lofi Rosa Menkman – A Vernacular of File Formats View more documents from Rosa Menkman Can hacking the innards of a file give you insight into how the underlying data works – and how to unlock the aesthetic of a digital file? Here’s one way to look at that question. Rosa Menkman, presenting at the […]

They’re not doing this with Reason – don’t get too excited – but Propellerhead are at least adopting this approach for upgraders from Reason + Record. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Oli Shaw. You’ve seen “pay what you want” pricing for self-released albums on Bandcamp, and independent donationware software. But you certainly haven’t seen it in a major […]

If you’ve got a whole bunch of colored lights, it seems only right to do something with them. Cacheflow sends a fun little hack with a Novation Launchpad. Of course, turning a Launchpad into a live EQ display means you can’t simultaneously use its lights to, like, play the Launchpad, but provided you have another […]

Click “Timeline” instead of “Sceneline,” and Premiere Elements 10 becomes a more conventional editor. Macworld has published the review I wrote of Premiere Elements 10. Windows users for some time have enjoyed budget-priced video editors from Sony and Adobe; the Mac user base has had only Final Cut Express. Then, Adobe brought their Premiere Elements […]

An Ableton rig with a dramatically-lit Novation Launchpad grid controller. Photo (CC-BY-SA) alexwire. Ableton Live fans hungry for sounds, what a good half-year it’s been. AfroDJMac alone has been busy putting together delicious-sounding, versatile racks of virtual Ableton-ready gear. After six months of contributing free downloads and videos – and discovering the use of this […]

DJ Apathy, anyone? DJs and audiences alike may have lost the plot of the DJ Mag Top 100 list – but technology could help the list get its groove back, says a former writer. Photo (CC-BY vmiramontes. DJ Magazine’s Top 100 list of DJs is irrelevant and broken, based on a flawed methodology, prone to […]

For those interested in coding their own audiovisual creations inside the artist-friendly language Processing, here’s an e-book that will help unlock the world of sound. Hot on the heels of my own workshop recently at Los Angeles’ Crash Space hackshop using our new Pd for Processing library, Evan X. Merz has an extensive ebook that […]

I’ll be flying from Toronto to Amsterdam, so as the song goes, “remember me to Herald Sq– God, sorry. It isn’t the prettiest part of Manhattan, exactly. Go in there and talk about music and then go to one of New York’s nicer parts. High Line! Photo by/(C) Oliver Chesler from last year; see the […]

Good fuel for coding and hacking? Bagels, natch. Photo by Dac Chartrand for CDM. Music Hack Day is an event that’s been gaining lots of steam. Packing engineering experimentation into a marathon session of collaborative, improvised work, followed by lots of sharing, the event tends to focus largely on Web services but also includes novel […]

In Toronto this Friday, we’ll be connecting with InterAccess Gallery in a celebration of DIY, adventurous music making, and blipping synthesizers. It’ll also be the first public debut of the new MeeBlip micro, a pocket-sized version of our MeeBlip open source hardware synth. Part of why I’m excited to be hacking away with the fine […]