I think we’ve reached a geekdom singularity. Nintendo Wii controller + physical computing + OpenSoundControl + Mac + Kyma granular synthesis = Star Wars lightsaber sounds? Nicely done, Matteo Milani! More details from these Kyma sound synthesis experts at Unidentified Sound Object, which also has lots of resources on sound design in general on the […]

This week I thought I’d shake things up a bit and post a few of the videos that came in over the last few days. It’s Friday folks! I hope everyone has an awesome weekend. That said, I hope you enjoy at least one of these. Do make sure to check out the last video. […]

Two common services are the biggest culprits for “disk churning” behavior in Vista, and they’ll be familiar from XP. Now, tame that disk access! A common complaint of users who have just installed Vista is that the disk starts churning endlessly. Any kind of frequent disk access on the same volume on which you have […]

Is the UI in Vista taking far too big a toll on your system? For now, under some circumstances, that seems to be the case. Here’s what I’ve seen, plus how to turn ths crud off. (It’s unscientific, so take it with a grain of salt, but this CPU graph actually did this just moving […]

Imagine the Apple TV as live music and visual instrument, and not just a way of watching archived Battlestar Galactica? Our friend Jeff Gambera has been busy hacking his Apple TV for just such unusual purposes. He’s gotten the real-time audio and music workstation Ableton Live working; even the demo song runs. (Plenty of people […]

JazzMutant’s Lemur touchscreen turned a lot of heads, at least as a concept: precise, multi-touch tracking that could follow all ten of your fingers independently, and interactive, custom controller touch layouts looking like something out of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was the good news. The bad news: difficult assignments for OpenSoundControl (OSC), extra […]

Ronald Stewart, creator of the mobile, Linux-powered Trinity DAW device, writes to tell us the prototype had its first public appearance at the recent Linux Audio Conference: We ran the device for 7 hours (3.5 hours battery/3.5 hours on wall power supply) with zero hangs and everything worked under various multiple applications running. USB device […]

Sometimes the best way to fix something is to break it. That applies to development processes as well as software itself. After some audio developers and users raised frustrations over compatibility issues with Audio Units and Mac OS X 10.4.9, a member of the Apple Core Audio team responded on the Core Audio development list […]

This week in synths with Matrixsynth, the obsessively-prolific synth lovers’ blog: a master modular synth builder on how modulars could be more affordable, a blog time capsule full of out-of-print music, and a “Welsh Minimoog” model E. Here’s Matrix: Grant Richter of Wiard on Cutting the Cost of Modulars A Modular Renaissance The following is […]