General Specialist not only has an excellent name, but Jonas is supporting that name with excellent original content. The latest: “how to avoid the dreaded image buffer error“, with background on why it occurs, and a collection of tweaks and techniques for preventing this from happening. Unlike many other compositing and 3D programs, After Effects […]

Your stupid, low-tech t-shirts. All they do is sit there. You can’t even hook them into a computer and control instruments live. Pathetic. John Malloy points us to a project by Dr. Richard Helmer, an engineer from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Belment, Australia. By embedding “textile motion sensors” (using conductive […]

Java has long been freely-available, but now the entire Java platform and source code are fully open source and free under the GPL. Sun has posted a resource center for the announcement: Open Source Java It’s not available yet, but a new open source implementation of the platform and Java Development Kit, dubbed the OpenJDK, […]

Love your audio gear so much you wish you could wear it around your neck, but a loudspeaker on your throat would a) strangle you and b) make you look like too much of a dork to attend high-society functions? Complete Technique jewelers feels you. From sterling silver turntable cartridges plated in gold with embedded […]

A combination of frenetic CDM backend design work and all of my clients finally giving me materials 2 weeks before I leave to holiday in Vietnam has kept me from writing, and for that I apologize. Peter has or course kept up the fantastic content, but there is some more material which needs to be […]

There are lots of fantastic music tools out there, but some of them just inspire love and envy, and the Moog Little Phatty certainly fits the bill. Via Matrixsynth, Melbourne Sydney-based composer / music maven Sofie Loizou has posted her unboxing ceremony and first impressions of the Moog synth. (At this point, I would normally […]

Photosynth is one of the coolest pieces of software of any kind to emerge this year. And despite the fact that the name begins with the word “Photo” from a major software developer’s “Labs”, this time it’s Microsoft Live Labs giving us love instead of Adobe Labs. Photosynth takes hundreds — or thousands — of […]

At the beginning of 2006, we learned that legendary guitarist Robert Fripp would create a musical theme for Windows Vista, following in the footsteps of the likes of Brian Eno. Well, after a brief joke that circulated about what the sound set would sound like, here’s the real sound theme, at least as far as […]

Digidesign has taken a minimalist approach to their latest audio interface, the USB-powered Mbox 2 Mini. The new hardware gives the mobile Pro Tools LE user the basics for on-the-go use, and nothing more: One mic input (on a dedicated XLR, though only 2 inputs max can be used at once) 48V phantom power Two […]

When those infants graduate from playing with computer music-controlling pacifiers, they can move on to blocks. Our friend Nat points today to a brilliant tangible computing interface that generates sequences of musical events. (Also seen last week on Matrixsynth.) The transmitter (some sort of RF operation) communicates with a receiver connected to the compute, and […]