DIY Portable Music Player Kits

Enough of whining about Apple, Microsoft, and other hardware players: make your own media player instead. Co-Editor Jaymis has been hitting nasty firmware issues with his iPod, and I’ve been having issues with oddities on Zune. So let’s do things the DIY way and build a player that’s exactly what we want! yampp, “Yet Another […]

More Zune Coverage; Why Hobble Wi-Fi?

Now that the Zune has been unleashed on the wild, we’re getting some more coverage on the player and this mysterious deal with Universal Music Group. (Incidentally, I am hoping to get someone from PR to explain to me what that deal is for, whether it’s intended to cover pirated music played on the device, […]

Universal, Microsoft Screw Over Artists, Set Absurd and Dangerous Precedent with Zune

At first, I thought I was reading something wrong when I got this press release this morning: “Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Universal Music Group, the world’s leading music company, announced today an agreement which creates a groundbreaking, new revenue stream for UMG and its artists: in addition to the standard payments it will make […]

Real-Time Visualizations, VJ by Hearbeat: Jan Kremlacek + Processing

Image from Whizz, projected at a Romanian club by Jan Kremlacek and coded in Processing. Last week, we saw how Flash and Processing code can create custom VJ and visualization tools. Custom code means custom results, and all sorts of dynamic new possibilities for visuals. Jan Kremlacek writes from the Czech Republic to share his […]

MacBook Gets Core 2 Duo; Live Laptop Config; What’s Your Laptop Pick?

As widely expected, Apple has given its MacBook Core 2 Duo CPUs, as with its existing MacBook Pro. The MacBook ships with either a 1.83Ghz Core 2 Duo chip with a 2MB L2 cache or a 2 GHz CPU with a 4GB L2 cache. To me, the added MHz along with the added cache and […]

Water-and-Laser Music Controller, A Look Back at Watery Musical Instruments

Is it the call of the ocean? The primordial urge to return to our pre-human evolutionary roots, the womb? Hand dryness caused by too many hours at the computer? Whatever the reason, interactive musicians keep designing wild instruments involving water. The latest comes from Australian hacker / designer / instrument builder Sebastian Tomczak. He’s turned […]

Audio Damage Working on Beat Repeat-Like “Replicant” Plug-in

Audio Damage, the indie plug-in developers who keep churning out some of our favorite plug-ins, do love to tease their fans with screen shots of their software in-development. The latest is something called Replicant: Teaser… Pt. 3 Like Beat Repeat in Ableton Live , Replicant performs some automatic slicing and dicing of incoming audio with […]

Open-Source ActionScript: Adobe and Mozilla Team Up

Open-source ActionScript meets Mozilla: it’s either a geek wet dream or an odd title for a Japanese monster flickr. Emmy Huang, Product Manager for Flash Player at Adobe, reports on her blog: New open source project with code contributed from Adobe ActionScript Virtual Machine See also Tamarin Project page at mozilla.org Now, before you get […]

Emmy-Award Winning Flash

Adobe’s Flash Video has won an Emmy Award for technical acheivement. Via Macworld: Flash Video Gets an Emmy Previous winners of the same award have included Apple’s Final Cut Pro. (But not Adobe Premiere, as far as I know — maybe next year.) 2006 is certainly Flash Video’s year, thanks to the phenomenal success of […]

Thomas Dolby + BT on Tour in US

One music tour in 2006 may pack more lines of code and more IQ points than any other: the meeting of BT and Thomas Dolby. This should be a really fantastic tour given the buzz on each artist lately, and if you want to see people doing unique stuff with computers as performance instruments, this […]