What if a competition didn’t just encourage entrants to try to make a better product? What if it encouraged friendly rivalry between makers to produce entries that were also shared across the community?

That’s the idea behind Digitópia’s upcoming series of competitions, now entering its third year. Digitópia itself is based in Porto, Portugal, at the Casa da Musica. But even if Portugal isn’t exactly in your neighborhood, entrants and onlookers alike can benefit from shared, open sourced contributions.

In fact, even the prizes itself are open projects. The simple, anthropomorphic-looking controller above is a free project. It’s dead-simple, a combination of an IKEA salad bowl, a potentiometer, and ultrasonic distance sensors. But as a result, it’s also inexpensive, simple to use (particularly with the addition of Digitópia’s custom-developed software), and a flexible starting point for further work. (Actually, handling multiple ultrasonics is a bit tricky, too, relative to things like infrared, so that’s a particularly nice addition.)

First up: Max and Pd patchers, your pride is on the line.

Think your Max/MSP or Pure Data multimedia patch is the most original around? Prove it. An international competition will find the best patches, and all of them (whether made in Max or Pd) will be released under a free software license. A panel will judge the results, led by Pedro Rebelo, composer, digital artist and Director of Education at the School of Music and Sonic Arts, Queen’s University Belfast. New deadline: February 14. (That’s right, polish off your best patch, send it into battle, and then take your pumped-up sense of masculinity / femininity out for a fantastic Valentine’s Day dinner.)

There are other competitions, too. The third-annual Musical Miniatures Competition is looking for musical works or “gestures” of 15 seconds or less. (If you’ve ignored other calls for works, this one should leave you no excuse.) The sounds will be licensed under a Creative Commons license for freesound.org, adding to that communal repository of sounds. Bram de Jong, legendary developer and freesound.org guru, will judge the results. Deadline: May 28.

Produce the best sound or the best patch, and you get the controller above and accompanying software. But the for third competition, you get the futuristic controller of your dreams. You submit the idea, and Digitópia builds the results. The entrants are judged on “innovation, originality, feasibility and inclusive potential.” (Yes, it needs to be feasible in order for them to build it — no electronic music equivalents of The Homer.)

Oh, yes, and the Dreams Competition has me as the judge. Deadline: April 3. Keep a dream journal.

The beauty of all of this is that these are contests that give back. We’ll have sounds, patches, inventions, and hardware documentation for the prize and the entrants; stay tuned as that documentation becomes available.

Speaking of getting something out of this for yourself… don’t have any dream ideas? No good at Max and Pd patching? For an absurdly-cheap €15 for three whole days of seminars, Digitópia will teach you patching skills in these two tools. Jeez, for that price, you could afford a flight to beautiful Portugal and still come out ahead. No details on the new seminars for spring up yet, but I’ll put up a notice when they are. (I’m also teaching a seminar at Digitópia the first week of June.)

Digitópia Competitions 2010

Digitópia – Platform for the Development of Digital Music Communities

Handmade Music is spreading. Toronto’s InterAccess has been a hub of terrific DIY activity in sound and other fields, otherwise known as a General Gravity Well of Awesomeness, and they’re now doing their own Handmade Music, kicking off this month.

Full call below, but as with other events, there is an open call for work (and some nice thoughts on why now is a wonderful time for DIY).

Even if you’re not in Toronto, it’s nice to read their take on why this stuff matters. I’m gratified they’ve found this inspiring. I’ve certainly been inspired by … well, all of you!

.

Friday, February 19th, 10PM
InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre
9 Ossington Ave.

Organized by Stephen McLeod, Andrew Lovett-Barron, and Alex Snukal.

InterAccess is hosting a party where DIY/handmade/experimental music performers and makers get together and show off their stuff. Haven’t made anything yet? Doesn’t matter, just come out and see what people are up to. We already have some confirmed performers but we want MORE!

We want your circuit bent speak ‘n spell!

We want your home made theremin!

We want your gigantic modular!

We want your trash can drum kit!

We want your insane Max/MSP (or PD) patch!

We want your monome!

If you’ve built something and you make music with it, we want to hear it! Doesn’t work? Bring it anyways! The night starts out with a show and tell, and aside from this initial event we will be holding regular workshops and get-togethers, that anyone regardless of skill level are welcome to attend and share ideas. In fact, we want to make Interaccess a space where people doing interesting things with electronic music can regularly gather, learn, and perform.

To participate, please email Alex Snukal at alex.snukal at interaccess dot org.

Great Time to Make Electronic Music

There has never been a better time to make electronic music, and here’s a few of the reasons why:

Monome (http://monome.org/about) adopted an open hardware/software approach and this has led to a creative and prolific DIY community, committed to finding new and interesting ways of interacting/performing/experimenting with the device. Users are encouraged to make it their own, either through writing/modifying their own software or building their own ‘version’ through a kit, or even sourcing the parts themselves and making something completely new.

In fact, many intrepid DIYers have build monome clones (called Arduinomes) using the Arduino! If you haven’t heard of the Arduino, it’s an amazing open source piece of electronics that lets you connect sensors and control things from your computer. Like the swiss army knife of the DIY electronic world, Arduinos have been involved in countless projects and we can teach you all about them.

This all leads directly to the software that is run on many a monome or Arduino: Over the last decade, Max/MSP and Pure data, both created by Miller Puckette, have been adopted by the international music and multimedia community as programming languages of choice for innovative musical and visual composition. As visual node based programming environments, they differ from the more familiar text based languages by having their roots in electronic musical synthesis using virtual patch cables to route messages to objects which stand in for synthesis modules, a style of creation more in line with Wendy Carlos than Alan Turing. With relatively recent addition of Jitter for Max/MSP and Gem for PureData, these techniques and tools are making there way into the visual realm as well, rounding themselves off as key tools for the modern musician, visualist, and multi-media artist.

And of course, we have been heavily inspired by the excellent Handmade Music events in New York and elsewhere!

http://handmademusic.noisepages.com/galleries-videos/handmade-music-nyc-videos/
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/01/11/like-a-diy-namm-handmade-music-preview-with-gestural-gadgets-mannequin-parts-more/

Here’s an amazing guy who makes all his own strange electronic instruments: http://vimeo.com/3099287

Some videos of the monome in action.

tehn: http://vimeo.com/295006

making the noise: http://www.vimeo.com/1860696

Official Post by snukal

More details soon, and we’ll definitely be sharing the best projects from Handmade Music worldwide.

The Harmonic Center of the Universe from Jesse Stiles on Vimeo.

This beautiful, meditative installation of choreographed lights and sound, by way of Rucyl and Saturn Never Sleeps, is the creation of Chris Harvey, Olivia Robinson, & Jesse Stiles. The Harmonic Center of the Universe evidently narrowly escaped destruction last year during a thunderstorm, but perhaps Art is as much repair as it is creation.

Artist Jesse Stiles specializes in such light shows. There’s a clear connection to the polytropes of Iannis Xenakis, with its own cascades of choreographed light – a reminder that lights can still have a place, even in an age of projection. He also writes experimental pop songs and does sound and music for IMAX films. (Yeah, Jesse, you’re someone we need to meet.)

Along similar lines, we saw the gorgeous balloon and music collaboration of Robert Henke and Christopher Bauder, ATOM, last year in Montreal. What strikes me about all these works it that the lit object and sound appear to fuse to an extent that these become either musical sculptures or a kind of sequencer in physical space. It’s remarkable that the digital can make musical structure more virtual, more invisible, or more physical – almost without consideration one way or another.

Ed.: Make no mistake about it: digital sound tech, from mixing to processing, has evolved to a fidelity on par with its analog predecessors and opening possibilities well beyond what they offered. But the making of that evolution wasn’t easy, and it was more than a technical challenge. You can thank the creative spirit of people like Paul Frindle. As contributor Primus Luta explains to CDM, his work is about more than just engineering or tools – it’s driven by creative, musical energy. -PK

Author’s note: I wanted to bring this piece to the CDM audience because, whether we know it or not, if we Create Digital Music, we are indebted to people like Paul Frindle.  While this piece is on the technical side, one of the things that I hope readers will pull away is his creative spirit. May Paul inspire you to bring that same energy to the work that you produce in the digital realm.  You can read the full interview, with war stories from Virgin Records, Trident Studios, SSL and more at AvantUrb.

In the world of audio, Paul Frindle is a legend.  During his tenure at Solid State Logic, he was responsible for the channel electronics of the SSL G Series Console.  He was also a part of the team that broke the “damnable black art” of digital conversion.  He went on to cofound the (pre-dot=com) startup Oxford Digital Ltd. Their first contract was with Sony (who would eventually take over the company), developing the application design of Sony’s flagship digital mixing console.  The result of this work was the OXF-R3, to this day regarded as the pinnacle of digital mixing consoles, not only in music, but also in film.  Like everything Paul has worked on, as much of a landmark as the OXF-R3 was, it proved to be but merely a stepping stone.  Where it was leading, however, could have been much different.

“I think there was a fantastic opportunity to revive the large studio concept, by integrating non-linear storage and editing into the OXF-R3,” Paul says. “It was already a massively-powerful workstation, wide open [enough] to accept it. This would have been amazingly powerful and creative, and would have knocked underpowered workstations off the map for many years to come, restoring a much-needed differential to the elite studios against the upcoming project studios.”

The OXF-R3 has only continued to blur that line in favor of the project studios.  Strapped for the kind of clients who could appreciate — let alone could afford — high-end studios, the great studios of their time have faded away one by one. If those studios could have stayed on the leading edge of digital tech, would it have been enough to halt those closures? We may never know.  Fortunately for all studio buffs, high-end and project alike, there was another avenue of exploration left for Paul that would give his work the broadest audience to date.

“The design of the OXF-R3 was amazingly ahead of time. It was a great big, highly flexible processor with a whole load of software running on it, which was restricted and presented on a panel just for conformity and convenience. It was already ‘software in a box’. It could even be controlled remotely. All of the design systems and debugging tools I was using on it consisted of on-screen GUIs.”  This was a dramatic, yet understated shift from the way technical engineers had previously worked.  It was a physical product, but the brains of it was moving into the virtual space.

“I was warning that the OXF-R3 product concept was obsolete even before we finished it. The large digital tape recorder was nothing more than a very costly and highly delicate ‘bit bucket’ organised like an analogue machine. With the meteoric rise in performance of digital technology, it was fairly easy to envisage a time when a unit bought for £1000 would be capable of doing a large chuck of what a mixer needed.  In the near future, we would be able to make art without all this paraphernalia, at a miniscule fraction of the cost. I was far more excited about this than doggedly hanging onto established formats and design constraints.”

Not one to let this excitement lay dormant, Paul and a few others started their own pursuit.  “The plug-ins project was initially hatched from humble beginnings, almost by us working in our spare time and at nights. My colleague actually did the first proof of concept EQ plug-in over the Christmas break and it all grew from that.

“What people needed most were high-quality, refined and indispensable applications; the EQ and Dynamics were adapted to provide that. Making them identical to the OXF-R3 applications was a link to our existing reputation. Of course running these in 48bits for TDM or double float in RTAS actually provided better performance than was available in the OXF-R3 32-bit, fixed-point environment. And it has to be said that we ironed out a few bugs along the way too, so these were actually better than the applications in the large format console.”

For users, this resulted in what are still being called the best equalizer and dynamics processing plug-ins on the market.  For Sony, however, the greatest deliverable was the system they built to create both the OXF-R3 and the plugins.  “It was a complete hierarchical graphic design system running on a specially-designed processor, which allowed real-time interaction and analysis of the action for almost every instruction in your processing design!”  If this description sounds familiar, it is because what Paul is describing is a modular environment for signal processing, much like tools like Max/MSP, AudioMulch and Plogue Bidule.

“Not only did it allow engineers without formal programming skills to build highly complex applications, it also very crucially allowed us to experiment freely and actually listen to what was happening in real time! It was this system that enabled me to delve so deeply into what we could hear and why, exploit that knowledge and realise the applications for the OXF-R3 console and subsequently the Sony Oxford plug-ins. Quite simply, I was able to ‘play around’ with all sorts of  wacky processing models to get the behaviour that matched the all-important sounds in my head.”

This freedom of experimentation allowed Paul to move from traditional audio utilities like EQ’s and dynamics processors into more creative arenas.  “The Transmod was something that I have always wanted since the mid-1970s, and over the decades had tried on several occasions to make out of analogue technology. But it was doomed to failure because of the relatively poor accuracy and stability of [analogue] components. During a lunchtime, I knocked up a digital version of my old idea as proof of concept, and it just worked!

“The Inflator came about because I received a late night call from a friend who had been doing high-profile sessions in L.A. with Eric Clapton and BB King. He had slogged away for months doing recordings and mixes, but had been beaten into production by another engineer who managed to make it louder. He wanted to know if there was anything he could possibly do to make it louder without wrecking the sound completely.  I was reminded that I had to make my first transistor power amp design in 1970 twice as powerful as the previous tube amp design to get the same volume and impact. All I had to do was to apply all this old knowledge into a digital process and the same effect would be available. I used a combination of math packages and the OX-R3 design system to experiment and extract the salient details of what made the tube amp louder. This was definitely a walk on the wild side, since for the first time in this employment I was making something whose sole purpose was to generate a heap of distortion!”

After leaving Sony Oxford, Paul set out on his own again to further explore the creative possibilities opening up through digital audio.  The result is his latest venture Pro Audio DSP.  “This initiative was conceived as a way of getting this stuff done without too much interference from marketing executives and sales infrastructures.”

The first product is the Dynamic Spectrum Mapper plugin.  “It was yet another object I had always wanted to have, but the idea was given greater urgency from listening to what people were trying to achieve in their productions using greater amounts of compression, the kinds of character they were trying to produce, and the difficulties they were battling with along the way. This, and a deep personal dislike for the artefacts produced in conventional multi-band designs, gave impetus for the design of the DSM. Digital processing seemed to provide the possibility of actually making it at last.

Dynamic Spectrum Mapper introduction from Paul Frindle on Vimeo.

“I am particularly pleased with the DSM because it’s exactly the sort of thing I want to bring to the marketplace – serious processes that have groundbreaking practical purpose and facility.  They are, at the same time, artistically capable and great fun! Such things excite me because they bring genuinely new capabilities and artistic power to the production process.”

If there is a theme to be found throughout Paul’s career it is a continuous effort to push forward this idea of the technology as art.: “I don’t want to waste the rich experience of the past in some manic push for ‘newness,’” says Paul. “Neither do I want to simply try and blindly copy what was there, in the hope that it does the same ‘kind of thing’. I want to understand it and use that understanding to produce new stuff, which is truly creative and actually advances our art. We should be carrying the past forward with us in a continuous process of advancement, not writing it off to history, or reverting to it in a religious search for past success.”

Speaking with Paul, his mind is so focused on the present or even the future, it’s easy to forget his historical relevance.  Working dilligently to realize the ’sounds in his head’ and put them out into the world, he is not only an inspiration for the work he produces, but for the creative ethic it exemplifies.

]]> http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/01/29/interview-sound-legend-paul-frindle-and-a-story-behind-the-digital-audio-revolution/feed/ 12 http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/01/26/most-insane-ableton-dj-setup-four-decks-four-copies-of-live/ http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/01/26/most-insane-ableton-dj-setup-four-decks-four-copies-of-live/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:33:39 +0000 Peter Kirn http://createdigitalmusic.com/?p=9250

Eat your heart out, Ableton/Serato The Bridge.

Native Instruments’ Traktor runs four decks at once without breaking a sweat, and there are various ways of incorporating sampling, scratching, and vinyl in a live rig that are pretty easy to set up. But lately we’ve seen some unusual options to build more elaborate setups. Rane even offers a digital mixer with two USB ports so you can, among other things, get four decks in Serato by running two computers at once. (Hey, never knock the brute force method of solving a problem.) And The Bridge, introduced to great fanfare by Ableton and Serato, synchronizes the transport and basic set information between Live and Serato. That’s to say nothing of the solution of using Ms. Pinky inside Live.

But none of this compares to Ilan Kriger’s method of getting four “decks” out of Ableton Live. He simply runs four complete instances of Live — one copy of Live 5, one copy of Live 6, one copy of Live 7, and one copy of Live 8 — in order to spread them out like the four decks in Traktor. (I’m not even going to ask Ableton whether this violates your license. Maybe you could start selling Live six packs?)

He uses a Mac for the job, but a PC should work, too. (Actually, that’d be an interesting performance comparison; you’d need to make sure your ASIO drivers on PC allow multiple apps to access the same interface.)

Go ahead. Hit the comment button. Tell us that this is an insane, impractical solution to the problem. (Really? Wow, I … didn’t … expect you to react that way. I must have entirely missed that.)

And good work, Ilan. Now, Ableton engineering teams, see how important the work you do on each release is? You never know when someone will run all of the different iterations you’ve built over the past four years at one time. Got it?

I think we need to invent a new prize for Only Because It’s There ingenuity. Suggestions? What should the trophy look like?

Ilan’s setup, blogged and translated by Google from Portuguese into English
Original Português

It’s a “tutorial,” in case you want to replicate the results. (In which case, I’ll have what you’re having.)

I will say this: inter-application communication is important, even if this isn’t the most practical example.

Original video (Português):

Ms. Pinky Revised from Mastah Lee on Vimeo.

What should DJing in Ableton Live look like? How could conventional vinyl cueing and scratching be integrated with the Live environment? Serato and Ableton gave us one possible answer to that question last week with The Bridge. Their solution: use your Serato DJ set normally, and simply sync the transport of Ableton Live when the two run simultaneously.

That solution could be ideal for some users, but it falls short of what many expected, which was the ability to scratch audio elements from Live as though they were on vinyl. Scratching Live clips would seem to be the best of both worlds: you get all the live sequencing features of Live, but you can still manipulate sound as you would on a turntable.

Enter Ms. Pinky. The vinyl control system has long been a highly-precise, solid-performing alternative to better-known names. Its ace in the hole has long been open control from your own custom patches, via an external object for the graphical programming language Max/MSP. The results have ranged from custom visual performance to a vibrating chaise lounge controlled by a turntable. With Max patches now able to interact more deeply with Live through Max for Live, that opens up the chance to build your own DJ-Ableton integration.

Ms. Pinky and Max for Live user Lee Goodrich has just done that. We saw an early version of the patch last month, but a new version irons vastly expands on the integration with Live, making this a truly complete solution for digital DJing.
Post on the patch with download
Information on the update

Some of the tasty features you get:

• Set Ms. Pinky to any track and use clips in that track
• Trigger a clip as you would normally, and it cues right into Ms. Pinky for scratching (see Lee in comments for more, but do note that the catch is that Ms Pinky actually loads the original file, because clips in Live don’t yet provide access to their playhead)
• Trigger different sequences of audio clips using a pattern contained in a MIDI clip (essentially automated cueing)
• Record clips using Live’s recording facility
• Scratch away with control vinyl

In relative mode, you can proceed directly to the beginning of the next clip without back-cueing.

The net result of all of this: Ms. Pinky acts like a scratch-anything device you can drop right into your existing Live set. With clever use of sampling and re-sampling, that opens up integration with any synths or external audio sources, not just audio clips.

Ironically, this is much closer to what I had predicted the Serato – Ableton collaboration would resemble.

Lee shares some comments about his experience:

I understand the concern people have about the one big caveat of Max For Live programming (You gotta pay to play, and no free runtime limits potential casual users), but honestly I think Max for Live is a slick enough product to overcome this. Making Max For Live patches has been the most fun programming I’ve ever had, and it is amazing how much you can do and how easy it is to do it. If other programmers are having as much fun as I am, then the bevy of awesome patches that come out of this product will end up being worth paying $300 at the door.

Perhaps the only other thing I’d like to say is that I’m not actually affiliated with Ms. Pinky at all, just another customer who wanted some functionality and due to the versatility of the software was able to extend it. So big thanks to Down Low Pinkstah and whoever else has worked on Ms. Pinky to make it so easily extensible.

Thanks, Lee! It’ll be interesting to see where else this may lead.

If you start using this in your sets, let us know – and get some photos / videos / mixes / whatever.

Oh, yeah, and I want to see a vibrating chaise lounge interface inside Ableton, too.

http://www.mspinky.com/

There’s long been a massive gap in technique, capabilities, and workflow between DJ tools and performance, music production, and live electronics or live PA. Ableton Live’s original hook was that it
bridged performance instrument and arrangement tool. Now, in a product literally called The Bridge, we get Ableton’s and Serato’s first take on how to blend DJing and arrangement/electronic performance. It’s certainly not going to be the last word on the subject. On CDM in the past, we’ve discussed inserting DJ applications in Live, and using vinyl to scratch video (including with Serato’s own VIDEO-SL). The advent of Max for Live means new applications, like Ms. Pinky-powered virtual vinyl devices inside Live. But The Bridge has turned out to be something different, as I discussed Thursday.

And surprise: there’s even some relevance to Ableton Live users who might not normally ponder Serato, even if only to take advantage of improved transport operation in Live itself.

We’ve gotten to speak to Ableton and Serato representatives; see the short video of Ableton’s Dennis DeSantis and Ableton’s official overview of the tool, as shot by intrepid CDM NAMM contributor Neil Bufkin. Based on additional conversations, here’s what we know.

Ableton & Serato @ NAMM 2010 – The Bridge from Neil Bufkin on Vimeo.

Serato to Ableton

Q. What’s this “mix tape” feature about?

A. That’s the easiest to explain, most immediate feature of The Bridge — and it’s the one that’s likely to be appealing to Serato users immediately. You can now export mixes produced in Serato directly into Ableton’s native ALS format.

Q. Wait – does that mean I need Serato ITCH or Scratch Live hardware controllers in order to record my crossfades?

A. Yes. Turntablists aren’t entirely left out, though: the Rane TTM 57SL and the newly-announced TTM-68 performance mixers do record mix automation. And you’ll still have other automation data with which to work, so this is still likely to be useful to everyone, even if there’s some level of variability between the different versions. (If that’s of interest, we can follow up more later.)

Ableton’s Jesse Terry confirms to CDM: “Audio files are laid out in Live’s arrangement on a timeline, according to when they are loaded on a deck in Scratch Live or ITCH. These are new audio files, to deal with scratching, etc, but they are named accordingly.”

Ableton has also posted more information on mixtapes and specific hardware on their Mixtape tour.

Q. CDM said ALS is now an XML-based format – really? When did that happen?

A. Yes, really. Live switched to an XML format with Live 8.1. In fact, save any of your Live sets in Live 8.1.x or later, and all the information about clips, channels, presets, and arrangements winds up in an open, standard format. That’s something I hope to look at more soon, because it could lead to some interesting hacks and power tools. But the reason it’s relevant here is that you can likely thank the Serato and Cycling ‘74 (Max for Live) collaborations for making this a necessity – even as this has potential advantages well beyond The Bridge.

Ableton “Inside” Serato

Q. I see clips from Live Session View in Serato. But that’s just audio clips, right? What about MIDI patterns, instruments, effects, plug-ins?

A. Ableton Live is running in the background. The Bridge requires both a full copy of Live and a full copy of Serato (Scratch Live or ITCH) for a reason: the real, full-blown Live runs at the same time as Serato does. That means everything you can do with Live normally, you can do with Serato, Live, and The Bridge: you can trigger MIDI patterns, use Live’s internal Devices like Drum Racks and Grain Delay, run third-party plug-in instruments and effects, and even – if you’re feeling especially crazy – Max for Live devices.

Q. Wait – but I can do all those things in Live now, and I still even a crossfader. So why wouldn’t I just DJ with Live and skip all of this additional complexity?

A. Answer: you might decide to do just that, especially if you’re a seasoned Live user. On the other hand, Serato DJs can get a chance to infuse more interactive performance bits into their performance easily, and they have manual control over transport tempo and timing. And if you split your time between Live and Serato – which some DJ/performers certainly do – this could mean being able to move from one to the other seamlessly rather than having to switch apps. But yes, of course: this isn’t going to be the right solution for everyone, even those looking to combine Live with DJing. We’ll be looking at other options, too.

Q. What does the integration itself do?

A. What you see:

• A limited window on Session View: You can see 4, 5, or 8 scenes, and 4, 6 or 8 tracks, clip color and status (just as in Session View), track controls, and two sends. You also get effect device controls and two sends.
• Live’s tempo
• Indicators for bars and beats, overlaid atop your waveform views in Serato, so it’s easy to see how the two are meshing (or not)
• A sync player, which Ableton’s Jesse describes as being useful “for adding embellishing songs, in case you’d like to assign Ableton Live’s sync to a song on one of your decks, with out using up that deck with a Live Set.”
• DJ-style Looping of Ableton Live’s Transport — that is, the entire transport for the entire set, not just an individual clip. “This is a big one,” says Jesse, “as previously Ableton Live users weren’t able to loop like this, i.e. Do 16th note looping, and when you exit the loop, you end up back on the ‘one.’”

What you can do:

• Control Live’s transport: play and stop with Serato as if Live itself is another deck.
• Sync Live and Serato easily, without having to worry about which you load first.
• Change tempo in Live.
• Nudge forward and backward (which should make for some nice beat syncopation effects with the pairing).
• Use ITCH or virtual vinyl to control the Live transport.

What you can’t do — yet:

• There’s no reverse audio recording of the output of Live — there’s no way to route audio from Live into Serato, period. So –
• You can NOT scratch or reverse Live’s audio as if it were another deck (yet; of course, it’d be nice to see this in a future release).

(”Yet” is the operative word, as I expect The Bridge may add additional features over time.)

Q. If I can’t scratch Live, I’m out.

A. That’s a valid response. On the other hand, there’s some powerful potential here for adding instruments, effects, and clips, particularly if you keep it simple and balance what’s in Live with what’s in Serato. I’m sure some DJ will make great use of this, even if it won’t be for everyone.

Q. Won’t adding plug-ins interfere with the stability of Serato?

A. That’s worth considering. Aside from stability problems or crashes, adding a lot of plug-ins could increase resource consumption on your computer, add more musical complexity that you have to control, and even – in the case of certain plug-ins that require latency compensation – impact your timing. So Serato users, you’ll want to be really careful and test thoroughly before gigging with a massive Serato-Live set.

Q. How do Serato and Live output to your audio interface, if they’re not routing audio into one another? Can they share an audio output? Might some people just route audio separate for independent mixing and busing via a mixer?

A. That’s a good question, and the short answer is, I don’t know. I turned to Ableton for an answer, but it seems like we may have to wait for more details. Jesse Terry advises us to “stay tuned, we are aware of the complications here and are working to find a simple solution for the end user.”

Q. How do I trigger clips in Live from the Serato interface? Can I use ITCH controllers?

A. Right now, there aren’t ITCH or Scratch Live controllers with controls dedicated for Live, though presumably such hardware could appear in the future. So you can use ITCH or Scratch Live to control the Live transport, and you can see visual feedback in the Serato interface as far as what’s happening in Live, but that’s about it. While we wait to see if new hardware combines these functions, though, you can use an ITCH or Scratch Live controller for Serato and any MIDI controller for Live, including devices like the APC40, Launchpad, a monome, a nanoKONTROL – whatever.

Q. What enables the transport sync between the two programs? Why not just use ReWire?

A. Actually, early prototypes of The Bridge did use ReWire. But ReWire has some limitations, like the inability of a client to use plug-ins or record audio (at least according to the spec), and ultimately people I talked to at both Serato and Ableton felt it wasn’t the right tool for this job. “Serato and Ableton created an entirely new interapplication communication protocol to make the timing as tight as possible,” says Ableton’s Jesse.

Q. Will we get to use this transport protocol for anything other than Serato and Ableton, if it works so well?

A. Maybe. Right now, it’s a proprietary sync spec that works only with these two tools. This is normally where I give my “open standard” speech, but I think it’d be too early to judge whether the solution Ableton and Serato found would even be useful with anything else. It does raise questions for other developers, though, about what sorts of general solutions might work. (Case in point: I recently saw a demo synchronizing 3D rendering, video, and animation tool Blender with the DAW Ardour, all using free software on Linux to do something that’s not currently possible with expensive proprietary solution. What made it tick? A free, open technology called JACK, which does transport interconnects as well as audio and MIDI.)

Side note: I’ve heard from Live users making insanely intensive use of synchronization and timing that they’re finding sync performance is improved under 8.1.1 builds and later. There are a lot of variables in sync, but it’s interesting anecdotal evidence, at least, and The Bridge did require some under-the-hood work on Live’s timing – always a good thing.

The Bridge – Availability, Pricing

Q. What will this cost?

A. So long as you own a copy of Live 8 or Live Suite, plus a copy of Serato, The Bridge is free; there’s no add-on cost if you own both products as there was with Max for Live. (Note that LE/Lite/Starter editions of Live would not quality, and would require an upgrade to the full version.)

Q. Is there a release date?

A. No release date has been announced yet.

Q. Is it working now?

A. Yes, actually – The Bridge is up and functioning with current builds of Live; it’s just not publicly available yet.

Q. Will the release of The Bridge be impacted by the decision Ableton made to delay new releases in order to focus on fixing bugs and reliability?

A. Yes and no. Ableton says they’re not releasing any new versions until they’re again fully satisfied with quality. So that will delay The Bridge. On the other hand, The Bridge is working, so while the release is delayed, The Bridge is coming – and my money says it shouldn’t be too far off.

By the way, the work done on The Bridge may have an impact in the opposite direction. “The work being done for the Bridge helps tighten up Live’s transport for all Live users,” says Jesse. And given how closely a lot of you rely on that transport, that’s good news.

I think that should cover it for now. This is the first-generation product, and it’s not even out yet. But we’ll be sure to cover more developments as they arise, and as we get closer to the release of The Bridge.

Lastly, here’s Ableton’s current video. Unfortunately, what it doesn’t show is video footage of the software in action, just some DJ celebrities talking about how excited they are. (”It’ll change lunchmeat forever!” “It’ll make your face melt!”) Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I’m guessing you’d like to see the tool; stay tuned.

And yes, if none of this is floating your boat, and your face isn’t melting, I’m working on showing more of what Ms. Pinky can do with Max for Live. Having more choices is always good; it means you can find the best choice for you.

Live maker Ableton and DJ and virtual vinyl developer Serato today announced the results of their partnership. First off, this isn’t what many of us originally speculated: it’s not a DJ deck inside Live. Instead, the collaboration seeks to bridge (ahem) the gap between the way DJs perform and the way Live users perform. The result focuses on the way a performance set is assembled in the two paradigms, an attempt to guide the flow of music between the two programs. Here’s how it works.

Bring Serato “mixtapes” into Ableton Live: Save a DJ mix – called a “mix tape” – in a Serato product, and export it to Live, and what you get is all of your edits in a form that can be further manipulated in Live. Waveforms and automation data from your DJ session, however they’re manipulated and transcribed by the Serato software, appear in Live.

Put the Ableton Live Session View “inside” Serato: Here’s where things get in interesting. Rather than put Serato inside Live, we’re getting Live inside Serato – after a fashion. Ableton Live runs in the background. Integrated into the Serato interface (as seen at the screenshot at top) are all your Session View clips from your Live Set. Serato’s control – via audio input from vinyl or CDJs, or an ITCH control surface – manipulates the entire transport of the Live set.

Unknown: Turntablists are probably wondering, can they scratch Live? How much are those Live clips able to do? Do they behave as they do in Live? (As far as I know, yes – Live is, after all, running in the background and appears to have its normal capabilities.) I’ll work on these questions with Ableton and have an update by tomorrow.

ITCH: Yes, you can use controllers that support Serato’s ITCH, not just vinyl or CDJs, in order to control the transport of your imported Live set.

Pricing: Free. Own Serato Live/ITCH and Ableton Live (full version or Suite)? The Bridge costs you nothing. (Yes, this seems to be a departure from the arrangement from Max for Live.)

Availability: “No release date has been set yet.”

Naturally, all of this begs the question: do you really want to do this? And I expect that question is about to get turned over and inside out all over comments here on CDM and around the Web. It’ll naturally depend a lot on who you are.

Taking Serato sets into Live is clearly great for Serato users. It means you can get a head start on assembling an arrangement just by DJing, or alternatively, that you have the ability to use Live as a way of editing your Serato set. (Now, again, this appears to be a proprietary format – but that raises an interesting point. Ableton now uses an open XML format, meaning you could also presumably deconstruct this new Serato export and enable it to be used somewhere else, whether intended or not. But I digress.)

It’s the more ambitious reverse direction that’s both the most interesting and the most potentially controversial. After all, if you’re using Session View inside of Serato, why not just use Session View? Will it be more useful to put Live inside the virtual vinyl environment than the virtual vinyl inside Live? (If it turns out you favor the latter, you have other options – not least the recent evolution of Max for Live patches for Ms. Pinky. More on that in coming days.)

Side note: check out the VIDEO-SL integration. That makes this all even more interesting as an a/v, virtual vinyl environment; see our ongoing coverage of VIDEO-SL and other vinyl visualism for Create Digital Motion.

I’m not a turntablist, though, so I think the real question is what their take on this is. And kudos to Serato and Ableton for taking the gutsy route here as far as combining these products. We’ll get a closer look soon, and I’m curious to hear the reactions – however impassioned they may be. (On your mark … set … comment. Oh, boy.)

http://www.ableton.com/thebridge
http://www.serato.com/thebridge

Ah, there’s nothing like bleeding-edge laptop performance. And to really convey to your audience that you’re indeed playing live, there’s nothing like glitches, dropouts, and crashing in the middle of a live set. It brings that homespun, digital authenticity to your performance, as you…

Okay, who am I kidding? You may be longing for a more stable, predictable, controllable mobile music rig. One way to get there is with the Linux operating system. The problem, however, is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, that setup can wind up being less stable, not more stable. Because Linux is about freedom and endless choice, you have the “freedom” to combine software in ways that … uh, doesn’t actually work.

I’m all for continuing to document ways of improving your Linux experience. At the same time, part of the free software business model – even according to the die-hards at the Free Software Foundation – is that custom configuration and distribution is a reasonable way to make money.

The best-available plug-and-play Linux music solution right now, hands down, is Indamixx. It’s got basically everything going for it:

• A highly-tweaked Transmission OS, as developed by 64 Studio
• Based on Ubuntu, so you can install recent Ubuntu packages for maximum software compatibility
• Carefully-tuned, custom real-time kernel for maximum audio performance
• Bundled with some great proprietary software, too, specifically ArdourXchange so you can import AAF files from your Pro Tools session – making your free software and proprietary software coexist peacefully
• LinuxDSP suite of mastering effects and plug-ins, specially tuned so they’ll work well even on Intel Atom-powered netbooks

The surprise: with the setup tuned in advance for you, Linux can be the friendliest out-of-box experience of any OS for music performance – seriously. Don’t get me wrong – it’s possible to get glitch-free performance out of Windows and Mac OS X, too. But Linux does offer a level of control and inter-application connectivity, as well as uniquely-strong performance on certain audio interfaces, that makes it a strong choice.

With tools like Pd and SuperCollider and the superb Renoise now on Linux, there’s no reason you can’t migrate your live performance rig to Linux – even if you choose to keep your production tools on another OS.

Normally priced at US$69, the Indamixx digital download is on sale for $49, and if you use sale code CDM, you get it for US$39. You have to purchase by January 19, and you have to use “CDM” as the code when you check out.

What you need to run it: Any PC netbook or laptop (and even UMPC/MID machines) should work. Note that Macs are not yet supported in this release; they’re trickier to dual-boot, but that support should come in the future. (If you know what you’re doing, it is possible to dual-boot the Mac, and honestly if you know your way around EFI and drivers I expect you could even use this distro.)

I’m not getting any money out of this deal, but I’m hoping for something far more valuable – it’d be great to have a little community of Linux users here on CDM so we can share tips with one another. As with, frankly, any OS, compatibility requires testing and tweaking. (That’s true even on the Mac, with a relatively limited hardware selection.)

Indamixx Digital Download

There’s also a USB key version, though it’s just as easy to buy or reuse a USB key of your own and use that.

I can certainly say, having tried various Fedora, SUSE, and Ubuntu configurations, I think the Indamixx/Transmission setup is the most painless and audio-friendly out there.

In Anaheim this week, the music manufacturer trade gather to show their wares. But 8pm – 4am Friday night, we party.

“Wham Bam Thank You NAMM” has become an annual tradition, an unofficial afterparty of sorts for the first two days of the trade show.

This year’s lineup: John Tejada, Richard Devine, Flashbulb, Deru, Laura Escude, Scott Pagano, CPU, DJ Kero, Acid Circus, Derek Michael, Baseck, Eezir, Trifonic, DJ G Ov, Moldover, Henry Strange, and myself, among others.

Escaping from the Anaheim Convention Center doldrums, the event is held in the lovely, artistically-blossoming Los Angeles downtown. The Downtown Independent is a gorgeous space with a movie theater and rooftop for full audiovisual-party immersion. This year, we have a couple of new features with which I’m assisting on behalf of CDM. There’s a VIP lounge / “industry room” which will be filled with music toys. You need a NAMM badge to get in, but inside you’ll find some unusual sonic toys you can’t find on the NAMM floor.

Also in the spirit of going beyond NAMM, I’m moderating a panel on how people are using computers in performance, and how we can all make the future of music tech shinier, sooner. When you’re living in a cool-sounding year like “2010,” there’s really no excuse not to take matters into your own hands (oh, yeah, and maybe I want to make sure I’m on the same side as the evil robots when the bad s*** starts going down):

2010: It’s gonna be the future soon
A conversation on live electronic performance technique, and how to make music tech better

There’s no need to dream of futuristic, expressive live performance on computers. It’s here. And there’s no reason to wait for technology to improve: let’s talk about how to make it happen. Moderated by Create Digital Music’s PETER KIRN, this conversation with some of the artists at the edge of sound and live electronic music provides a glimpse into the ways people are working in 2010, and an open discussion about what we can do this year to extend our technique and make technology work better.

JUSTIN BORETA and edIT (Glitch Mob, etc.)
RICHARD DEVINE (Schematic/Warp), DSP mad scientist and composer
LAURA ESCUDE, violinist and music technologist
FLIPMU, the duo of Owen Vallis and Jordan Hochenbaum
MOLDOVER, Mojo controller creator, musical supervillian
DERU, composer and musician (Ghostly, etc.), recent Paris Opera Ballet score
BRIAN TRIFON (TRIFONIC), electronic musician and sound designer (Avatar)

and other guests

Hands-on "snap" demos of live rigs + topics of discussion:

Unusual interfaces, including graphical, touch, gestural, and multi-touch interfaces
Monome, Arduinome, MidiDuino and the Minicommand
Max/Max for Live, Reaktor, Pd, Processing, and other tools
Collaboration, synchronization, and open control
New Year’s Resolutions for making technology and performance practice better
…topics to be continued online
Followed by live performances kicking off a night-long party

Presented by Electronic Creatives, Dubspot and Create Digital Music

When: Friday, January 15, 2010, 8pm – 4am

Where: The Downtown Independent, downtownindependent.com

251 S. Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 [Map]

What: Wham Bam Thank You NAMM [official site/artist bios]

Cost: $20; $10 discounted (21+)

RSVP: droidbehavior@gmail.com Information: 213-915-6120 Facebook: Event page

Note on NAMM badges: the NAMM badge gets you into the “industry room” and a discount on admission, but you do NOT need a NAMM badge to get into this party! It is 21+, though – sorry about that.

View Larger Map

Major kudos to the wizards of Electronic Creatives who’ve been a huge part of making the whole evening happen (whereas I largely get to just show up). That includes in particular the talented violinist, composer, technologist, educator, and creative mind Laura Escudé, who has worked with everyone from Cirque du Soleil to Carmen Rizzo; I hope we get to introduce more of her work.

Electronic Creatives “produces events centered around Ableton Live and new music technology coupled with envelope-pushing performances.” (I’m going to try to make sure not to interpret that last phrase as “making my laptop crash onstage,” okay?)