Deadmau5, acting mousey. Photo (CC) iamdonte. Who’s sampling what? When is sampling stealing? Who’s stolen sampled samples, and was the sampling stolen stealing? Is anyone actually playing live? Does anyone know what the law is? Does anyone care? Yes, it’s been a lively November so far for massive, complicated legal battles, PR battles, who-said-who-sampled-what battles, […]

Much as we love computers, who hasn’t dreamed of a dedicated hardware box for gigging that plays your plug-ins seamlessly? The Muse Receptor does this already, and it’s a very effective solution – everyone I know who’s got one loves it. But it is a full rackmount space, and prices start around US$2000 (though it […]

Ableton forum members are abuzz on this latest hack for Ableton Live: a specialized plug-in now enables a “bus group” that routes audio to a MIDI track for effects. Now, of course, group folders are a feature present in some competing DAWs, but it’s still nice to see it working in Ableton Live. (And if […]

In William Gibson’s novel Spook Country released last year, artists create a new generation of “locative art.” Peer through goggles at a real-world scene, and see something that isn’t literally there. Few would say it was Gibson’s best novel – perhaps partly because the plotline didn’t live up to how compelling the locative art ideas […]

I wondered if anyone else had used calculators as music controllers. The answer? But of course. Here’s a classic Russian calculator model controlling arrangements in Ableton Live. It appears in this example as though this is working as a USB (QWERTY) keyboard substitute, rather than as a MIDI controller, but you get more of the […]

It’s hard to write the first line of this, because in this case any reference to Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator” is wildly redundant. This is a calculator. He is the operator. This is a real, working HP48 graphing calculator playing MIDI events. You can go, like, graph stuff with it afterwards, do some Calculus. And we […]

You may have noticed that I’ve been a little quiet in recent months. The Game On Projection Mapping project is partly to blame, but the biggest culprit will be making its first public appearance as well this Saturday, and I’ve called it Herovision. Herovision Testing Party from Jaymis on Vimeo. The above video features a […]

DRM on displays and projectors? Believe it. Apple, like many computer vendors, has added DRM to its new laptops in the form of HDCP (which, bizarrely, stands for “High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection”). This is doubly odd, because Apple cited technical restrictions of Blu-Ray as a reason for not including those drives on their machines – […]

Create Digital Motion is proud to be a sponsor of the 2009 MGFest. It’s a huge festival, now covering multiple US cities, covering all aspects of visual technology – including the stuff we especially like, at the convergence of live visuals, VJing, interactive graphics, and music. Now’s the time to enter your stuff, as we’d […]

Musical gifts – the best kind. Photo (CC) ex.libris. It’s nearly the holiday season, and as CDM has just completed its fourth birthday, I want to give all of us a present. The idea: a holiday guide that’s a bit different. The first CDM treeware. We’ll have PDF and print-on demand versions. And part of […]