Want to roll your own effects and synths? SonicBirth is a tool for constructing VST and AU plug-in instruments and sound processors, via a graphical patching interface. It’s a bit like a friendlier, Mac-compatible SoundEdit. And now, it’s completely free and open-source. Even ignoring its open-source nature, there are a few elements of SonicBirth that […]

VJing with flickr? Clubbing with Yahoo Maps? Flash/Flex and Apollo-based apps present some interesting new ideas. We’ve been tracking the excellent Flash 9-based Onyx VJ tool, among others, and it’s nice to see the “open source Adobe-based VJ app” category growing. Mute is very early in development, perhaps not as far along as Onyx, but […]

In the immortal words of Burt Bacharach: Beware of The Blob, it creeps And leaps and glides and slides Across the floor Right through the door And all around the wall A splotch, a blotch Be careful of The Blob It’s true, Burt. Tracking multiple blobs in an image for motion tracking, in order to […]

Finding the right tool for visual performance and VJing is always a challenge. Pre-built systems give you a few choices, but one doesn’t have the right kind of effects, and one doesn’t have the right routing, and one doesn’t have the interface or control you want, and none lets you use custom patches. Modular systems […]

Java has long been freely-available, but now the entire Java platform and source code are fully open source and free under the GPL. Sun has posted a resource center for the announcement: Open Source Java It’s not available yet, but a new open source implementation of the platform and Java Development Kit, dubbed the OpenJDK, […]

What good is open source hardware? How about hacking in additional functionality by adjusting the code and electronics? The creators of Monome have a new video demonstrating some of the possibilities for user modifications to their hardware project. Included: Optical encoders allow additional multi-touch interactions, for a game of Life (the grid-based life simulation of […]

If you haven’t been paying much attention to the leading open source DAW, Ardour, now might be a good time to start. Not only is this software fully open source and freely available for Mac OS X and Linux, but as it nears a major upgrade, it’s getting some significant feature support — and the […]

The One Laptop Per Child initiative, aka “that $100 laptop” though it will initially cost more like $140, just got its first leg up. Nigeria has ordered one million of the custom Linux laptops. Now the big challenge will be whether the OLPC developers can deliver the machines on-budget and on time, given its wildly […]