Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation saw this coming – computer display interfaces were destined to allow direct touch from all your fingers, with no mouse or stylus or clunky single-point interface intervening. Jazz Mutant’s Lemur multi-touch hardware was arguably the first widely-available commercial solution to enabling this kind of control of music and performance. Now, several years after the launch of Lemur, multi-touch is mainstream. Apple’s iPod touch and iPhone already support it in hardware costing as little as US$200. Microsoft promises built-in support in Windows 7. HP says computers and displays are imminent. Many others will follow.

But if you want multi-touch to work for music, what’s the best approach? The dedicated multi-touch Lemur controller (and its Dexter sibling) has won over support from some musicians and multimedia artists for specifically catering to their needs. Various celebs have been spotted using them – recently we saw Justice rocking a pair in Rio.

What defines the Lemur is that you don’t use it like a conventional display. Instead, you create interfaces from pre-defined building blocks – the virtual equivalent of adding physical faders and knobs to DIY controller hardware. To me, that’s been paradoxically both its strongest and weakest point. The strength is, the display focuses on controls that make sense for performance and can be easily manipulated with fingers. The weakness is, you’re limited to these widgets – and, increasingly, the Lemur has to compete with mainstream hardware displays that have no such limitations. As mainstream hardware grows, it puts more pressure on Lemur.

In the meantime, though, Lemur’s creators keep improving the available widgets. The biggest firmware update yet, v2 has just hit beta, with the finished firmware available by the end of the year. It’s a free update for Lemur owners, so a no-brainer there. New in this release:

• Breakpoint object for manipulating multi-segment envelopes
• Gesture object: gesture recognition, pinching, rotating, and finger tracing
• Tabbed container: Now, instead of switching endlessly between control pages, you can fit different sets of controls into tabs
• Mouse/keyboard remote control: keyboard shortcuts and mouse movements now become possible directly from the Lemur

In addition, it’s easier to edit Lemur pages more quickly, aliases of objects save memory, and multi-line scripting beefs up custom options.

It’s really good stuff, which makes me wonder: does Jazz Mutant have the ability to support other third-party hardware if it becomes available?

In the meantime, there isn’t actually any direct equivalent for the Lemur, at least not with this screen size. I imagine those with the cash who want to use a futuristic interface rather than just speculate about it will continue to snap up Lemurs. For the rest of us, it’s interesting just watching the development.

Jazz Mutant [Company Site]

Brad Linder is a blogger, freelance journalist, and producer for National Public Radio. If anyone loves mobile recorders, he sure does. He writes in with a great overview of what was happening in mobile recorders at the AES show here in New York, with plenty of detailed information on his blog.

Here’s my little writeup of the new portable flash recorder from Sony:

http://www.bradlinder.net/2007/10/sony-announces-pcm-d50-handheld-flash.htmlSony announces PCM-D50 handheld flash recorder

Overall, it blew me away. The successor to its $2000 PCM-D1 flash audio recorder is 1/3rd the price, and packs almost all the same features. For $600, it’s a bit pricier than the Zoom H2 or H4 recorders, but it’s aimed at professionals with high quality audio standards.

Here’s the Sony product page:

PCM-D50

Also, Digidesign/M-Audio is launching an updated version of their Microtrack flash recorder in November. They didn’t have a working model at AES, but the new unit will sell for $299 ($100 less than the original), features a brightness control, 48V phantom power (compared with 30V on the original), and improved battery life. On the down side, the battery is still non-removable.

M-Audio Microtrack II available for $299 in November

And Marantz (who is not exhibiting at AES) is competing with Zoom, Edirol, and M-Audio with the new PMD620 recorder:

More Marantz PMD620 details emerge

The long and short of it is, it’s an exciting time to be shopping for field recorders.

Be sure to click through for some sound samples, details, and observations. I feel a little sheepish about my Zoom H4, which has some definite issues, but this is good news for anyone buying. Maybe I need a second recorder, huh? If you’re in the H4 boat, here are our past tips from Brad:
Zoom H4 Mobile Recorder, In Action on NPR
Fix for Zoom H4 Mobile Recording: Use a Mobile Battery Pack

Let’s be clear: I’m absolutely opposed to piracy. It really has damaged the industry, and it really is often perpetrated by people can afford to pay. For people who can’t afford the software, we’ve been big advocates of cheap, freeware, and free/open source software that can be used legally. But making anti-piracy efforts look like brute thuggery is horribly damaging for an industry that’s been working for years to try to encourage positive relations with its customer base in order to compel them to buy software as choice, not out of fear. I’ve talked to many developers who, despite their concerns about piracy, have worked really hard to build that paying base of users, through mutual trust. And I can only see this nonsense having one effect: hurting the efforts of developers who have fought piracy by using sensible product authorization, providing great support, and taking an active role in the music community.

SonicState.com got a great interview, which is nice, as it means I didn’t have to talk to them:

AESNYC07: More On The Waves Antipiracy Campaign

And developers, please, we’re happy to help you sell more legit software; let’s stay away from these guys. They’re creepy. This isn’t really an anti-piracy effort; they plainly state they’re out to make more money for their clients. And that’s called extortion.

Updated: Amidst the roiling debate going on in our comments now, here’s an excellent and quite balanced article from Pro Sound News Europe. They detail the tactics used. In fact, what Waves/BanPiracy is doing is legal. Whether it’s good PR for existing, legitimate customers is another matter.
Waves tackles the cracks [Pro Sound News Europe]

Another observation, if I’ve got this right. Some readers do feel combating piracy may take this kind of strong-armed approach. But, so far, the only confirmed client of BanPiracy is still Waves. That means, whatever claims BanPiracy makes about the industry as a whole, it’s possible no one else is willing to take these kinds of measures. If you hear otherwise, let us know. But sticking to dongles, serials, authorization, and old-fashioned customer outreach may remain the solution for most developers.

What’s this new Max about, and why was it such a big deal at the AES trade show? To really understand, let’s turn to gaming for a moment. When Nintendo described their vision for the Wii, they talked about appealing to three groups of customers:

• The “hard-core” gamer; that is, their existing audience, of course
• “Lapsed” gamers: people who had done some gaming at some point but lost interest
• Entirely new gamers, across a variety of demographics

History will have to be the judge of Nintendo’s slim white box and controller-wagging interface, but I heard some similar development goals at the AES audio show this weekend. Nowhere was this more apparent than Cycling ’74’s upcoming Max 5. Substitute the word “patcher” for the word “gamer”, and you’ve got a snapshot of the new Max.

After all, whether you’ve touched Max before or not, you’ve likely got some needs in at least one of these categories. Beginners are easily intimidated by the “visual programming” metaphors of a blank-slate, modular tool like Max. Many others get through a couple of patches, often in a school course, but wind up having difficulty getting beyond that first work later on. And even advanced users (maybe especially advanced users) are always looking for ways of working faster.

The build I saw of Max wasn’t entirely complete, but I will say it’s tremendously promising. I talked to many for whom the chance to see Max 5 was the highlight of the entire AES show. It’s a tool you really need to see in action, so be sure to check out Cycling’s just-posted videos of the program:

A First Look at Max 5 [Cycling '74]

This is not the all-words, no-pictures manifesto we saw recently: now you actually get to see the tool in action. Highlights:

• The interface zooms, scales, and snaps: I knew this was coming, but I was really pleased at how Max-like this is. It still looks like Max, but it’s more usable.
• There’s a patcher inspector: The inspector lets you easily adjust attributes without mucking about with typing things into an object box or sending messages to an object, which was always very confusing. You don’t see much of this in the video, but trust me, this is huge, especially for more-complex Jitter objects. And while this is shades of Quartz Composer, it works much better than the clunky UI implementation in that tool.
• Finding the object you need is much easier: There’s a pretty visual browser which will be a lot of fun, but there’s also auto-complete when you type in a name. (Programmers will recognize that functionality from IDEs like Eclipse; Mac users, think QuickSilver fast-typing goodness.)
• There’s a nifty new file browser: Drawing from iTunes and Ableton Live, this makes it really easy to get access to files in the file system — no more manually entering paths. The bad news is, it sounds as though this may not initially be usable in your own patches, for, say, making a video navigator for a VJ app or sample loader for an instrument; hopefully, that’ll either sneak into the final build or be available soon after. (The Cycling page does mention integration of the database that powers this browser with JavaScript, though, so advanced users may have some new options.)



A new file browser takes cues from iTunes and Ableton Live.
• Debugging and feedback and help everywhere: The old way of working with Max was pretty slow. Add an object. Click the object’s help to figure out what it does. Look up its help page. Go find the tutorial reference in which it’s introduced. Add a print object to watch what data is coming out of it. Go back and try to see why it’s not working. Now, there’s feedback everywhere: pop-up hints for each inlet and outlet, integrated help, the ability to mouse over objects and see what data is moving through them (including Jitter matrices, apparently), and even better-organized data feedback in the Max window. The integrated help is much richer, too, though it wasn’t quite ready for demo when I saw it; I expect we’ll find out more about this soon.
• Presentation mode for performance, and the end to messy patches: This is really the feature that could make you jump for the new Max. Presentation mode lets you select elements in your patch and add them to a performance interface, so that in addition to locking a patch, you can build a custom interface as an additional layer. Let me translate that: you’ll never have to stare at a giant, messy patch while you’re trying to perform again. Now, Reaktor has had something like that for years, but again, the implementation is really Max-like and unique. When you go to presentation mode, you can drag objects where you want them. Switch back to editing mode, and they remain connected to the rest of your patch and automatically move back to their edited locations. (If that didn’t make sense, go watch the video, and expect to see more examples of this soon!)

There are still lots of questions, of course: there’s no solid release date or pricing plan, and we haven’t yet heard what Cycling is cooking up with its new partner Ableton, or how that fits into Max 5. Jitter will be supported with this new release, though, like the internals in Max/MSP, it doesn’t sound like there will be any earth-shaking changes immediately. (I.e., it won’t be Jitter 2.0.) Then again, Jitter patchers should benefit just as much as MSP heads from all these other features, so I wouldn’t underestimate the potential there.

I think there’s no question this will step up the game for custom-patched music and multimedia software. Max isn’t the only game in town by any means, though it is arguably the most extensive tool (especially if you’re counting number of objects). I can’t wait to get my hands on the new Max and share the patching experience, and I’m equally interested to see what happens with the next version of a more specialized tool like Reaktor. As always, stay tuned.

• Apple
• Ableton
• Cakewalk
• Native Instruments
• Cycling ‘74
• Trinity Audio (the mobile Linux folks)

I’ll let you figure this one out; some of those folks have made announcements, and some have not.

Exhibiting at AES? Send me your booth number and I’ll try to drop by! I should be around all weekend.

Going to AES? Let me know…

• Experimental DIY guitars by Yuri Landman (hey, if any of you do this in the NY area, feel free to drop by the next Handmade Music event!)
• If you liked the albums released on NES cartridge, someone else has an album on floppy disk
• Electro-mechanical keytar
• Radio producers are obviously reading MT, given a 15-minute radio show on Radio 4 seems to duplicate an MT series on “Tiny Music.”

And hopefully we can track down Fairlight’s ridiculously awesome control surface on the AES show floor.

Sometimes it’s really hard to be rational and dispassionate about high-end audio gear. Some of it is just ridiculously pretty. And every time the AES show rolls around, you can be sure your right brain’s neurons are going to get all hot and bothered about Blue and Red Microphones and their lovely, vintage-style designs.

The RED Type A Tube Mic is one gorgeous microphone. It’s also a unique design: you can interchange different capsules for different recording situation, all without ever turning off the mic. (That’s right: you can actually hot-swap capsules.) There’s a serious tube inside: a “hand-selected” ECC88 vacuum tube.

This mic isn’t cheap at US$1345, but that’s nothing compared to what some similar mics can cost. Once you have the mic, the capsules are relatively affordable, starting at US$245. Now, I won’t make a recommendation on this kind of mic, but you have my permission to go seek out your local enabler — I mean, erm, audio expert — and ask him/her whether this is worth it. If you can afford a luxury mic like this, do send pictures and let us know how it treats you.

Pictured below: included accessories. Red says these are a “custom-built flight case, Red’s high-definition tube mic cable, a shock mount and the innovative PowerStream power supply, which not only insures ultra-stable performance but features a soft-start feature that maximizes tube life and minimizes startup time.” I see something that looks like a flask. (Yeah, I know, I know, it’s the power supply; maybe Red can introduce a specially-branded flask, which would be all I could afford.)

Vintagemicrophone.com

Native Instruments, maker of the leading Traktor DJ software (now part of their DJ line, have quietly announced they’re ending their relationship with Stanton, the company that makes the vinyl-to-computer interface Final Scratch. Given that the Traktor/Final Scratch combination has been dominant in the DJ club world, that’s big news. Here’s what Native had to say announcing the “mutual” decision. (I cut the part where Stanton said “we’ve been together for several years now — where is this relationship going?” and Native said something about how they “really liked Stanton” but things had been getting a little “too hot and heavy” and that “maybe the best thing would be a break.”)

The successful partnership with Stanton Magnetics based on the pioneering FinalScratch digital DJ system will mutually expire in 2006, with both companies focusing on their respective product lines from that date on. Native Instruments will continue to maintain the FinalScratch user forum on its website until December 31st 2006.

I was planning on calling on my secret informant deep inside NI’s Berlin headquarters to find out what was going on, but it turns out it’s in black and white right in the press release:

In the future, the DJ Division of Native Instruments will completely concentrate its operations on the TRAKTOR platform, and will also develop integrated solutions for the DJ market based on its own internal hardware engineering capabilities and expertise.

There’s your answer: NI clearly wants to build their own hardware instead of relying on Stanton (unless they’re planning on using their “internal engineering capabilities and expertise” to build model airplanes or something).

So, good news or bad news? I think that depends entirely on what NI plans for their hardware. Personally, to me the core of what Traktor is is, well, Traktor. Now that NI has had some experience building a plug-in host in the form of Kore, it’d be great to see Traktor DJ take on plug-in support and other software features. And if there is hardware, it’ll be up to NI to prove they can offer something existing offerings don’t do already. Of course, for DJs who really want to redefine their techniques in digital terms, NI’s real strength is its wild sound-mangling capabilities in Reaktor, but I won’t kid myself about the size of the market for that — part of what makes it cool is that the experimental DJs doing crazy things with Reaktor are a radical, fringe group. The reality on Final Scratch may simply be that it’s a technology others can replicate; even M-Audio recently jumped in with its own hardware product line.

The best news: NI is dropping its confusing product names like “Traktor DJ Studio” and going with “Traktor”, which is what we called it anyway.

In the meantime, here’s my hope. I don’t think anything can replace the feel of real turntables, any more than I would give up playing acoustic pianos forever as a pianist. But there are a number of good products for connecting vinyl to Final Scratch. What there isn’t out there is a strong control surface for DJs, many of whom have developed new techniques in Traktor, Live, Reaktor, Max/MSP, and others, to say nothing of VJs. I’d love to see NI apply some experience to that; so far we’ve had a few knobs and foot pedals here and there, but no hardware that’s yet as striking as NI’s software.

Correction: I incorrectly stated that Euphonix themselves collaborated with UA; instead it is Euphonix co-founders and veterans of the company Scott and Rob Silfvast. I apologize for the error. In a way, this is even better; they represent some of the individual design vision behind Euphonix. See Scott Silfvast’s ideas at the end.

This weekend is the high-end AES audio show in San Francisco, meaning we get to ogle beautiful gear with serious-looking VU meters and drool-worthy audio quality. Universal’s new modular “desktop console system” is at the top of the list on both counts, and it’s actually geared at the project-sized computer music studio.

Universal Audio has an intensely loyal following for its DSP plug-ins and vintage-style preamps and hardware gear. (Quite a few CDM readers are big fans of their UAD-1 platform, a PCI DSP card that supports some terrific-sounding plug-ins.) But they’re likely to get a lot more attention for this move: they’re teaming up with Scott & Rob Silfvast, two of the original founders and ex-executives of Euphonix, who are best known for their high-end Pro Tools controllers and large consoles, the kind of things you usually only see in big studios.

The collaboration here is intended to bring console features to project studios: instead of big studios and big budgets, think small spaces and more modest wallets. The Desktop Console System (DCS) is a modular, “micro-console” product line. Got one machine running SONAR and just want a high-quality mic pre? This could be for you.

Whether or not this particular product is of interest to you personally, I think it’s telling that this product is getting unveiled at AES. Conventional wisdom is that, with the downfall of big studios, high-end audio gear sales should be suffering and the Audio Engineering Society shows, geared at high-end users, should be shrinking. Instead, the opposite is happening: AES is packed, and there are new opportunities for boutique audio makers like UA. The shift to more project studios and computer-based recording with less outboard gear could actually mean an opportunity for high-end audio gear makers, if audio dollars become less centralized (more individual users instead of fewer big studios).

The first products in the line are a remote preamp (dual pre and cue mixer), ideal for improving the signal chain from a small studio space, and a monitor master (speaker cue and cue controller).

Here’s how UA describes the features of the new products:

Key Features Of DCS Remote Preamp (Dual Pre & Cue Mixer):

1. Dual Mono Or Stereo transimpedance Mic Pre/DI
2. Mid-Side (MS) Recording with decoded monitoring
3. Headphone amp with 3x Cue mix, Reverb & EQ
4. Digitally controlled analog signal path via DCS-Link�
5. Remote up to 300′ from base station via CAT-5 cable

Key Features Of DCS Monitor Master (Speaker & Cue Controller):

1. Mixing/monitoring/recording premium-quality “console master section”
2. 100% digitally controlled analog signal path via DCS-Link� interconnect
3. Five stereo inputs (three analog, two digital) and five stereo outputs
4. Features such as mono sum, dim, mute plus L/R solo, phase and swap
5. Flexible talkback & Reference grade 24 bit 192 kHz DAC

These two modules are due at the beginning of 2007; pricing TBA. More modules will follow.

If you just want some more analog hardware / VU meter pr0n, head to this link:

Universal Audio analog gear photos

Normally the quotes you see in press releases are pretty meaningless, but Scott Silfvast succinctly describes what the idea of these units is:

” By collaborating with UA, we have combined heritage, sonic excellence and our joint industry experience to design a modular series of desktop studio products. The DCS products uniquely take the best features and working methods of large-format consoles and allow these to be easily integrated into today’s more compact DAW-based studios.” said Scott Silfvast, Product Consultant and co-Founder of Euphonix. “Each DCS unit provides a unique solution for the DAW-based studio that helps to interface the analog part of the studio – humans, mics, instruments, headphones, speakers etc with the computer.”

Cakewalk SONAR 6 Producer Edition: New Feature Highlights [Cakewalk.com]

The banner feature is a new “audio quantize” feature. All the major DAWs have been toying with various takes on beat-synced audio warping, not necessarily copying software like Ableton Live, but trying to appeal to those who use those techniques with something different. It makes sense, given that MIDI has long had this rhythmic flexibility. In the case of SONAR 6, the new features include non-destructive audio quantize, the ability to combine different tracks into a single groove, “audio beats to MIDI” conversion, “slip-stretch”, and tempo changes. Some of those are available elsewhere, but it sounds like Cakewalk has taken a unique approach to actual editing. Like Logic Pro, SONAR is also integrating high-quality stretching algorithms from iZotope Radius (with one important difference — Radius is an a la carte extra for Logic; here it’s included in the box).

There’s no one enormous feature or deluge of plug-ins, but taken together, lots of improvements add up to a big upgrade.

Among the workflow changes, I’m most interested in:

1. “Dynamic” re-mapping of controllers — something I’ve long wanted, though I’ll have to test Cakewalk’s “Active Controller Technology” to know just how it works
2. Fast zoom that keeps your place, with mouse wheel support
3. Customizable interface and plug-in menus (with grouping)

And, of course, no DAW upgrade would be complete these days without some new plug-ins:

1. VC-64 Vintage Channel modeled-analog channel strip with dual EQ and compressor stages, for warmth
2. Session Drummer: Multisampled drums and patterns (not an automatic drummer as that might have sounded)
3. Analyst spectrum analyzer

There’s also a new Synth Rack, though nothing is going to kill my buzz on racks from another upcoming version 6 upgrade — Ableton Live. Will be interested to see Cakewalk’s take, though.

Eye candy alert: here’s the full image, straight from the source:
Giant SONAR 6 Collage

SONAR remains the traditional DAW to beat on Windows, and this upgrade looks from a productivity perspective to be the major upgrade Cakewalk lovers were hoping for — it should convince some of those who passed on SONAR 5, because the combination of 5 and 6 is definitely reason to upgrade. More from our in-house SONAR experts when we can get them to sit down and write.

Best endorsement: GarageSpin is ready to make the leap from SONAR 3. (Hey, I know lots of users of older Cakewalk software; just a matter of new releases reaching critical mass as far as new features.)