The good news: a lot of “broadcast” Internet video is free forever on AVC and H.264. The bad news: everything else still costs money, not much else changes, and you can expect the next battle will be a protracted patent debate. Whee! Photo (CC-BY) Bill Jacobus. MPEG LA, the group that holds the patent pool […]

With the iPad available now and more touch-enabled devices likely coming soon, we finally have hardware that can be both display and controller, visual feedback and input device. While tactile control will maintain its place, these devices can augment performance controls, acting as compositional brains, and can serve as studio creation tools. Yesterday, we got […]

Mobile devices are here, they’re powerful — get used to them. Now, could they just connect to the rest of your noisemakers and studio rigs? That’s the potential of new iOS SDKs for MIDI I/O and keyboard docking. But aside from some restrictions imposed by hardware support on iOS, what many developers are publicly wondering […]

Squarepusher plays Rome in April of last year. Photo (CC-BY-ND) funkoolow. To take us into the weekend, here are some favorite online music releases this week to download, stream, and enjoy. Be sure to click over to the site if you’re on RSS for the included players if they’re not appearing.

Japanese fusion “underground music unit” Human Boot Project have a clever take on the music video, one that – well, let’s face it, probably appeals only to music production nerds like us. Using the free/open source software Gawker (Mac-only screen capture, not to be confused with thegossip blog), they take an extended timelapse of their […]

Sneaks are a good thing. Photo (CC-BY) Pink Sherbet Photography / D. Sharon Pruitt. Let’s start with what’s really important: Chris McCormick’s squeakyshoecore tunes may well make you tap your All Stars and smile. The words “algorithmically-generated acid” and mention of the multimedia patching environment Pd might not suggest feel-goody, cheery, geeky-sounding electronic grooves, but […]

Is it time to get a round tuit? Photo (CC-BY-ND) Denise Mattox. For this book review, we welcome guest writer Andy Farnell, who himself has a terrific book on interactive sound design and free modular patching environment Pure Data, entitled Designing Sound. It began as a review of a book on using free software – […]

Mixing, transport, and other shortcuts now appear on Apple mobiles with the newest version of MOTU’s Digital Performer (DP) DAW on Mac. Photos courtesy MOTU. First-party touch control is gradually coming to big-name DAWs. There are plenty of third-party applications that allow control of music software, but until now, we’ve only seen Cubase iC from […]

Image courtesy Abstract Data. Rockstar sparkle not included. Operating small runs out of his basement, Justin Owen is on a mission to bring his idiosyncratic, all-analog sounds to musicians in affordable, portable form. “Affordable” and “portable” often aren’t associated with analog, though even players as big as KORG have gotten in on the game recently, […]

A little stretch of desk, a couple of monitors, and a copy of the free and open source DAW Ardour running on Linux, (CC-BY) wstryder / Lauri Rantala. (Note: this is presumably Lauri’s studio, and is certainly not mine, seeing as I can’t play the guitar, and thus recording the results of me playing a […]