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 […]

Software doesn’t have to mean virtualizing everything and letting go of physical objects. On the contrary, it can create all sots of imaginative, new ways of mapping musical ideas to the physical world. And that’s how we wind up with a walnut drum sequencer. There’s something about virtual drum machines and snacks. We’ve seen bubblegum […]

Reaktor… you know, for kids! Oli, age 7. Photo (CC) Laura Whitehead. Normally, pricing announcements and sales press releases bore me to tears, but this is actually news – Native Instruments is selling Komplete for July only at just US$/EUR 399, instead of $1139/EUR999. That means if you were looking for Reaktor alone – about […]

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, […]