Taste the rainbow of the Spectrum ZX home computer. Photo (CC) diebmx. Call it the 8-bit preservation society. Chipsounds is now available. It’s a new programmable soft synth, filled with custom oscillators and samples of famous and obscure vintage chips, accompanied by an EP of free chip tracks. Far from a threat to fans of […]

It’s Richie Hawtin Watch time! The latest: NI teases an upcoming DJ controller by sharing video of Richie playing it in a club. The surprise: it’s actually what he’s doing with Maschine that seems most interesting to me. And if you recall the Twitter DJ app that he promised in the spring, it’s here, ready […]

Windows 7 running on a laptop, as photographed by / (CC) Luke Roberts. Windows 7 makes far subtler changes than Vista did, which gives it an opportunity to refine features by the ship date. And it’s been tested unusually widely, by testers like Luke. Windows matters. It’s what roughly half of CDM readers use, and […]

You’ll want superb music on loop, because it may … take some time to get out of this puzzle. Musicians and artists now have the power to fuse visuals, sound, and interaction, to make a spectacle, an album, and a game all at once. But with the blank canvas of three different media before you, […]

Nosaj Thing Visual Show Compilation Test Shoot from Adam Guzman on Vimeo. Designing visualist work is often a baroque process of iterating through more and more layers, ornaments, and complexity. But it’s stunning, sometimes, how people respond to simple, elegant ideas. Adam Guzman‘s collaboration with Taiwanese-born, LA-based designer Julia Tsao yields this beautiful sequence of […]

The mouths are yelling “yay, a new version of Video Production Tool!” Photo (CC) hc gilje. HC Gilje’s Video Projection Tool is a powerful, open-source, Max-produced tool for video projection and projection mapping on surfaces. The new 4.0 release adds a whole bunch of goodness, including mixing signals and an enhanced interface: 16 layers (previously […]

Funny, I’m usually able to “acheive” that most days. Ummm… art imitates life? Brainpipe is a psychedellic journey down the neural pathways, a long, strange trip into the minds of an unusual band of independent game designers. And while some games demand muscular graphics cards or brilliant flat panels, this is one that requires playing […]

I’m sure Native Instruments wants me to open with discussion of realistic-sounding strings in Kontakt 4, but instead, I offer a loose visual representation of Absynth’s sound engine. Photo (CC) Joe Penniston. Native Instruments released a slew of soft synth updates today – thanks to everyone who sent this in. The big news is that […]

Ed.: Many of Snow Leopard’s improvements – new, under-the-hood enhancements for 64-bit and multithreading – don’t impact visual creation right away. But significant changes to Quartz Composer could be the most useful, most immediate reasons to look at the latest version of Apple’s OS. Resident Mac guru Anton Marini looks at those changes for CDM. […]

"Okay, I’m totally awesome, now just be careful upgrading, okay?" Photo (CC) Shawn Kinkade. Snow Leopard is coming, but try to keep your cool. I’ve just finished the first of a series of previews for audio users considering the Mac OS Snow Leopard upgrade, due this Friday. This quote from Plogue, I think, is classic: […]