Those zany, wonderful YouTubers. A YouTube post in April challenged YouTubers to show off home-built instruments: And there’s a terrific lineup of responses, like this performance on Tupperware musical instruments, by Adachi Tomomi: Video is a natural medium, after all, for showing off DIY instruments. Now, if only we could start doing this on a […]

Flash drives: ultra-fast. Zero noise. Absurdly awesome reliability. Now, replacing your hard drive. That’s the vision, anyway. Flash memory, once limited to very tiny chunks, is slowly creeping towards storage big enough to use for audio. You’ve already got flash storage around, most likely, because of devices like Apple’s iPod nano and iPhone. But 4GB […]

“If only Live could …” Hard-core Live users dream of more than just an extra feature widget or two. They imagine a world in which they can hack and alter the way Live itself behaves. They want the ability to develop software that works with Live at a low-level. In short, what they want is […]

In just over a year, the open source Monome hardware has become a cult hit among musicians. A grid of buttons seems deceptively simplistic; I have to admit I was skeptical at first. But the Monome has spread by word of mouth because this simple design can be elegant, because the build quality and touch […]

Macworld, naturally, spends a lot of time focused intently on Apple hardware while I get distracted by beatboxing parrots and modular synthesizers built out of yarn and rubber bands. They have an excellent write-up of the significance of the MacBook Pro Santa Rosa upgrades, with comments on their benchmarks of the equivalent refreshed MacBooks: MacBook […]

Audio, relying primarily on the CPU, can do fine on the non-pro MacBook: a fast CPU and FireWire 400 can be all you need. But for visualists, the GPU has become more and more vital. The integrated Intel GPU on the MacBooks is surprisingly capable, and certainly gets through basic video mixing. But throw enough […]

There’s a reason all these MacBooks have become a big hit with laptop musicians. Expect to see so many of them you get sick of seeing them. That’s why we strongly suggest customization, like making a new case out of mylar or something. Apple has unveiled its revised MacBook Pros today, with some subtle but […]

We are saddened to learn that Juan Antonio Argüelles, “Argu(ru)”, died Sunday night in a car accident. He was respected as one of the most talented plug-in developers anywhere, as the creator of plug-in house discoDSP, and later a developer of plug-ins for Image-Line. He had a deep role in the creation of FL Studio […]

Lightborne writes us: Hi, first of all I wanted to say I love the site and have been checking it daily for about a year now, as well as createdigitalmusic. I just came across a clip on youtube that really puts what I’ve seen of people abusing Wii remotes so far to shame. This seems […]

Editblog does more tests of SmoothCam, plus comparison tests. Editblog has responded to Anton’s SmoothCam tests with some tests of their own: SmoothCam is smooth, but slow [Scottsimmons.tv] Scott’s tests run even slower than Anton’s, regardless of codec. I asked Anton about this, and his take was that the technology was really intended for short […]