One keyboard, a mind-bending nine engines, lots of tech specs … now that we’ve lived in a world of impressive, technically-intimidating workstation keyboards for a couple of decades, it’s easy to imagine your eyes glazing over when there’s a new one, let alone the general public. So, what might get your attention? This. “Workstation keyboard” […]

Photo (CC-BY) Marcelo Braga. Roger Ebert is not a person with whom I’m accustomed to being in agreement. His position on whether games are art seems laughable for someone who makes Hollywood his living, attacking a medium rather than the content made in that medium. But kudos to Ebert for bringing to light the insight […]

Photo (CC-BY) Marcelo Braga. Roger Ebert is not a person with whom I’m accustomed to being in agreement. His position on whether games are art seems laughable for someone who makes Hollywood his living, attacking a medium rather than the content made in that medium. But kudos to Ebert for bringing to light the insight […]

Practical iPad Music Making: Connecting Hardware What’s this MIDI thing about? Creatively, music is about assembling a new whole out of lots of pieces. So it makes sense that in a music workspace, making connections is important. Like traditional computers before it, part of what makes the shiny, new iPad musically useful is its ability […]

Photo (CC-BY-ND) tianhua. Record an album in the month of February, and have it in the mail by March 1: that’s the RPM Challenge, and so far, some 6,000 acts have already delivered. Nathan Groth writes us with details (and apologies for late posting here, since that means you have… less time). Long time reader […]

Spend seasons with great listening. Photo (CC-BY-SA) hell*yeah. Given the vastness of music available today online, “best of…” lists, while nice to have, can be disappointingly predictable. Not so with music selected by readers of this site. We asked for your favorite albums of last year, and you responded with extraordinary variety. I’ve selected entries […]

Google ups the ante. H.264, it’s on. Of course, given the entrenchment of existing videos and the Flash plug-in, many are predicting the “die tryin’” scenario is the more likely one. Time will tell. Photo (CC-BY) Linus Bohman. Today, Google announced it is omitting H.264 support from its Chrome browser, in favor of free and […]

Dave Cross thinks more about the design of DJ gear than even most passionate electronic music enthusiasts. Aside from stints at DJ Times and Ableton, this is a man who wrote an honors thesis on the history of the DJ mixer [PDF]. Then again, maybe it’s more a matter of the industry being painfully behind. […]

From comments (thanks, Charlie Cowper!), here’s a live performance by Japanese electronic artist Rei Harakami on nothing more than a 1990s-vintage multitrack digital workstation, Roland’s VS-880. (The VS-880 was introduced at NAMM in January 1996.) Harakami is a virtuoso on this machine, not simply playing back tracks but dancing through menus and settings and adding […]

Pay attention to those Angry Birds. They could be a sign of upcoming gigs, composers and sound designers. Photo (CC-BY) Johan Larsson. Composer/sound designer Ben Long has a resume of work on dozens of games. Here on CDM, he shares the topic on which he recently addressed GDC China: mobile. If mobile game audio is […]