, important music stuff. Like connecting Logic to your Nintendo NES game system. Jonathan Flugel writes: The […]

Building a VJ App with Adobe AIR, Bridging to Java with Artemis

For more on the creation of the new VISP visual app, there’s a terrific story by creator Michael Creighton at Adobe Edge: Building a visual performance app with Adobe AIR, Flex, and Flash The advantages of this combination are potent for visual development: File system API (so you can easily manage video clips, generative sketches, […]

Livid's New Ohm Control Surface, and the Hunt for the Perfect VJ Controller

Visualists have a challenge: visual hardware needs often aren’t quite the same as music’s. To make matters worse, there’s still no single, killer DJ-style control surface. There are lots of interesting entries, from Numark’s Total Control and NuVJ to the M-Audio Xponent and Vestax VCI-100, but, as our own Jaymis can attest, finding one that’s […]