For all the hype around mobile music creation, here’s a story with an ending in the opposite direction. Independent developer Olivier Gillet is the reason a lot of people see handheld gadgets as potential music making devices; he’s the creator of the brilliant Bhajis Loops for Palm. But, as if to prove that hardware can […]

The folks at Miro have a handy tool for fool-proof, dummy-friendly video conversion for mobile devices. Drop nearly any file, and it converts to MP4, OGG Theora, or specific presets for devices from the TMobile G1 to the iPod – and even FLV. It’s available for Mac and Windows only, not Linux. I imagine that’s […]

Among the highlights of the product releases last week, Roland has a new virtual analog synth (the SH-01) and shoulder keyboard (AX-09) that look friendly and relatively affordable (especially once you account for street price, not list). They have that convergence of certain selling points that I think will make them popular – maybe not […]

SunVox, the quirky and cool modular music creation software, already runs on a ton of platforms. Starting now, most of those platforms can run the tool for free. (The one exception: iPhone/iPad.) That means you get a rich music creation environment that can run on everything from an ancient PDA to a desktop computer, complete […]

FINE COLLECTION OF CURIOUS SOUND OBJECTS from Georg Reil on Vimeo. Commentary would spoil the video above, but to me it’s a reminder of the power of theater in all we do with technology and musical objects. The arrangement includes six exceptional exhibits from the world of sounds and acoustics. At first sight looking trivial, […]

The Octatrack is an ambitious piece of hardware, combining multitrack sampling and playback with real-time audio warping. We didn’t get a good look at it earlier this week, but the folks at Gear4Music went back to get a more complete walkthrough with Elektron’s Jon. It’s followed by a proper live set – and it sounds […]

Let’s get this out of the way right at the beginning: dedicated audio editors are important. For sound design, for tweaking audio assets, and for just getting close to your sounds, editing waveforms in a DAW often doesn’t cut it. That’s made a lot of Mac users unhappy, because it’s one of the few areas […]

One of the numerous 64-bit-ready processors, the Core 2 Duo E7300. Photo (CC) William Hook. What will 64-bit mean for After Effects? Will it be worth the jump, and will your plug-ins be ready? I noted that those questions had some people concerned earlier this week. AE Product Manager Michael Coleman writes in with a […]

Image courtesy KORG, USA. Looking for all the world like it was inspired by the Gakken SX-150 synth, but packed with Korg analog electronics, the monotron has to be one of the biggest surprise announcements from a major vendor in recent memory. The tiny has the filter from the classic KORG MS-10 and MS-20 and […]