Machine Project is the wonderful gallery / multimedia educational center and maker of happenings in Los Angeles. They’re on a roll with Big Ideas this month, so I thought I’d pass them along — aside from participating, they may inspire similar stunts in your hometown. (Just make sure you hire professionals if they’re going to […]

The Monome is small and elegant, but there’s something to be said for traditional instrumental controllers like a keyboard. So why not combine them? David Phipps of the electronic jam band Sound Tribe Sector 9 did just that, and sends CDM this photo of the project in process. He’s off on a five week tour […]

We live and die by hard drives for music. There’s no substitute for redundancy and backups (hey, you could be Matthew Dear and have a drive stolen during your set). But it is helpful to know whether a drive is healthy or not. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring features built into drives can help. Lifehacker today points to […]

Create Digital Music Night at ETSY LABS from Etsy on Vimeo. Handmade marketplace Etsy.com, DIY "mook"/blog Make, and createdigitalmusic.com again team up for another Handmade Music Night at Brooklyn’s Etsy Labs! For an idea of what it’s about (or perhaps inspiration for starting something similar in your corner of the world), see the video above. […]

If you missed getting a free Minimoog model with the purchase of landmark ambient album Gas0095 from label Microscopics and still want it, we’ve got good news for you. Microscopics have extended the offer, exclusively for Create Digital Music readers. Paul writes: "If they enter the code CreateDigitalMusic.com in the ‘Add special instructions for the […]

So much of the visual inspiration for digital generative visuals — even those that never leave the computer — come directly from analog electronics. There’s something organic about the motion visuals this gear creates. Case in point: the latest, short video from Mat Jarvis, the pioneering ambient artist, via his label Microscopics. Good stuff, and […]

I’m sure this is one of those tools which almost everyone knows about, but it’s useful enough that I’d post it if only a single person benefited: Perian is a component for which adds native Quicktime support for, notably, FLV (and a bunch of other formats nobody really cares about). This means you can play […]

Omer Yosha has created a beautiful, elegant interface that uses infrared sensors to control music applications. Touch-free interfaces, of course, date back to the Theremin, but Omer is trying some new things here, creating an invisible matrix of controls in the air. And I love the way the physical object looks. He writes to tell […]

  Process Explorer is the essential portal to seeing what’s going on with CPU and memory activity on Windows. It was good enough that Microsoft bought the tool. Any computer – Mac, Windows, and Linux – can experience degraded audio experience pretty fast if a background task starts stealing CPU or a driver is misbehaving. […]