New Yorkians, hope to see you tonight (Thursday) at the first Musicmakers @ Etsy meetup, hosted by Create Digital Music and MAKE Magazine at Etsy Labs. 7 pm – whenever. Informal, so bring any in-progress projects or just show up and drink Coke and gawk at other people. Directions. (It’s easy, right downtown, not off […]

Peter’s fantastic, historic and educational vintage tape looping and Dr Who posts made me think of the BBC and theremins (yes, I’m fully aware that there were no theremins used for the Dr Who theme, but the myth is too strong), and the person who best combines the BBC and theremins: Bill Bailey. If you’re […]

Onyx, the lovely open and extensible Flash-based live visualist tool, now runs on Mac as well as Windows. (Next stop, since it’s built in Flash: Linux.) And the latest build has some great new features: Snap to tempo, tempo-synced filters Build your own TempoFilters Mutable bitmap filters “Mix files” for saving multiple layers and filters […]

The wireless, Bluetooth-based Wii controller is fast becoming the music control hardware of choice. The latest addition: Yann Seznec’s Wii Loop Machine, a free, Wii-controller looper for Macs. The software is built in Max/MSP using my current favorite way to interface with the Wii controllers, the free aka.wiiremote external for Max. Load in any samples […]

Cockos’ REAPER, the lightweight audio and MIDI multitrack editor from the creator of Winamp, is coming to (Intel/PPC) Mac, too. There’s a full discussion of the update on the REAPER forum. It’s an “alpha” build, but comes as a surprise: REAPER may have a lot more appeal as the “standard” lightweight host as a cross-platform […]

Want to roll your own effects and synths? SonicBirth is a tool for constructing VST and AU plug-in instruments and sound processors, via a graphical patching interface. It’s a bit like a friendlier, Mac-compatible SoundEdit. And now, it’s completely free and open-source. Even ignoring its open-source nature, there are a few elements of SonicBirth that […]

Sometimes the best way to fix something is to break it. That applies to development processes as well as software itself. After some audio developers and users raised frustrations over compatibility issues with Audio Units and Mac OS X 10.4.9, a member of the Apple Core Audio team responded on the Core Audio development list […]

I had hoped to have Wii Remote control over at least part of Resolume happening for my gig on Friday night, but didn’t have time to setup the various MIDI messages in glovePIE. If only I’d googled it first. Erm, so not an “I feel lucky” search, but the second result is this thread on […]

AV3 has posted some impressions of the Numark NuVJ on VJForums, here and here. On getting it out of the box I have to say it looks really nice, quite light, but it is a midi controller and not hardware, so that was to be expected. Actually it sits well on the desk, and the […]

AV3 has posted some impressions of the Numark NuVJ on VJForums, here and here. On getting it out of the box I have to say it looks really nice, quite light, but it is a midi controller and not hardware, so that was to be expected. Actually it sits well on the desk, and the […]