We’ve all watched and commented on bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails releasing free albums and still profiting by them. Will this model still work for new artists, though? Trent Reznor posted yesterday that the Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication reissue is “how you sell music today”. As a rebuttal to the usual “that only […]

When applications are open to clearly-expressed control, it’s easier than ever – easier than with MIDI – to navigate their interfaces and make them express what you want. Using OSC (rather inaccurately named Open “Sound” Control), interacting with live visuals is getting a lot more powerful. Case in point: thanks to hacks, we’re getting affordable […]

What if you could record directly online from a Web browser – no additional software needed? It’s not a new idea, but online music community Indaba has an interesting new Java-based tool that gets one step closer. We took a first look at the tool last month, but it’s now publicly available at indabamusic.com today. […]

CrudBox by Steven Litt at ITP from Core77 on Vimeo. How much performance power can you pack in a briefcase? What if you could have a magic box that did whatever you wanted? That’s the question asked, in various different ways, by the artists we’re showcasing at this month’s Handmade Music NYC, Thursday evening 7/16 […]

The glowing glory of the PowerMate, as captured by Casey Fleser aka Some Geek in Tennessee. The PowerMate from Griffin is an affordable, very compact USB knob with glowing blue LED feedback and push-and-turn functionality (so it’s a button, too). But using just one knob may not be all that useful for control. We’ve already […]

There really is something special about Montreal, Quebec’s metropolis just beyond the New York Adirondacks. Having shared our own conversation with Christopher Bauder and Robert Henke with video from their stunning ATOM, here’s what our friends at XLR8R Magazine were up to in May: they were on a tour of Montreal with local Ghislain Poirier. […]

Thanks to those of you who reported a temporary issue with Create Digital Music’s RSS feed. I believe we’ve resolved this problem: you can blame an accidental edit to a configuration file. (WordPress users, if you ever happen to encounter this problem yourself, feedvalidator.org has a tip for you.) We have traditionally used the Feedburner […]

I’ve been blogging effectively every day for nearly five years, so it’s hard to avoid novelty – that’s kind of what we publish. The question is, is it the novelty that’s important, or do you see these as little steps toward something greater that hasn’t happened yet? I tend to favor the latter. Here’s the […]

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 […]