It’s been a long, long wait, but it’s now official: Ableton and Cycling ‘74 have collaborated on Max for Live, which integrates Max/MSP with Ableton Live. There’s tons of information on the Cycling ‘74 site, and I’ll be doing some follow-up interviews for CDM soon with more details, but here’s the overview. What is Max […]

It’s been eight years since Ableton Live introduced its signature screen layout for live performance: clips, scenes, sends, tracks, and devices. For the first time, a single controller combines all the basic elements of that Live set in a single hardware layout. Akai’s APC40 is a plug-and-play, driver-free hardware controller developed with Ableton. The APC […]

The step sequencer. The sixteen-pad drum machine. The piano roll. The step sequencing piano roll. The waveform editor. The multi-track recording. Live music is a dynamic and changing phenomenon, but much of our technology assumes fairly predictable interfaces with time. Elysium, which we saw early this week, breaks out of that mold by defining generative […]

Photo (CC) lee leblanc. CNET has a terrific interview with Rio Caraeff of Universal Music Group’s eLabs. Caraeff is a new breed of record exec – the kind of people we’d actually want running the industry. He’s a software guy and a mobile guy. UMG digital chief on iTunes, DRM, and Android [CNET Digital Media] […]

Archaeopteryx: Ruby Self-Generating Pattern Sequencer from giles goat boy on Vimeo. Who needs NAMM? Well, sure, you could wait 48 hours for the mind-bogglingly awesome announcements I’m sure we’ll be scooping on this site know absolutely nothing about. But that’s 48 hours you could be spending right now, coding your own sequencer. And unless Ableton […]

pauk on pages from Pauk on Vimeo. Part of what sets apart the open source monome controller instrument (cdm tag | site) is that, despite its minimalist grid of pads, it really behaves like an extension of software. That grid can be thought of as touch-ready pixels. Using Pages, an app developed by phortran that […]

In a surprise announcement (well, surprising me, at least), the experimental MySong shown by Microsoft Research earlier this year will be available for sale. US$29.95 will buy you a downloadable auto-accompaniment tool. Windows-only, but it sounds as though a Mac release is in store (seriously). It’s a bit like Band-in-a-Box for singers: sing in a […]

“This is my tree. It makes music.” It took “actual 12-year-old girl” (as Microsoft described her) Sparrow to rescue Microsoft’s drab CES keynote (and drab tech news week) and get us back into the Future again. That future is one in which the dazzling interactive 3D world of games becomes a playground you can shape. […]

It’s looking like 2009 is set to be a great year for open source and hardware hacking. Likely lost in a lot of the CES news, BUG Labs, makers of open source, Linux-based hardware you can snap together like Lego bricks, now has a range of new modules. Most interesting to readers here: there’s an […]