You’re tired of using your mouse to grab on-screen controls. You want something physical to control, a motorized fader that will automatically pop to the right position. But you aren’t quite ready to surrender a bunch of workspace to a hulking full-sized control surface. You want something as compact and easy to grab as the […]

Learning Processing “Is there a good, basic tutorial for Processing?” This question gets asked all the time. Processing is a powerful, open source, cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) tool capable of all kinds of multimedia magic from video processing to generative 2D and 3D art and animation. There’s no graphical UI, just simplified Java code, but […]

Learning Processing “Is there a good, basic tutorial for Processing?” This question gets asked all the time. Processing is a powerful, open source, cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) tool capable of all kinds of multimedia magic from video processing to generative 2D and 3D art and animation. There’s no graphical UI, just simplified Java code, but […]

Portable game consoles are fantastic things: do-all media players and mini-computers that are actually fun to use, small enough to carry, with powerful capabilities for just a couple hundred dollars. For computer musicians, they’re versatile devices that fit well into music setups, whether sequencing instruments or feeding videos to a projector. There’s only one problem: […]

I love and use my Mac and Windows setups to death, but maybe it’s time for a three-platform world. Desktop Linux is slowly gaining ground, and it’s particularly strong in the area of music software. There’s a new Linux music blog, and I like the title: Linux Rock Star, by DCZX Highlights: ALSA Modular Synth, […]

I love mice. They’re still a great way to do many things, and while some may think they’re anachronistic, they still do the job for a lot of interface tasks quite nicely. But they’re also painfully awkward for many tasks in 2D and 3D graphics. The folks at 3Dconnexion have been rethinking input devices in […]

I love mice. They’re still a great way to do many things, and while some may think they’re anachronistic, they still do the job for a lot of interface tasks quite nicely. But they’re also painfully awkward for many tasks in 2D and 3D graphics. The folks at 3Dconnexion have been rethinking input devices in […]

As ActionScript has gotten more powerful, some simple animation operations in Flash have gradually required more code, as opposed to the “shorthand” of earlier versions. Meanwhile, the open source Processing project has built a simple, elegant language based on Java that’s powerful, yet surprisingly accessible to non-programmers — and free. Brevity is sort of “Flash […]

(Update: I bought one of these controllers soon after they became available in Australia, and found that it had some compatibility issues with various VJ software. Definitely try before you buy. Jaymis.) Numark launched their NuVJ VJ product, a combination of a DJ-style MIDI controller with software from Arkaos, back at Musikmesse in April. The […]

(Update: I bought one of these controllers soon after they became available in Australia, and found that it had some compatibility issues with various VJ software. Definitely try before you buy. Jaymis.) Numark launched their NuVJ VJ product, a combination of a DJ-style MIDI controller with software from Arkaos, back at Musikmesse in April. The […]