Live visualism needs a format that a) isn’t so huge it eats your hard drive, b) can be decoded and processed by your computer without bringing your CPU to its needs (DV compression causes some issues here), and c) still looks good, especially when scratched. We’ve had a great discussion going on the forums, in […]

The Rest of the Messe As you know, the Frankfurt Musicmesse opened on Wednesday the 28th. There were quite a few exciting announcements including the Nord Wave, Arturia Origen Keyboard, the Dexter and of course the biggest announcement in my opinion, the Solaris hardware synth by John Bowen Synth Designs. If you haven’t already, be […]

I got a disturbing comment on a past story on Brian Moore Guitars working on hybrid MIDI/audio USB transmission for guitars. The poster suggested Brian Moore was no more. That would be sad news, as Brian Moore makes some fantastic custom instruments with MIDI and USB interfaces, top-notch stuff. Fortunately, a company spokesperson has confirmed […]

JazzMutant’s Lemur touchscreen turned a lot of heads, at least as a concept: precise, multi-touch tracking that could follow all ten of your fingers independently, and interactive, custom controller touch layouts looking like something out of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was the good news. The bad news: difficult assignments for OpenSoundControl (OSC), extra […]

Me-too 49-key controllers have been mind-numbingly dull for the most part. The new Akai MPK49, revealed in Frankfurt at Messe, easily qualifies as different. Not only does it add trigger pads as found on the MPC line, but there’s an onboard arpeggiator, functionality borrowed from the MPC, and additional MIDI control options, as well. It’s […]

We looked at the VMX controller from Codanova last month on Create Digital Motion, because it instantly looked like a terrific VJ controller. It’s not cheap at EUR500, but it certainly doesn’t want for controls. Now the creators have shot some video of the VMX running FL Studio 6. Look how lovingly he tweaks those […]

And we thought we’d have to wait for 10.5 to get Boot Camp improvements. Apple today released Boot Camp 1.2. Still beta, but lots of improvements including 32-bit Vista support and Apple Remote support in iTunes and Windows Media Player. (Wonder if you could hack in other Windows apps?) We’ll have more on Vista for […]

We usually skip over minor version upgrades, but Z3TA+ from Cakewalk is a very special synth, and 1.5 is a very nice (free) update. New in the version bump: x64 and Vista support, a low-CPU arpeggiator (assuming it’s handling voicing/oscillator resource allocation more efficiently?), different CPU-optimized quality modes (also added to rival NI Massive recently), […]

Chiptune musicians rejoice! Though the original, grey Game Boy has long been a favorite, Herbert Weixelbaum has recently posted what may be the most thorough sonic comparison of Gameboy models. In his comparison he uses LSDJ to analyze the sonic qualities, as well as list the pros, cons and quirks of each model with and […]

“Collaboration” I think is the key word in the upcoming, unknown Ableton-Cycling ’74 product. It’s difficult to avoid confusion when talking about a product you can’t talk about, but Cycling ’74 founder David Zicarelli does that today. The highlight for me is this passage on the next version of Max/MSP/Jitter, which is independent from the […]