Game Of Life Sequencer in Processing from wesen on Vimeo. Coding-for-artists tool Processing is already popular for visuals, but MIDI and sound have been a serious blind spot. Speaking of our friend Wesen of Ruin & Wesen, he has solved that with a new library called rwmidi, which makes MIDI programming far easier and more […]

Wesen of Ruin & Wesen has been doing some amazing stuff with the MachineDrum – and sharing every last detail with friends via the Web. Ruin & Wesen blog We’ve already seen his DIY hardware, including a joystick for the MonoMachine. Here’s my favorite hack so far, though: using the MIDI Command hardware, he’s set […]

Low depth of field, high frame rate, high resolution. These are the technical hurdles which have traditionally separated consumers from creating film-quality video. HD video has been within consumer reach for quite a while now. 2008 has already seen high frame rates fall to Casio, and in the last couple of weeks, both Canon and […]

Todd Bailey’s “Where’s the Party At?” wants to return to a simpler, glitchier era of sampling. When CDM spoke to Hank Shocklee, Public Enemy’s legendary producer, he talked about how those artists really preferred earlier samplers because of, not in spite of, their flaws. And because lo-fi is a little easier to pull off, this […]

Earlier this week, I talked about some of the consumer-oriented feature improvements in Adobe Creative Suite CS4. But the most interesting development from Adobe is actually more on the developer side. Pixel Bender is a new format for making GPU-accelerated (and CPU multi-threaded) filters, which means fast blends (with different blend modes) and special effects. […]

I’ll be in Los Angeles this week and very excited about everything going on. I’m playing the Air Conditioned Supper Lounge in Venice Wednesday night with my friend Steve Nalepa, hosted by the amazing electronic impersario and producer Irwin. (Event info: Facebook | venue) The night, delightfully named Irwin’s Conspiracy, promises to inject some new […]

Distributing music on USB sticks or removable flash memory is an idea various parties have tried for the last few years. The Creative Commons advocates at self-proclaimed “non-evil” indie label Magnatune sold USB sticks pre-loaded with ten albums in 2004; Barenaked Ladies had the nicely-named Barenaked on a stick. But to really make the idea […]

Cakewalk has revealed what’s new in the latest version of their flagship Windows DAW, SONAR 8 Producer. SONAR remains a popular choice for people on Windows wanting a do-everything, traditional DAW. At the same time, it faces heated-up competition from rivals like Ableton Live and Reaper. SONAR users have been posting wish lists around the […]

The treachery of mock-ups: Roger Linn Design today released a new image of a design that Dave and Roger won’t be using. The LinnDrum II (once the BoomChik) has become a somewhat mystical beast, looming over the horizon and taunting fans of synth and beat hardware. The collaboration between beat machine guru Roger Linn (of […]

Electronic music is filled with grids and repeating loops. But get off that grid, and you can quickly wind up, well, floating in space. The challenge of marrying music that’s pre-sequenced with music that can generate itself, between self-evolving music and music that you can control live, is the challenge a lot of people are […]