We’ve seen fantastic ways of using the iPod touch and iPhone as controllers, but all require the jailbroken device. Once you up to 2.0 firmware, they cease to work — even if you jailbreak your 2.0 firmware. I’m hopeful that those apps will catch up, hopefully via a mixture of the jailbroken, open-source toolchain and […]

It may be called a beta, but that hasn’t stopped VDMX from being a favorite in big live gigs. Here is powering przemion’s rig in Amsterdam. VDMX5 may be “perpetually in beta”, but oh, what a beta it is. The latest version includes some major breakthroughs, a new render engine, lots of new features — […]

Sound design secrets have traditionally been closely-guarded secret sauce. But in the age of the Web, the opposite is happening: people can actually enjoy sharing what they’re doing, just as passionate cooks chat about recipes on food blogs. Case in point: reader John Keston writes to tell us about AudioCookbook.org, on which he’s blogging a […]

I’ve been impressed by Rax, the virtual effects and instrument rig for Mac, for some time. I marveled at its musician-friendly fullscreen interface and live visualizations in Rax 2.0, lamented its lack of popularity and eventual demise at developer Plasq, breathed a sigh of relief as it found a new home at Audiofile Engineering, and […]

The Monome project, a USB MIDI and OpenSoundControl control surface for music and art, was built on open source principles, on its users making the product better as they used it. Its community has already built custom housings and elaborate software setups. But a clone based on the Arduino microcontroller promises to do still more. […]

There’s a growing appetite for using custom controllers or creating DIY controllers from scratch. Why not, after all, get exactly the number of knobs and sliders you want, in just the layout you want? Where a lot of these projects stumble, though, is in the enclosure. That’s what made the appearance of machinecollective, an polished-looking […]

It’s been a couple of months since Peter mentioned MachineCollective – the open, DIY modular controller enclosure system – on CDMu, and they haven’t been sitting on their hands during that time. MachineCollective.org has been updated with lots of new pictures and information, and they’ve even dropped a potential price point: €25-35. Despite a couple […]

The music hacker is a different breed in a number of ways. It’s fairly safe, for instance, to say that the average Nintendo gamer does not consider the ability to patch modular synth parameters with their stylus a “killer app.” Yet the Korg DS-10, arguably the first entirely music production-focused cartridge for a major game […]