Aside from commercial alternatives, the preferred open source audio editor tool is Audacity. Early releases of Audacity were unquestionably rough around the edges, in terms of both stability and features, but thanks to the efforts of the open source community, the software is steadily improving. Version 1.2.5, released this week, is the new stable version, […]

This year’s Macworld, due to hit San Francisco in January, is shaping up to be an epic event for visuals and motion graphics. True, Macworlds of late have paled in comparison to the heyday of the conferenece, but this year looks extraordinary, especially if you’re interested in motion graphics and visuals, especially since there’s a […]

The Arduino I/O board is becoming the board of choice for building DIY electronics projects cheaply and easily. It’s affordable, it’s flexible, it’s open source (and has a growing community to help you out), and evolving nicely. Naturally, one of the first things we want to do with it is build some cool music electronics […]

Online music making with open source tools. Hook up some phones and controls and lock yourself in a cage, if you like, as one of the core developers did. Imagine a massively multiplayer music studio, connected worldwide over the Internet. Log in, and everyone sees a set of synths, effects, sequencers, or other custom patches. […]

Regular readers of this site and Make Magazine know I’m a big fan of Limor Fried’s MIDIsense, a physical computing (aka real world aka sensor input) MIDI board. Sensor data goes in, MIDI goes out, and thanks to standard MIDI DIN connectors, you can plug it into any computer MIDI interface or music hardware and […]

Flash VJs, motion graphics artists, photography lovers, interactive Flash programmers, I’ve got plenty of good news for you. There’s a whirlwind of activity from Adobe Labs this week (I imagine Beaker’s head exploding), so let’s hit it all at once — the weekend could be the perfect time to grab this stuff, as Adobe Lab’s […]

The blogosphere this week is all abuzz about the supposedly desire-inducing Upravlator. The awkwardly-named hardware comes from Art Lebedev, the mysterious designer who first promised the Optimus Keyboard, a unique “design concept” with tiny color displays under each key. That indeed sounds cool, but instead, after months of delays and promises, the shipping product turned […]

Legos, the ultimate prototyping material. Many of us have wished we could have music controllers that could be assembled and customized with the ease of Legos; the Lego-like Mawzer modular controller system got our hopes up but still doesn’t seem to have evolved into a product you can actually buy. Of course, why build something […]

Flash goes better with After Effects; via Lynda.com tutorial. Come on, you’ve got that Production Suite on your hard drive; why not make it earn its keep? The next version of Adobe’s software suite is sure to feature new integration with Flash after Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia. But that doesn’t mean you have to wait […]