Apple’s "point" releases — those seemingly-harmless updates you get automatically in Software Update — do sometimes break stuff. I tend to ignore the updates until I’ve had a chance to confirm they’re okay. Case in point: it looks like 10.5.2 can result in glitchy audio on laptops.

Native Instruments has an official statement out on the problem, but according to them, this issue can affect software from other vendors, as well:

User feedback and internal testing indicates that recent changes introduced by Apple in Mac OS X 10.5.2 can cause audio dropouts and similar problems on Macbook/Macbook Pro computers. This issue is not limited to NI software in particular, but applies to performance-criticial music software in general.
Therefore, Native Instruments currently cannot guarantee the proper operation of its products under Mac OS X 10.5.2. If possible, users should refrain from upgrading beyond Mac OS X 10.5.1 until further information about this issue becomes available.

Now, I will say this: I am frustrated with Apple’s OS upgrade approach — and I think on any OS, media support is the most vulnerable area.

Brad Sucks, the (despite the name) well-loved Internet musician, has been blogging and releasing tools he’s building to make his online music life better. This one is especially nice: it’s a simple, open source script that connects mailing list sign-ups to Google Maps. Armed with this information, it’s easier to see where your fans are. (Image at right seems to suggest at least a one-person gig offshore of Nigeria, but you get the idea.)

Brad’s Mappy Email Signup Release

Early data is really interesting already. Of course, you need to have more than, say, five fans, but now’s a good time to start. I’m revamping some sign-ups around CDM, so I hope to try this here soon.

Previously from Brad: the brad sucks digital download store, which hooks you up with your own Amazon S3 and PayPal-powered online music store.

Brad also has a tool for asking for donations:

http://www.bradsucks.net/gimme/
http://www.bradsucks.net/projects/gimme/

Slicing, remixing, looping, "live performance-oriented features" … this is Digidesign we’re talking about, right? Digi’s Advanced Instrument Research (A.I.R.) unit, the fruits of the acquisition of Wizoo, may have a pretentious name, but they’ve been doing some pretty great work on new instruments. The new project, Transfuser, will have to enter some crowded waters. Loop slicing and handling already works pretty nicely in Ableton Live (especially with Live 7’s drum racks), in instrument form in FL Studio 8’s awesome Edison and Slicex, and in tools like fxpansion’s GURU. (Superficially, at least, Transfuser bears more than a passing resemblance to the latter in its overall UI layout. And then there’s the fact that the knobs look like they were lifted directly from Live.)

Of course, Transfuser isn’t for FL Studio users. As with previous AIR releases, the Digi-owned Wizoo now make plug-ins for Pro Tools only. And if you are a Pro Tools user, you don’t have to listen to me or try to squint at the screenshots: you can take Transfuser for a test drive free. Download the plug-in for Pro Tools (LE/HD/M-Powered) before June 25, and it’ll operate for three months, no restrictions.

Transfuser Preview [Digidesign]

I can already see from these shots that this isn’t quite the way I’d want to work, personally, let alone enticing enough to make me deal with Pro Tools as a host. But "groove-making" is different for different people, so I’d be very eager to hear what someone else thinks. If you’d like to write up a mini-review for CDM, let us know.

Ableton announced that they’d be doing an orchestral sample library — called, logically enough, the Orchestral Instrument Collection — way back when Live Suite came out last year. But Orchestral Instruments actually didn’t ship then. As of this week, it is shipping.

You can buy the whole library for US$599, or you can pick up sections a la carte for $189 (or, oddly, $159 for Orchestral Percussion). Like the Essential Instruments Collection, the samples come from SONiVOX, with high-fidelity and low-fidelity (read: lightweight for performance) versions. There’s also something new called "SmartPriming" for system resources. I haven’t yet gotten my hands on this, so I can’t comment yet; obviously, it comes down to how important Live integration is to you, or whether you’d prefer a third-party orchestral library.

The a la carte sections, though, makes me think of Garrison Keillor’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra skit. (It’s Classical Music humor. My apologies.) One way to choose sections: think about which God would want you to buy. Excerpt:

But for a Lutheran who feels led to play in an orchestra, the first question must be: are you kidding? An orchestra? Are you sure this is what you want? Do you know what you are getting into? Opera. Is that anyplace for a Christian? Don Juan and Mephistopheles and Wagner and all his pagan goddesses hooting and hollering, and the immorality — I mean, is anybody in opera married?

Not to give away the punchline, but not surprisingly harps and percussion (think about the patience required to be an orchestral percussionist) win out, so that could theoretically guide your purchase decision here. Just remember:

The French Horn takes too much of a person’s life. French horn players hardly have time to marry and have children. The French horn is practically a religion all by itself.

Software is different, of course. A Young Lutheran’s Guide to Music Software, anyone?

Native Instruments is releasing some cheaper ways of getting at their software guitar modeler, Guitar Rig, in the form of a cheaper software version and a hardware bundle:

• Guitar Rig 3 XE is a "lite" version of Guitar Rig, focused on the basics — 5 guitar/bass amps, 12 cabinets, and 21 effects. It also some of the "helper" modules from Guitar Rig, including a metronome, tapedeck, and tuner — but no looping module, which is one of my favorites. (See the full list.) US$99 on its own.
• Guitar Session bundles the LE software with Cubase 4 LE, some pop drums for KORE player via a soundpack, and the Session I/O audio hardware. US$250 for the bundle, available June 1 worldwide.

If we’ve learned one thing on this site, it’s this: if it’s a computer, big or small, someone’s going to find a way to make music. The iPod / iPhone, with their Mac OS-derived software guts and a multi-touch interface, are no exception — with or without Apple’s blessing. Here’s a look at what people are doing, including some apps you can download right now, and where this might go musically, whether it’s just a couple of fun toys or trying to make that pretty pocket device an instrument.

Background

There’s no question what makes the iPod Touch and iPhone significant: they are tiny, palm-sized Macs, running all the stuff that makes a Mac a Mac — Cocoa, of course, but even music-specific stuff like Core Audio and Audio Units. (For more details, have a look at the WWDC session highlights spotted by Palm Sounds, all of interest to audio specifically. It could easily be mistaken for desktop development. The Unity 3D game engine is on its way, too.) And even if you’re not planning on picking up mobile Apple hardware, this says something about the rapidly-advancing direction of mobile computing. There was a lot of talk about mobile convergence in the 90s and early years of this decade, but now it’s here.

Of course, there are strings attached. Apple was in no rush to get an official SDK and firmware out to developers, relenting only this year. And it strikes me as I see iPhones on the go that the coolest stuff is happening using "jailbreaked" phones — phones specifically hacked to get around Apple’s requirements. Even when Apple goes official, that’s likely to continue: Apple has placed some arguably onerous restrictions on development. Software has to be Apple-approved and sold via iTunes, and basic capabilities like multitasking are a no-no. Someone’s just called? Great. Your app just quit. (Bizarrely, even extremely low-end phones are willing to multitask, but not Apple’s far-superior hardware.) Whatever arguments you may make for Apple’s approach, my guess is the hard-core iPhone/Touch owner will remain outlaws to get the full capability out of their device.

Also, despite some common elements, the implementations of APIs on the mobile devices are not as complete as on desktop Mac OS. Chad from miniMusic tells PalmSounds that some features currently available in Core Audio on the desktop are missing on mobile — at least for now.

Then there’s the fact that the major Apple strength is Cocoa and Mac-based development — meaning I remain curious about what the Windows and Linux camps will do in this space, particularly Linux. Those folks do have a major, uphill battle to match Apple’s achievement here in terms of software. One would think, though, that Linux should have a bit of an edge because its comparative modularity, whereas Mac OS X was designed solely as a desktop OS — though mobile development is hard, either way.

For Mac-based development, though, iPhone and iPod Touch are here now (always a major advantage in technology). Its full-fledged Mac roots have led to the fanciful image at right and some heated discussion on CDM’s forums earlier this spring. But let’s have a look and what’s here now for the iThings, like MooCowMusic’s Band app (pictured, top).

Andrew Turley writes to share his microfiche-to-MIDI music maker, which he shared at the Maker Faire. The idea: take the humble library microfiche, and translate light and dark values into MIDI, fed to a Casio keyboard. Sound like a random idea? Well, it would be — except Andrew happens to be in a band called Microfiche. (Check them out on MySpace.) None other than IEEE Spectrum — yes, from the IEEE standards body that brings us stuff like FireWire (aka IEEE 1394) — got hands-on with his project; IEEE Spectrum’s Josh Romero named it one of his favorite musical projects at the faire.

Maker Faire Highlights: Making Music the Hard Way [IEEE Spectrum]

Andrew has more impressions of the Faire on his blog Pillowsopher:

I’ve been there for the last two days presenting some of my projects, such as:

• Unicorn Vs. Dolphin
• my stomp pad
• $2 multitouch instrument (based on the water-in-a-bag design by Erling Ellingsen)
• Rock Band Keynote
• the Microfiche Machine (light to MIDI converter for the band Microfiche)
• the LED VU Meter

Cool, but I’d love to do this with microfilm — especially with the film cranked up to full speed. Wheeeee— click, click … crap. Film came off the spool. (What, am I the only person who’s done old-fashioned library research?)

More Maker Faire Videos

Make: Blog’s resident musicologist Collin Cunningham has a video with more of the music projects at Maker Faire:
Musical interfaces @ Maker Faire from Collin Cunningham on Vimeo.

Anyone else with fun Maker Faire reports, do send them our way. Sorry I couldn’t make it this year — but I’ll take this opportunity to finally edit all this footage I have from Yuri’s Night Bay Area, for more Greater San Francisco DIY Musical Goodness!

Multi-touch controller goodness is now as close as your nearest iPod Touch or iPhone; all that remains is to hook it up to some creative music, visuals, or others. (I would prefer the iPod Touch for this reason; then you don’t have to worry about using it as a phone — draining the battery in the process — or needing AT&T service.)

Olle Holmberg has a new solution for using the Touch/iPhone as a controller, by translating input to OpenSoundControl (OSC) and, if you prefer, MIDI messages. He writes:

I was searching everywhere for a way to get my new iPod Touch to work like a wireless touch controller to Pd (and hence to everything else), but couldn’t find one — so I made one. It’s really just an OSC mapping for routing the default Mrmr “Performance.mmr” interface, but if you’re interested it would save you heaps of time, even though it’s not really anything difficult to make.

Mrmr is an “open protocol for mobile devices” for dynamically creating interfaces; we’ve covered it on Create Digital Motion, where vade has interviewed the creator, and we’ve seen it in action coupled with upcoming visual app 3L. Those solutions used proprietary software like Max/MSP/Jitter, though, whereas this works with the free and open source Pd. (We love Max, but having an alternative is good, especially if you just want to hook up your iPod Touch to Ableton Live or Reaktor, etc.) As far as I know, this should also mean compatibility with Windows and Linux, but maybe someone can verify that.

The Pd patch is below — homely but functional, and you can extend it if it doesn’t do what you need.

For more information and download of the first release:

PdiPod - Mrmr to Pd on iPhone & iPod Touch [on pissypaws.tumblr, Olle’s blog]
Pd Forum Announcement and Discussion
Files/download

There are various ways to bridge the gap between vinyl records and computers, as we saw last week. You can cut records with digital timecode. You can build controller hardware that simulates the resistance of a motor, or mechanically control digital media using the turntable platter. And then there are the brute force methods, like strapping mice to turntables.

Squarely in the brute-force camp, our friend Ean Golden at DJ Tech Tools has added 7" records to the wheels on Vestax’s VCI-100 USB controller. If you want to do the same violence to your VCI-100 (I love how abused Ean’s VCI is looking, especially with those custom arcade buttons), Ean has a tutorial:

Add Records to your VCI-100 Jog Wheels [djtechtools.com]

The VCI still doesn’t feel like a turntable; I think it’s best thought of as something new and digital. And you do lose access to some of the controls. But I love that it’s customized in this way. Maybe I’ll add hubcaps to mine.

As using sounds produced on unusual 8-bit systems and game consoles grows in popularity, some artists are appropriating the music as their own. Sometimes, as with Beck, a well-known or better-marketed artist is using lesser-known artists for purposes of novelty. That alone has riled some in the hard-core chiptune community. In some cases, though, artists are resorting to outright theft. In the most recent case, part of the problem is people misunderstanding Creative Commons licenses, even though those licenses are designed to encourage sharing.

Is Creative Commons a safe license to use, or does it encourage this kind of theft? I think CC is actually a solution, not part of the problem – and this illustrates that.

Not Just Timbaland: Fitts for Fights Syndrome

Online music piracy is well known. But ready access to music online has led to a much more serious problem: digital plagiarism.

The best known case, of course, is the infamous 2007 Timbaland Controversy, in which Timbaland apparently stole musical elements from Finnish demoscene artist Tempest in the song Do It by Nelly Furtado. (See EM411 story, Wikipedia article.) But Timbaland isn’t alone.

At least Timbaland was using a sample; some artists steal whole songs outright. The notorious Norwegian duo Fitts for Fights performed entire sets stolen from demoscene/"microscene" recordings — and kept playing the stolen tunes live.

In April of this year, Laromlab released an entire album — every last track — stolen from other recordings. After CMJ reported the story, widely discussed on chip community 8-bit collective, the "artist" was forced to admit the entire album was a "hoax." (Thanks, Peter Swimm, for the tip.)

In fact, the track record here demonstrates that, for all Timbaland’s press as the most famous figure involved, micromusical plagiarism is rampant. It’s not just geeks getting defensive; there’s something to this, fueled by the novelty and apparent obscurity of the music. (See also: an ongoing thread on Pouet.net.)

Crystal Castles and Creative Commons

The latest episode combines 8-bit musical plagiarism with an abuse of Creative Commons licenses. Crystal Castles is a Toronto-based band that’s gotten quite a lot of positive press for their use of 8-bit sounds, including a keyboard with an Atari chip. (And there’s the source of the problem: this stuff is "hot" partly because it’s novel to mainstream press.)

Unfortunately, some of Crystal Castles’ sound apparently isn’t their their own.