Working with music production today is a bit like science fiction. It’s fitting that visions of technology’s promise, menace, and humanity would inspire electronic music.

Create Digital Music, XLR8R, and Pitchfork got to join together with TV network SyFy to curate a free, 13-track compilation of “Music for Our Future.” Inspired by the world of SyFy’s new TV series Caprica, which is set just before the recently-concluded Battlestar Galactica, this is science fiction as the familiar. It’s the near future, not simply fantasy.

Download the full compilation for free, exclusively at:

http://www.xlr8r.com/musicforourfuture

The lineup, curated by the three publications, includes the likes of Lusine, Willits & Sakamoto, The Field, and Richard Devine, to name a few regular favorites on this site, with exclusive or previously-unreleased tracks by White Rainbows, Nice Nice, and myself.

In addition to the music, several of those artists share with CDM their techniques and process.

The full tracks:

Running a daily website is something of a controlled experiment in the passions of an enthusiastic community. 2009 was a year in which musicians pulled no punches in debating the merits not only of tools themselves, but of the ideas behind them. What follows is not the “best” of 2009, but the “biggest” – the stories that inflamed passions and got readers clicking and commenting. Some top lists include the items about which everyone agrees. This is the list of what got everyone arguing.

Software of the year: Propellerhead Record

For all the major releases and upgrades and gear, as well as the dominance of a certain Berlin-based developer, if you had to pick one application of 2009, it’d be Record. Record tops the list not because everyone dropped everything to go use it, but quite the contrary. Record bucked industry trends, and provided a love-it-or-hate-it view of what audio software could be. In other words, it was quite reminiscent of Reason.

Centered on a mixer, emphasizing “recording” (perish the thought), and omitting expected features like MIDI out and plug-in support, Record resists modern-day conventional wisdom. That was divisive enough, even before the debates began over Record’s new hardware key. In the long run, it may be the simple fact that Record brings audio signal to Reason that gives it staying power. But in 2009, Record was the application about which everyone had an opinion.

See our original preview, May, plus details on the "Ignition Key" authorization system

Developer of the year: Ableton

What a year it’s been for Ableton. The company kicked off the year with “Share,” “Extend,” and “Touch,” as well as the release of Live 8. It sounded simple. But Ableton’s tech dominated CDM headlines in ‘09 with the variety of user tips and tricks, rants and raves. How’d they do?

There’s something to be said for the traditional digital audio workstation, its linear arrangement view, and all its editing bells and whistles. When it comes to finishing a track from beginning to end – not doing live PA-DJ hybrid performances or racking up modular synths and effects or programming intricate cellular beats – sometimes the conventional approach can be welcome.

With lots of affordable alternatives – not to mention competition from stable, previous versions – the question with any full-freight, top-of-the-line DAW is whether it can “buy” your loyalties with enough extras? And, for that matter, might it even convince you to enjoy running Windows? SONAR has tempted me before, but 8.5.2 reaches a new level of maturity – and a new level of pack-in goodies to sweeten the deal.

Choosing a DAW is an immensely personal decision. It’s worth saying that we have a lot of exceptionally good choices from which to select tools. Even when they perform tasks in very different ways, any number of tools can achieve the same results. I have had a personal reaction to certain tools, though, and too often in reviews, we don’t get to talk about that subjective experience. I’ve actually started to work SONAR into more of the projects I’m doing, so I speak personally about it.

Looking at the monome hardware, it could be difficult to understand how a simple array of buttons has become the most important musical design of the decade. It’s been the software that has brought this to life, not least the work of stretta (aka Matthew Davidson).

In the early days of electronic music, the creation of modular systems for synthesizing sound was a major breakthrough. Today, we can produce modular systems for composition, for assembling the music itself. And in a world in which “more” is the key word, many of these systems, by design, do less, focusing on the essential.

stretta reached a major landmark late last week, with the release of the maxforlive monome suite. It’s a set of seven Max for Live devices, with variations, which can be dropped into Ableton Live for use in musical projects. But it’s also more than that – it’s a modular model for how stretta thinks, and each module is designed to be used with the others, all without ever having to take your hands or eyes off the monome controller. Included in the pack:

• obo matrix step sequencer
• pitches for playing notes on the monome
• polygomé 64 for polyphonic, step-sequenced, transposing pitches
• press cafe for repeating patterns of pitches
• spectral display for blinking lights to visualize sound
• step filter step-sequenced filter bank
• automatorgator MIDI- and audio- and OSC- controllable pattern gate

Details and download link (no explicit license coming yet, but Matthew has promised an open license):

maxforlive monome suite released

I got the chance to talk to Matthew about the project, how he created it, how to approach using it, and what it was like working with Max for Live.

All photos by Matthew Davidson; released under a Creative Commons attribution license. Click the images for full-sized versions.

Max for Live is now available, fusing the multimedia, visual programming environment of Max/MSP/Jitter with the plug-in hosting and sequencing and clip-launching and recording of Ableton Live. With two complex products interacting, there are plenty of questions to answer. I asked Michael Chenetz, the creator of the online tutorial site and community max4live.info, to tell us what major points we shouldn’t miss.

Here for launch week are Michael’s answers, information on what you get in the box (including videos from Ableton), plus the best video tutorials from Michael’s site to get you oriented in the new tool – and to begin to determine wheterh Max for Live is for you.