Live 6 isn’t even out yet, but here’s a “secret” feature Ableton developers were able to sneak into a recent beta. Sources at Ableton say this won’t ever be documented, but they do plan to put it on the forums. I’m most interested to see what Live hackers and hard-core users do with this. The […]

My review of the Novation ReMOTE SL keyboard/control surface is in the current issue of Keyboard and free online. Here’s a taste at how I approached the review: Music stores and closets alike are full of controller keyboards aimed for use with software. Most seem identical save for a set of drum pads here and […]

Logic Pro has some incredible instruments, effects, and (if you’re good with the Environment) absurdly powerful MIDI configurations. It’d be great to take those onstage and switch between them as easily as you switch patches on your hardware synth. Enter OnStage: Fluqe OnStage It’s a simple utility: hit a program change, and call up one […]

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 […]