Earlier this week, I talked about some of the consumer-oriented feature improvements in Adobe Creative Suite CS4. But the most interesting development from Adobe is actually more on the developer side. Pixel Bender is a new format for making GPU-accelerated (and CPU multi-threaded) filters, which means fast blends (with different blend modes) and special effects. […]

An invitation to a new CS. I can at least guarantee “It’s going to come in a really big box.” Photo by Ian Usher, via Flickr. Adobe is back with another Creative Suite update, and touting (accurately) “bigness”: Adobe’s biggest software release to date includes Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design editions, Creative Suite 4 Web […]

Another lovely shot by VDMX user przemion. Look over someone’s shoulder at VDMX and prepare to be confused — the modular interface means you can put loads on the screen. But spend a few minutes with the tool and its tutorials, and you’re likely to find it surprisingly intuitive. It’s a big leap from generations […]

If you haven’t seen it yet, Jamie and Adam did what may be the greatest illustration of a computing concept onstage ever, using an 1100-barrel paintball gun: Updated: We’ve seen the basic idea before — one of the Max/MSP + Atmel-powered Printball notes his own, similar project, as featured on Pixelsumo way back in 2005. […]

Last month we saw Sarah Angliss using the Theremin as an audiovisual controller. If you’ve got a Theremin and want to try this yourself — or try some other similar continuous input — here’s a really simple example of a patch that converts audio to MIDI. It uses Pd, Max/MSP’s open-source cousin for Mac, Windows, […]

It may be called a beta, but that hasn’t stopped VDMX from being a favorite in big live gigs. Here is powering przemion’s rig in Amsterdam. VDMX5 may be “perpetually in beta”, but oh, what a beta it is. The latest version includes some major breakthroughs, a new render engine, lots of new features — […]

There’s a growing appetite for using custom controllers or creating DIY controllers from scratch. Why not, after all, get exactly the number of knobs and sliders you want, in just the layout you want? Where a lot of these projects stumble, though, is in the enclosure. That’s what made the appearance of machinecollective, an polished-looking […]

“What if you had to take just one software instrument with you to a desert island?” It’s not an entirely silly question, with so many choices in software potentially distracting you from real music making. I say, cheat: take a tool that lets you build your own tools, specific to the job. Reaktor immediately springs […]

Memo has released the source code for his optical flow/psychadelic fluids project, used at the Glastonbury Pi Installation. Seeing as a lot of what I’m doing is based on open-source software and the good intention of others, I think its fair that I release some source code too… So I’ve tried to clean and comment […]

Memo has released the source code for his optical flow/psychadelic fluids project, used at the Glastonbury Pi Installation. Seeing as a lot of what I’m doing is based on open-source software and the good intention of others, I think its fair that I release some source code too… So I’ve tried to clean and comment […]