Two interesting Windows VST plug-ins hit this week. First up, Sonata, a rather nice “tone synth” for leads and pads and such has become free. (via our friends at rekkerd.org),) CPU hungry, so this looks like yet another chance to dial up some interesting sounds, throw them in the mix, and bounce. Tetra may be […]

Open Sound Control (OSC), an open protocol that can be used in place of MIDI, isn’t the right tool for everything. Hooking up a 4-octave keyboard with some knobs, for instance, makes a whole lot more sense in MIDI, and MIDI is widely supported. But I like OSC’s open-ended message structure for devices like the […]

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 […]