Mac switchers from Windows, you know why this one matters. Bome MIDI Translator is one of Windows’ most essential utilities, with powerful tools for converting MIDI messages and keystrokes. I know folks (like the awesomely-talented beatboxer Kid Beyond) who sorely missed the tool after switching to the Mac. Happily, it’s on its way. The beta requires an invite, and expires in July, and some important features are missing in this build. But there’s no question this is good news for Mac users:
MIDI Translator on Mac OS X

Be sure to post bug reports and forum posts over there, but we’re curious to know how it works here, as well. (Now, Linux, Bome?)

CDM has ongoing coverage from the Mutek festival; see more dispatches at events.noisepages.com. Liz talks to A/V duo Rechenzentrum for CDM — and there’s a bit of a revelation at the end of the interview. -Ed.

Rechenzentrum, which means “data processing center” in German, is a Berlin-based duo who create live audio-visual performances by combining austere film visuals with their own brand of minimal techno, fusing elements of jazz, dub, and early industrial. Marc Wieser handles the music half while Lillevan navigates the visual landscape. Their 2003 DVD release Director’s Cut, originally out on Mille Plateaux, went on to win the Ars Electronica prize. Marc and Lillevan sat down with us after their sound check for A/Visions 2 at Mutek 2008.

Liz: What goes on in a live Rechenzentrum performance?

Lillevan: I do the video; Marc does the music. The video is live in the sense that I determine which image gets shown at which second, but obviously I’m not creating the image in real time because I’m not really interested in that. Real-time-created video usually looks pretty “blocky,” and I don’t really like it that much. It’s a mixture of pre-recorded video coming off a hard disk and live stuff reacting off of Marc’s music. But we’re not connected by any kind of MIDI connections or sound analysis. I just listen to his music and create stuff based on that. It’s a connection between our persons and not between our computers.

Marc Weiser: This way it’s improvised, for sure.

The x0xb0x, the open-source Roland TB-303 clone by Limor “Lady Ada” Fried, has been officially discontinued edit: unofficially end-of-lifed? Made less than widely available? It’s actually unclear. That makes this already hard-to-find kit tougher still to get. Because it’s open-source hardware, you can source the components yourself and build it, but some of the parts are very hard to find — which may be why it was discontinued in the first place. has been difficult to get a hold of in full kit form.

Our friends over at the awesome trash_audio (music blog with home studio voyeurism added in) pick up the story:

x0xb0x: Kits Discontinued

So, what’s next? It seems to me that, should the open source hardware argument really hold for music gear, the x0xb0x needs some successors — the more, the merrier. First off, perhaps it’s time to re-conceive the x0xb0x in a version that uses more easily-sourced parts. (Call it the Socks Box, dropping the l33t spelling as a metaphor for more accessibility?) And I’m eager to see the Next Great Open Instrument. Nominees?

Update: Okay, as my corrections above concede, it seems that the x0xb0x is not fully discontinued, just hard to get and between production runs. (I thought about applying a question mark to the original story, and now regret not doing that.) But maybe it’s time to declare what’s been obvious to many for a long time: the backlog for the x0xb0x is so huge, and there are so few signs of any increase in production rate, that they’ve effectively become impossible to get.

And that raises another question to me: is it possible for open-source music hardware to reach bigger quantities? Could they keep their cool factor even if everyone had one? (The answer, I suspect, is a huge yes, because greater availability almost encourages users to make their gear their own. Witness the hugely-successful Arduino, arguably music hardware itself.)

If you do get one shipped to you, though, do let us know.

Official word from Lady Ada in comments:

peter, the x0xb0x is not discontinued. the waiting list is long enough that i suggest ’self sourcing’. i am still making kits but it is slow going.

CDM’s Peter Dines and Liz McLean Knight (Liz literally on her honeymoon) are keeping us posted with the latest events from Detroit’s Movement and Montreal’s MUTEK festivals. You can keep track of their travels and live impressions on our new CDM events blog, and I look forward to some artist interviews planned with some of our favorite people, coming soon.

So far, Peter is getting his synesthesia on with live audio and visuals at A/Visions, while Liz notes the spooky near-ubiquity of UC-33e controllers running Ableton Live at Movement. (Guess they need to invite us with some odder controllers, huh?)

Lots more coming soon — if you’re at either of these events, too, send in your reports and we’ll publish or link them:

events.noisepages.com

The events site will soon feature more information on CDM-hosted events, as well.

The Asus Eee PC is unlikely to be your first choice of laptops for music. But it’s small, it’s cute, and it’s ridiculously cheap. Some CDM-reading computer enthusiasts are biting, as we found out in March when we asked you if you had turned the Eee PC into a music box.

On the Linux side, you’ve got lots of options. Best among these, CDM reader Dan Stowell has put together a comprehensive tutorial on using SuperCollider, the powerful, free sound synthesis engine. You can even add custom GUIs using a free Java-based tool. There are also plenty of DIY environments for music working nicely (Csound and Pd included, as well), meaning the Eee can very quickly become a programmable, dedicated sound machine and synth for the price of the cheapest closed-box, name-brand piece of music gear.

Linux also supports various music tools that lend themselves to a lower-end machine, like music tracker MilkyTracker. Check it out in videos on the Eee: Eee-PC MilkyTracker Xandros, more. (Thanks, emrox!)

The surprise is, full-blown Windows software holds its own. From the NI forums, a group of intrepid Guitar Rig 3 users have fired up XP and have a pretty usable, self-contained Guitar Rig computer:

Guitar Rig on Eee PC [Native Instruments forums; thanks to Jahmal Tonge for the tip!]

The trick is, you do need modded video drivers to make use of 1000×600 resolution, thus accommodating the user interface. Forum members also suggest avoiding the newer Atom model as they believe it will be slower. Then again, while this proof of concept is tantalizing, I’d probably hold out for more-powerful mini PCs coming out — and the fact that music works this well on this machine means it only gets better from here.

Computer Music Magazine did do a review of the Eee, and were a little more practical about the Eee’s downsides (though the resolution hack here helps at least with that problem). But then, the other way of looking at this is that the Eee is just the beginning. Plenty more budget mini-laptops are coming; already machines from HP and others close the gap with “conventional”, pricier laptops. Linux distributions may soon target these configurations (Ubuntu has promised a “remix”), and Microsoft has committed to keeping XP and Vista going on these machines, as well. And that means the price divide with computer music is getting erased fast.

Here’s a brief video snippet I discovered someone took at a talk I did at this year’s South by Southwest, with interaction design pioneer Joy Mountford (formerly Yahoo, Apple). We were talking about the idea of “data as art”, which happened to coincide neatly with the Design and the Elastic Mind show at MOMA, featuring several works from Joy’s recently-disbanded Design Innovation Group team at Yahoo.

The audience response to the work Joy showed was really overwhelming, as search activity danced around the globe and photos came to life in three dimensions. And it was nice to be able to show them the tool used to create these projects, Processing, and encourage people to try it out for free, even if they hadn’t tried programming before.

But I was surprised by how people reacted to a quick musical demo I closed with. Using Java, I wrote a simple program that checked my Gmail account using IMAP, then translated the time spam messages arrived into MIDI notes. I’m still developing a more advanced real-time version, so I threw the resulting SMF file into Ableton Live.

I’ll actualy be showing a newer version of this for Internet Week at an event sponsored by Make Magazine; more on that in a few days. (I’ll also use that as an opportunity to post some updated code.)

We spend so much time talking about how visualization can make data more expressive that we sometimes overlook other media. The spam “musicification” made sense to people partly because even the untrained ear is sensitive to musical timing, I think. Sonification of data isn’t always the right choice; the results can be abstract, though perhaps there’s value in that, too. But it’s worth remembering that people are sensitive to sound as they are to visuals. Since it’s not an either/or choice, necessarily, it’s too bad that so often designers neglect aspects of sound and timing while focusing only on what something looks like. It’s a challenge, certainly — there’s a reason most of us mute annoying sound feedback on computer interfaces — but I think it’s an area in which we’ll see a lot more discussion.

Now, data in smell-o-vision — that’s a story for another day.

The good news: Digidesign has made a pre-release version of Pro Tools 7.4 (all versions — M-Powered, LE, and HD) available for Mac OS X Leopard. You’re advised not to install this on a critical system and to keep regular backups, but if you’ve got a new machine waiting for a Leopard-ready version, you can give this a go now.

Update: Information on Pro Tools Compatibility for Mac OS X 10.5.3

The reason you might still want to wait on Leopard upgrading, in case this hasn’t already made you cautious: not all RTAS plug-ins are expected to be “Leopard-ready.” (TDM plug-ins run on Digi’s DSP hardware and are apparently unaffected once the host works.) We’re told developers are being advised to test rigorously because of changes to Mac OS X. This may not be limited to Digidesign. Based on reports from readers, while users are on the whole happier with 10.5.3 than 10.5.2, there are still some kinks to work out — including users of products other than just those from Digidesign and M-Audio. Best advice: stick with Tiger 10.4.x if you can for the most stable alternative.

Pro Tools Plug-in Compatibility with Leopard

Just as being patient now is advisable, though, it’s equally good advice to reserve judgment on Leopard until the OS matures. Changes made to 10.5 promise better performance on multiple-core systems, for instance — so while the short-term side effect may be glitchy audio until bugs are ironed out, once software is mature, you may squeeze out more performance. The problem is, we can’t know either way until other issues are resolved first. That means patience pays off doubly: sticking with the most stable option if you can is a good way to avoid trouble, while waiting to see how things go means you could reap some rewards upgrading once the software matures. (On the other hand, some readers have no problem, so if you have more than one machine or a new machine that requires Leopard, I’d say go for 10.5.3)

I’ll say those two words I tend to say all the time: stay tuned.

Thanks to Ray Tovey and others for the tips!

Our friend Marc (”M-.-n”) writes to let us know version 1.0 of music tracker (think alternative sequencer / music making tool) LittleGPTracker is here, with quite a lot in the way of new features. As always, the banner feature of LGPT is its ability to run on the open, Linux-based GamePark mobile game console, making it an ideal choice for tracking on the go. But it runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux desktop systems, too, with features enhanced in this release. The list from Marc: