From my review for Macworld.com: Rax 2.0, a music utility from plasq, the creators of Comic Life, brings the same kind of easy access to virtual musical instruments and effects plug-ins that Apple’s Front Row provides for music, videos, and photos. With a virtual mixer, a facility for creating custom songs and sets, and a […]

You heard it hear first. For those of you who just joined us, Mono Touch is a simple clone of the Ableton Live template from Lemur, though without the Lemur’s multi-touch capability, hardware, physics, customizability, and essentially everything other than the look of the interface. My criticism of this effort — which gave no credit […]

If you take digital photos and care at all about your signal, then you should own, or be planning to own, a digital SLR camera. Of the stuff people don’t understand about DSLRs, the easiest to explain and see is dust. You change lenses, some dust gets in and lands on the sensor, each subsequent […]

CDM got some early exclusives on the future of Microsoft’s media plan and PlaysForSure, including an explanation of why Zune isn’t part of the PlaysForSure program, thanks to Dave McLauchlan of the Windows Media Group: Microsoft Not Turning Back on PlaysForSure with Zune Player MTP, Portable Player Standard? Microsoft’s McLauchlan Sets Us Straight At the […]

The mighty Ars Technica regularly takes on technically-intense reviews of processors and operating systems, but this time they’ve turned their attentions to something else altogether: DJ software. Dave Girard helms the review, with an exhaustive look at both basic DJ virtual decks (Disco, FutureDecks Lite, DJ1800) and full-featured software (VirtualDJ, Traktor DJ Studio from Native […]

You’re tired of using your mouse to grab on-screen controls. You want something physical to control, a motorized fader that will automatically pop to the right position. But you aren’t quite ready to surrender a bunch of workspace to a hulking full-sized control surface. You want something as compact and easy to grab as the […]

As I have a plotter which only speaks vectors, and Peter has motion tracking on the brain we’ve been thinking about visualisations involving vector graphics a lot recently. Someone else who has visualisation on the brain is Martin Wattenberg. I’ve encountered his work before, but hadn’t connected the projects together. Shape of Mary Had A […]

Mashup/files/media/music maven Moldover checks in in comments with another tip for surviving the desert of Burning Man (or, you know, your next gig in Yemen): I’ve been bringing my laptop to the playa for several years now. My solution this year was a modified briefcase. I made a mount for my MIDI controller to sit […]

Light Emitting Textiles is a technological theme which keeps reappearing year after year. In fact, a year ago for the Internationale Funkaustellung (IFA) Phillips announced their Photonic Textile Prototypes – rather blocky but undeniably cool flexible LED arrays. For this year’s IFA, Phillips have upped the ante with: better resolution? Cliched example loops? Come on […]