My God … it’s full of keys! While the black-and-white piano-style keyboard layout remains the standard, designers still look for ways of reinventing pitch in music controllers. Sometimes the aim is to make it easier to play harmonies (top) … and sometimes it’s 211 keys-per-octave microtonal mayhem.

AudioEase previewed a new utility at NAMM that integrates with your Mac to provide ever-present sound file previewing, editing, and sample utilities. (Thanks to our readers who picked up on this in Barry Wood’s NAMM Oddities.) Soundabout has a lot of tricks up its sleeve: It provides waveform previewing, auditioning, and selection tools. It integrates […]

It wouldn’t be a winter NAMM music trade show without the galleries of musical curiosities that are Barry Wood’s NAMM Oddities. Barry’s finds range from the unique and useful to the utterly baffling. Many of the techno geek toys aren’t strictly new, but they are strictly strange and unusual. And there’s plenty of evidence to […]

I’m a complete idiot when it comes to mental arithmetic and aspect ratios. Everything else I can convert in my head, and yet … here is an absurdly simplistic solution: Aspect Ratio Calculator Built in Java. Now, should Jaymis and I set about building our own open source alternative with lots of powerful features? (I […]

Mike’s description: “It’s the type of artifact you might discover hidden away on a derelict alien freighter drifting aimlessly somewhere near the ancient center of our galaxy … There are mysterious faded glyphs on the buttons – the remnants of a now long dead language.” Mike aka Chronovalve writes CDM to share two new projects: […]

“It’s kinda ghetto”, notes creator Cousin Throckmorton, but a series of pennies becomes a touch interface for Ableton Live and drums in Battery. Apologies if you’ve seen this; I hadn’t. (That or else I had, and they didn’t push the whole “pennies and popsicles” angle.) The $.08 Ableton Live Controller His MySpace blog, 13unluckysongsaboutlove, is […]

We’ve covered Lightroom from early in the beta. Now adobe have put up a product page, thanked the half-million beta testers, and announced that Lightroom won’t be a part of CS3, but will be shipping mid-feb, for an introductory price of US$199 (until May, then $299). I feel that $200 is quite reasonable for the […]

Robert of Flight404 fame has posted his initial dabblings in Quartz Composer. I find it rather exciting that a Processing Ninja such as Robert can find inspiration in QC. I have a terrible head for languages – both human and machine – so I’ve been wondering whether a node-based environment may be easier for me […]