Enough of all this nonsense about how the Western Empire is crumbling. In our new “world” in which Mumbai is as powerful a cultural compass as Berlin or New York, one thing is guaranteed: it’s going to be a great party. One stalwart Western-based advocate of a more pluralist electronica scene are the folks at […]

You’ve got to respect BeatKangz: here’s an independent company doing something new in the world of hardware drum machines. Their design is blinged out like crazy, the polar opposite of a minimalist MachineDrum, but with easy access to the controls you need. It’s a box that has personality in a world of gear that often […]

The once and future Walkman. Photo: FaceMePLS. July 1, 1979: it was thirty years ago today that the Sony Walkman went on sale, launching mobile music for the first time. Wait – rewind (so to speak). That honor really belongs to the portable transistor radio – and, indeed, part of the reason America already knew […]

You’ve seen the demos. You like the idea of tracking tags in the real world to create visuals. And now you want to try augmented reality for yourself – and, incidentally, you’re a Flash developer. Reader Eric Socolofsky writes to share a framework he’s created that makes it much easier to work with the Flash-based, […]

Fans of the Nintendo DS may have been immune to the siren song of Nintendo’s tweaked DSi model. Unfortunately, I have a feeling a bunch of you are about to upgrade your handheld game system. Why? Because the folks at AQ Interactive are doing an upgraded version of the DS-10 software synth for the game […]

Puddle of Life – Darwin Exhibit from Tiago Serra on Vimeo. Here’s a really elegantly-designed multi-touch table. It uses two really key pieces of open source technology: the Community Core Vision (“CCV”) tracker, formerly known as tbeta, and a lovely framework for coding visuals called PyMT. PyMT, as the name implies, is a Python-based framework. […]

If you’re using Ableton Live 8, you’ve hopefully already discovered the joys of Track Groups. Track grouping is a welcome feature in any DAW, but in Live, the mixer-centric Session View can easily get unruly with endless columns of vertical tracks. I wanted to share some discoveries about Track Groups, including what I thought was […]