Think vintage video hardware has nothing on classic analog music synths like the Moog and Buchla? Think again. The Rutt-Etra video synthesizer, circa 1972, did sophisticated video raster manipulations. The invention of Steve Rutt and Bill Etra, the Rutt-Etra may not have had its Keith Emerson, but it did inspire Nam Jun Paik and Gary […]

The Video Critter hardware video synth kit seen here last year has been incarnated as a Cellular Automata kit from the good folks of MAKE Magazine. MAKE has been nice enough to do the scary bits for you: the board is assembled and programmed, so all you have to do is make a nifty case. […]

It’s not digital music, but it doesn’t matter. It begs the question, do you have time in your day for beauty? Does your audience? (And that beauty might be made with a violin or a laptop, but either way — the question is time and attention.) Also, hint to Joshua Bell: ditch DC and come […]

This week I thought I’d shake things up a bit and post a few of the videos that came in over the last few days. It’s Friday folks! I hope everyone has an awesome weekend. That said, I hope you enjoy at least one of these. Do make sure to check out the last video. […]

Two common services are the biggest culprits for “disk churning” behavior in Vista, and they’ll be familiar from XP. Now, tame that disk access! A common complaint of users who have just installed Vista is that the disk starts churning endlessly. Any kind of frequent disk access on the same volume on which you have […]

Is the UI in Vista taking far too big a toll on your system? For now, under some circumstances, that seems to be the case. Here’s what I’ve seen, plus how to turn ths crud off. (It’s unscientific, so take it with a grain of salt, but this CPU graph actually did this just moving […]

Imagine the Apple TV as live music and visual instrument, and not just a way of watching archived Battlestar Galactica? Our friend Jeff Gambera has been busy hacking his Apple TV for just such unusual purposes. He’s gotten the real-time audio and music workstation Ableton Live working; even the demo song runs. (Plenty of people […]

Hispasonic has a hands-on video with the Dexter control surface. I must say, I’m impressed with how far the Dexter has evolved in its user interface over the Lemur. There are a lot of new widgets to support the DAW functions, and (finally) real interactive interlinking of control pages from the main screen, such as […]