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 […]

Cycling 74 has updated its Jitter 1.6.3 installer, while there are no new features, they’ve worked hard on optimizing speed for Windows users. I don’t have a Windows machine to benchmark, but if you are a Jitter user on Windows, you might want to give this a once over. Jitter 1.6.3 Ed.: I do have […]

Cycling ’74 hasn’t yet made a screen shot of the next version of Max public, so instead we offer this blurry picture of the current version, courtesy a lovely patch Peter Segerstrom was using with his Monome last night. If you squint really hard… Love it or hate it, there simply is no graphical development […]

Last night, a reasonably-sized mob squeezed between workbenches at Etsy Labs to enjoy the latest Handmade Music night, organized by myself and CDM, Etsy.com, and Make Magazine. At this point, I’d normally try to explain what the concept behind Handmade Music is, but, like so many things, it sounds way cooler in Spanish. Mangas Verdes […]

Designed to enhance phone camera video, and optimized for YouTube, FixMyMovie.com could be very useful for visualists. Most of us don’t perform with particularly high-resolution footage, so the dimensions of YouTube clips aren’t too much of an issue, but the horrible compression is instantly recognizable, which I’m sure prevents plenty of VJs scavenging material from […]

I’ve only had it for 12 hours, so I can’t do a proper review yet of the NuVJ, but its strange MIDI mappings (and those of the Total Control) have caused me enough trouble that I’ve posted about it on CDMusic. the Total Control jogwheels use a bizarre schema for their endless encoder messages. All […]

After more than a year of relatively trusty service and a country-spanning tour, my BCD2000 has finally become too flaky for performances. I’ve been looking at the various DJ-style midi controller options, and was down to about 5 options when I was asked to play a set on short notice at a relatively big festival […]

Monome co-creator Brian Crabtree, sampling into Max. Photo by saguirl from Etsy. It’s time for the third-ever, semi-regular Handmade Music Night with CDM, Etsy.com, and Make Magazine. If you have friends in the NYC area, make sure they drop by. In the lineup: the first-ever public debut of the Monome 256, Richard Lainhart playing a […]

I may be the last person to notice this for all I know, but I just plugged my FireWire-based Focusrite Saffire into a MacBook Pro 17″ and was treated to a blinking light show. The solution? Don’t use bus power; plug in the Saffire’s power supply to an outlet to power it directly. The solution […]