NAMM, the trade group that includes music manufacturers and vendors, holds its flagship conference every January in Anaheim, California. It’s the biggest music trade show in the world, and even the biggest trade show of the year in Anaheim, home to Disneyland. But, of course, we’re about more than just pre-packaged industry news. So, we’ll […]

Photo courtesy Droid Behavior from a previous year. In Anaheim this week, the music manufacturer trade gather to show their wares. But 8pm – 4am Friday night, we party. “Wham Bam Thank You NAMM” has become an annual tradition, an unofficial afterparty of sorts for the first two days of the trade show. This year’s […]

One Frame Of Fame shows us how a band can use viral culture and crowdsourcing to grab some publicity and make a couple of thousand people “stars” of a music video. But what could you achieve if you already have a surfeit of fans? For a couple of years, Trent Reznor and the Nine Inch […]

(CC) Pikturewerk. Minor releases and bugfixes don’t generally make CDM news, but this is a special occasion. Ableton founder and CEO Gerhard Behles got everyone’s attention this week by making the rare public announcement that Ableton’s development team was temporarily halting work on new features to focus on fixing bugs. That has prompted some seriously […]

Free tools like Processing and OpenFrameworks have provided elegant, quick coding for live graphics, but their interfaces have tended to be code-based. One exception has been the Mac-based Field, which provides graphical patching. Now, you can add NodeBox to that list. This free graphical creation toolkit, built on Python, had long allowed tinkering with and […]

For a generation of musicians of nearly every genre, the laptop has become an instrument. It’s easy to take for granted, but the rise of the computer for music has been remarkable. Less than twenty years ago, real-time digital synthesis and audio processing was the domain of expensive, specialized workstations. Now, $700 per seat can […]

Novation has unveiled this week their own “free” step sequencer offering for Ableton Live. It’s some lovely work, with basic melodic pattern playback that comes alive once you add some envelopes. It’s a cool creation — but for me, it’s massively overshadowed by a new video featuring the upcoming Renoise 2.5 beta with the same […]

The remarkable thing about Processing on Android is that you can use your (desktop) sketchbook development environment as always, then run on the Google emulator or your device. Google’s open-source Android mobile platform runs on Java. Processing, the elegant coding language for visualization, art, and media, is built in Java. The marriage of the two, […]