Crystal Castles: now under fire for abusing a Creative Commons license on a chiptune track. Photo by Oliver J. Lopena: oliverlopena.com. (And CC-licensed, via Flickr.) As using sounds produced on unusual 8-bit systems and game consoles grows in popularity, some artists are appropriating the music as their own. Sometimes, as with Beck, a well-known or […]

Our friend Florian Grote is giving a workshop at STEIM in Amsterdam on Pure Data, the open source patching environment that’s a close cousin to Max/MSP. Florian tells us there are a couple of spots left for anyone near STEIM. The workshop is geared for composers, live performers who want to create their own instruments, […]

Windows is getting enough instrument and effect madness for free to make your head spin — a lot of it previously commercial software. Here’s the latest addition: Beatburner, a looping sampler combined with a wave shaper and enveloped filter. In short, Beatburner takes your loops and makes them into sonic insanity. I’ve been playing with […]

PC games — and even Windows customization utilities — make up a much larger market than music software. But in this parallel universe there have been echoes of the challenges facing music developers since the early days of PCs. Both have highly dedicated, niche audiences. Both face rampant piracy. Neither has the support of big […]

Free, odd soundware keeps on coming — hot on the heels of faux bent instruments and a tape-recorded Roland 606 and 808, here are more sounds to satisfy your need for unusual sounds. Stephen Haunts was inspired by the cassette-recorded 808, and writes to tell us he’s decided to give something back. He’s uploaded 22 […]

The Breadboard Band in action — it’s like a soldering class collided with a musical performance. Photo: Amy Young. The exceptional Masayuki Akamatsu, best known around these parts as the maker of the wonderful aka.objects for Max for hooking into Wii remotes, Space Navigators, MacBook motion sensors, and more, gets an in-depth interview over at […]

Processing is an open-source coding tool, built in Java, designed specifically to be versatile for artists and friendly to non-coders. Code is elegant and simple, but can take advantage of all the potential power and performance (no, really) of Java. Java really can be fast enough to use in live performance situations, though its one […]