Robotspeak video window (Director’s Cut) from Donald Bell on Vimeo. Take on Make Controller Kit, one copy of Max/MSP/Jitter, one ultrasonic sensor (deliciously superior to infrared sensors in my opinion), a projector, and a storefront window on Lower Haight in San Francisco, add in some music tech shop geeks, and you get some good fun. […]

What do you say when it’s all been said? We felt it was time for a fresh perspective on the MPC phenomenon — one a normal review couldn’t provide. So we got the opinion of our friend, samplist/producer and Segue member Dave Dri. And the verdict: there’s still something about an MPC — even if […]

Photos from Berlin’s fantastic Dense Record Shop by MPC2000xl / MIDI Mechanics, from his blog. To me, the ideal kind of music tech writing is when you get to spend quality time with tools for musical reasons – not simply to talk about the technology, but to make stuff. Over the past weeks, we’ve been […]

Well, it was fun while it lasted. Hey, my Apple IIc at least still has a composite TV out (and nothing else, as it happens). Photo: Daniel Höpfl. It’s long been accepted tradition at VJ events: the lingua franca of video interconnects is good, old-fashioned analog S-Video and composite. Add an Edirol V-4 mixer, or […]

Back from the dead: music videos, from the network that forever ruined the term “VJ.” Photo: James Good. I’m just wrapping my head around how huge this is, but MTV has posted a massive archive of music videos on their site. That can mean only one thing: it’s time to assemble CDMotion’s list of the […]

Conventional projection hasn’t come very far since the magic lantern days of a century or so ago. Projector + flat, rectangular surface = image. But naturally, with computers, it’s possible to do far more. The idea is to contextualize a projection in its surroundings, and give the illusion that instead of being simply a rectangular […]

What if controllers were not only wireless and multi-touch, but could find software to control automatically, or share control between more than one person or more than one computer? On one-level, yes, Mrmr is a free and open source OpenSoundControl app for iPod and iPhone. But on a deeper level, it’s an illustration of how […]

SoundCloud, the music and sound sharing service we saw launch this month has added a very important feature: support for different licenses. When you upload tracks, you can elect to protect your work with a conventional copyright or opt instead for a Creative Commons license. That’s an important feature I’d like to see all these […]

I’ve recently had another shipment arrive from previously mentioned purveyors of cheap gadgetry, DealExtreme (disclosure: Affiliate links used, if you buy stuff I get a (tiny) cut). Last time I write about the site, I noted that super-useful VJ things such as preview monitors weren’t available. They are now. As you can definitely tell from […]

Over at Video Thing, Wiley is espousing the competition-winning Boxee – an open-source “social media player”, based on XBox Media Centre, and running on Linux, Mac, Windows, and in the VideoThing setup, AppleTV: I’ve been using an AppleTV since it was released. A device with great potential (cheap, HD enabled, great integration with iTunes) crippled […]