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 […]

Livid, best known for their VJ software (Union, Cell), have a new control surface for music and visuals called the Ohm. What’s nice about this control surface is that it’s clearly designed around specific user needs, with a control setup that should work well for music software (Traktor or any DJ software, Ableton Live, and […]

We’ve mentioned VISP earlier in the year, an open source VJ app based on Adobe’s Flex and AIR (formerly Apollo) Rich Internet Application platform. Despite some delays, VISP has been released. Check out VISP-VJ.com for downloads and source code. VISP’s home page contains tutorials, introduction videos and guidelines to download the latest frameworks required by […]

MacNN points to an Apple Support document announcing Boot Camp will cease to work “when Leopard is available to the public.” That means if you’re happily dual-booting Linux or Windows on your Mac, you may soon be unable to do so without a Leopard upgrade. Edit: This is technically inaccurate as written originally. What Apple […]

With the release of Logic Studio 8, several soundware houses released custom Logic Environments / sound packs. Taking advantage of Logic’s unique modular engine, beneath its shiny new skin, has some real potential. I’m trying to organize a round-up of everything out there, so if you represent a company doing commercial Logic development — or […]

Hardware is wonderful, but make no mistake about it: many musicians have put the same care and musical love into their software setup as once was limited to tangled guitar pedal rigs. We’ve been watching as intricate computer music studios appear in the CDM Flickr pool. proem, the gifted electronic musician from Austin, Texas (see […]

Kotaku points us to a very odd an interesting looking prototype gaming console. The gist of the system is that it captures real-time data from sensors, such as GPS, a camera system, etc., to mold reality into an immersive gaming environment. Kotaku puts it rather well : I don’t come from the future, where everyday […]

Thanks to the AES audio show here in New York this week, for the first time I hope to meet Tom Whitwell, the writer behind the blog Music Thing. That should be fun, as we both appreciate robotic Japanese vocals and Flight of the Conchords. There have been some other great posts lately: Experimental DIY […]

Tubes rock, and not just the vacuum tube kind: from Collin Mel’s photostream. Collin Mel brought some wonderful soundmaking projects to Handmade Music last week. Face-to-face community is a beautiful thing (if loud, crowded, and prone to elevator failure — I like to think the Etsy elevator was slashdotted). But it’s also nice to keep […]

It’s no secret that a major update to Max/MSP/Jitter is coming from Cycling ’74, with a major overhaul of the underlying code and an entirely new, friendlier interface. What has been secret is just what that upgrade will look like. We still don’t know what it’ll look like visually, but Cycling ’74 today released some […]