Entries tagged with “computer music” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

Art is disruptive.
Computers, strong but stubborn.
Let's show them who's boss.

While tracking down some cool songs I heard on the Space Music podcast, I found Kahvi.org, a huge collection of free electronic music in MP3 and (mostly) Ogg Vorbis format.

Cakewalk, one of the first music software manufacturers to achieve Windows Vista compatibility, just launched a musicians' resource site for the new OS. It explains the musical benefits, lists audio gear with Vista drivers, and features links to other sites with Vista music information. Speaking of which, be sure to check out O'Reilly's Vista site as well, where you'll find...

The report from Project Bar-B-Q 2006 is now online, and its annual predictions are as provocative as ever. Bar-B-Q (I'm on the advisory board) is a four-day conference designed to shape the future of music on computers. Hosted by the Fat Man on a Texas ranch each October, it brings together 50 experts in chip design, music software, game music,...

At nine feet long, the IK Multimedia StealthPlug guitar-to-computer interface is possibly the skinniest way to go digital. The StealthPlug is a cable with a USB plug on one end and a quarter-inch guitar plug on the other. In between, there's a little arrowhead that converts the analog guitar signal to digital and the computer's digital signal back to analog...

The always insightful Eliot Van Buskirk just posted an entertaining interview with Justin Frankel, the programmer behind Winamp, Gnutella, and some visionary new music programs like Reaper and NinJam. In the interview, Frankel shares his design philosophy, discusses his own music, and explains why DRM is a bad idea. He even reveals the origin of the mythical Winamp Llama....

Steinberg just revved its Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) standard to version 2.2, delivering support for 64-bit Windows systems. "The ASIO 2.2 SDK provides software engineers with a complete set of tools for creating ASIO-ready host applications and drivers," says the press release. Developers can supposedly download the SDK at www.steinberg.net, but I couldn't find an obvious link. In the meantime,...

I received an email letter today from Bob Moog's daughter, Michelle Moog-Koussa. The Moog family has established the Bob Moog Memorial Foundation for Electronic Music. The letter states that they have "...carefully chosen objectives, each tied to his life and work" * Endowed Scholarships * The Bob Moog Memorial Museum * Outreach Programs for Disadvantaged Students * Special Events for...

Intrigued by Scott Bourne's review of Synk Audio Musicbed DV, I watched the screencast on the developer's site...and got even more interested. Musicbed DV is a Mac program that generates soundtracks, but what struck me was the controls it offers: They're labeled with musician terms, not engineering ones. Instead of knobs and envelopes for quantitative aspects like level, panning, and...

A while back, I wrote about some slick tempo-detection software. A week later, Erica Sadun reported on a utility she was using, and complained about how long it took to analyze songs. The developer of that program just wrote to explain that compressed music files like MP3s must be expanded before they can be analyzed, and that takes time. Curious,...

Whoa. I was recording a great-sounding hardware synth last night and noticed that my USB audio interface was picking up some digital grunge. Today I tried using the Mac G5's built-in audio input instead. Not only was the sound cleaner, I found could crank the input latency down much farther before getting glitches. For years, the computer audio mantra has...

Mix magazine has an intriguing interview with Gina Fant-Saez, who has written a number of popular articles for the O’Reilly Digital Media site. (Her controversial tutorial about setting up a laptop music production system, "The Ultimate Portable Studio," has been the #1 Google hit for "portable studio" for the last year.) In the Mix interview, Gina shares more details about...

Even if you don't DJ, knowing the tempo of your music collection opens creative doors. For example, slide shows come alive when you synchronize the slide durations to the tempo of the background music. (See my tempo sync tutorial.) And playlists seem to flow better when you group songs by tempo. I'd been eyeballing the BPM field in iTunes...

Okay, I'll admit it: Even though I learned (and loved) electronic music production on patchcord synthesizers, I never got deeply into Reason, Propellerhead Software's pioneering studio-on-a-screen. There was just something about its snarled cords and infinitely tall rack of modules that looked forbidding. Then I bumped into Reason virtuoso Kurt "Peff" Kurasaki at a party and learned he was hosting...

We get so caught up in the exotic sound of electronic music, it’s easy to forget that visuals are important to a performance as well. At the Maker Faire last weekend, I quickly tired of watching a knob-twisting groovebox duo and even a VJ competition. But it was fun to see Rick Walker (a.k.a. Loop.pooL) snatch an endless stream of...

The last time I started a blog with a quote from music technology guru Jim Aikin, it provoked an erudite uproar, which taught me a lot. So in honor of Jim’s latest feature for O’Reilly Digital Media, I thought I’d whack that beehive once more. Jim covers the Korg MS2000B and many more voice-twisting technologies in his article “How to...

As I receive more high-end audio software for review, the copy-protection dongles have been multiplying annoyingly. Swapping them in and out as I launched various programs and plug-ins was becoming a hassle. In one case, a program crashed the computer when I inadvertently quit it while its dongle was unplugged. Thanks to a tiny USB hub I picked up at...

The QWERTY keyboard is a tricky interface for music-making, but many inventors have come up with equally tricked-out ways to overcome its limitations. Here are a few of my favorites. I’ve long been a fan of Mixman, which turned typing into synchronized grooves. But simply triggering samples doesn’t allow much expressivity, so the company eventually designed its own input controller,...

Looking to do more with FireWire audio on Windows? CEntrance has released a free beta version of its universal audio driver. Among the features are device aggregation (which lets you use multiple FireWire audio interfaces with a single program) and multi-host capability (which lets multiple programs address a single interface). Those were among the top requests from developers at last...

Like microscopes, audio editing software can reveal amazing new worlds within everyday sounds. Check out “Winnoise,” for example. It’s a three-minute song made by manipulating Windows error sounds. I particularly like the way the artist looped portions of the Microsoft Sound to create a sustaining pad, and that he needed only basic commands from the lowly Windows Sound Recorder to...