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 […]

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? […]

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 […]

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’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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]