Apple has posted the details of GarageBand ‘09. Most of the new improvements are in the form of the new Lessons feature, both built-in “Basic Lessons” and a la carte, $5 “Artist Lessons.” The basic specs: Basic lessons: Included with the program, these teach you the fundamentals of piano and guitar, with side-by-side notation, frets, […]

It’s port talk time again. As I suspected, Apple’s 17” MacBook Pro does get one additional port. You get 3 USB ports and one FireWire 800 port – though this means that, even though there’s almost no hardware that supports FW800, you’ll need an adapter for FW400 devices like HDV/DV cameras. At least unlike the […]

One chip to rule them all: over a quarter century later, the sounds of this chip are reborn in the newest mobile devices. Photo (CC) Dejdżer / Digga. Take a look at the long view of history, and the Commodore 64 fares nicely. It remains the most popular computer of all time. And this newfangled […]

Finally, NVIDIA extends a welcome mat. Photo by Anna Irsch. For graphics cards, drivers are everything: it’s just not possible to be on top of stability, performance, and functionality without access to new, stable drivers. But for Windows notebooks, unlike desktops, traditionally you had to turn to OEM PC vendors to get your NVIDIA graphics […]

Keep Your Resolutions Dance Party NYE 2009 from Robotkid on Vimeo. How did you spend your New Year’s Eve, visualists? And how much do you love live visuals and dancing? Our friend Robotkid (aka Josh Randall) just showed me this video of the frigid dance party in Boston, complete with –10-degree (Fahrenheit) wind chills and […]

chromedecay studio look: TouchOSC with Ableton Live and BigSeq from chromedecay on Vimeo. New Year’s Resolution: do cool new stuff. In celebration of the coming of 2009, I’ve got a set of tutorials to post here on createdigitalmusic and createdigitalmotion, so you can get a jump start on the new year by learning some new […]

Adobe has quietly added some features to Premiere CS4 I would consider really huge. Adobe Updater is normally the little app that delivers Acrobat Reader updates what seems like every other weekday, but imagine my surprise when I opened it today: a little New Year’s present. AAF support (Advanced Authoring Format, an attempt to create […]

Doing live visuals and other projects means sometimes endless conversion and editing tasks, but many of the dedicated tools for the job are just too much. I’ve been playing around with Video Converter from Extensoft, which is about perfect I think in terms of what you most often need to do. It’s an ideal companion […]

Sophisticated drumming is here. Practice your polyrhythmic ideas, folks. Image: Julián Rodriguez Orihuela. DIY lovers and drum machine nuts alike should be very excited by what our friend Wesen has been up to lately. Working on his projects MidiCommand and MonoJoystick, two hackable boutique music hardware gadgets for MIDI control and joystick manipulation of MachineDrum, […]

  Move over, Manchester Boys Choir. A computer can allow you to hear the digitally-reduced essence of all of these songs at once. Album image from Jacob Whittaker, who also offers some videos. It’s an old piece (Christmas 2004), but if you find your ears are ringing with retailers playing Christmas tracks on endless loop […]