chromedecay studio look: TouchOSC with Ableton Live and BigSeq from chromedecay on Vimeo.

New Year’s Resolution: do cool new stuff. In celebration of the coming of 2009, I’ve got a set of tutorials to post here on createdigitalmusic and createdigitalmotion, so you can get a jump start on the new year by learning some new skills and making new music and visuals. First up: our friend Bill Van Loo has a great video tutorial on working with touch control on an iPod touch or iPhone.

The ingredient list here:

• TouchOSC, one of a handful of superb new touch controllers on the iTunes app store that supports the flexible, forward-thinking OpenSoundControl protocol. TouchOSC’s edge? Ready-to-use, clever, music-oriented control layouts.
• Ableton Live, a good choice because of its live-playing emphasis and solid hosting features
• BigSeq, Audio Damage’s fantastic analog-style sequencer plug-in
• OSCulator, the glue that holds the rest together by intelligently

In fact, even if you don’t have an Apple mobile gadget, you may find this useful: the OSCulator software on the Mac used for control processing can work with a variety of controllers. If you don’t want to spend $200+ on an iSomething, you can spend a few bucks on a Wii controller and run with that, or grab a SpaceNavigator (also very affordable) or Wacom tablet. (OSCulator is Mac only; PC users may want to check out the likes of GlovePIE.)

chromedecay studio look: TouchOSC with Ableton Live and BigSeq

Sure, we may live deep into the future. High in our Blade Runner apartment studios, we use androids for all of the vocals. Yet we still have that occasional need for good, old-fashioned compression. Like the soy-based dinners we microwave and the synthehol beer we wash it down with, it has to be simulated.

Audio Damage has earned its cult following thanks to inexpensive plug-ins with no-nonsense controls that just seem to fit into projects. So it’s nice to see his new, free Rough Rider compressor. Simple controls, a slight vintage tint, and crankable parameters – not the “careful with that, too far, total destruction!” feeling you get from, say, the unpredictable compressors included with some hosts.

I see on Twitter that Tom from Music thing likes Rough Rider, and he’s a hardware guy, so that’s a good sign. That means he didn’t just eBay some ancient, slightly irradiated piece of Russian equipment.

Rough Rider Download Page @ Audio Damage [Mac, Windows – yep, a free Mac plug-in!]

Via the Ruin & Wesen blog, here’s another way to approach compression in Ableton Live. Live may instantly make you a remix artist or loop addict, but it can’t turn you into a mastering engineer. That means you can either apply science (blech!) or complete voodoo. We choose a culture of voodoo.

What’s in for this season in music software? Cellular automata. You may have been exposed to a cellular automaton in the classic Game of Life; it’s basically a very simple biological simulator exposed as an intuitive, 2-dimensional grid of squares. If tic-tac-toe, Charles Darwin, and a petri dish of bacteria got together in one wild evening, you’d come up with something like this as a result. The Game of Life has been around since mathematician John Conway invented it in 1970, but lately it’s been cross-bred with music software to help patterns escape the rigid, boring repetition of traditional sequencer grids.

Cellular automata is in fine form on the beautiful, strange homebrew sequencer for the Nintendo DS, GlitchDS, which has had ongoing updates. It’s still fun as ever in Reaktor 5’s Newschool preset (old news, but enjoyable nonetheless). But in what’s so far the most anticipated plug-in release of the fall, CA takes on particularly powerful sonic possibilities in the first “experimental” release from beloved plug-in boutique Audio Damage:

Automaton [Product Page, Mac AU/VST; Windows VST]
Cost: US$49.99

Since the cellular automata grid can control anything, it’s what you hook it up to that matters — and that’s especially important, because it means instead of a set of knobs or sequence grid doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, CA “evolves” on its own, bringing much-needed change to your music. Automaton is a combination of a flexible CA sequencer with four effects:

1. Stutter (modulates a buffer, so you can combine Automaton with existing beat loops and patterns)
2. Modulate (a self-modulating ring modulator)
3. Bitcrush (which includes AD’s own “error” setting)
4. Replicate (based on their Replicant effect, which goes even further in the beat slicing realm a la Ableton’s Beat Repeat)

I’ve been playing around with the beta, and it’s just fantastic. I hope to finish off some special CDM presets and share them with you, though I’m a bit behind — let’s see if I can top the presets that come with the tool. One of the hallmarks of Audio Damage’s software in VST format is lots of MIDI learn support, and since it supports VST automation I anticipate some fun combining this with Kore. Either way, think easy tweaking and live performance control.

Now, question math geeks: any other cellular automata aside form the Game of Life that work well with music? I’m sure there are some experimental music projects out there that have used other CA, so link away.

Here are two tutorial videos of the tool in action, in case you haven’t seen them already:

Updated: A PACE Anti-Piracy official has officially requested that we remove an image of the iLok product. While they asked not to be publicly quoted, they have challenged the technical accuracy of Adam’s blog post, saying they don’t believe their product caused the Blue Screen of Death. If PACE chooses to release an official reply, we will share it.

The debate over copy protection in music software and anti-piracy tactics continues to heat up. Now Adam Schabtach of Audio Damage, the popular plug-in developer, has fired off a call for a boycott of products that use PACE and the iLok hardware dongle. And that means that Waves is again a target, in this case because Adam himself had technical difficulties resulting from the copy protection scheme. But here’s his argument: the problem isn’t copy protection per se, it’s that developers have to cede control to a third party when the technology breaks.

This points up the biggest problem with PACE: if something goes really wrong, the maker of the PACE-wrapped product can’t help you. They didn’t invent PACE, they can’t fix bugs in PACE, they often don’t even know enough about PACE to troubleshoot it (which is not so much a reflection of their ignorance but of the sheer arcane complexity of PACE and the amount of information about it which its makers do not release even to their customers). Their only recourse is to tell you to wipe your hard drive bare and start again. This is one of many reasons that Audio Damage doesn’t use PACE: we want to help our customers make music, and we don’t want to be in a position in which we have to say “sorry, can’t help you” if something goes wrong with one of our products. Of course, unlike Audio Damage, Waves doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee for their products, so in the end I was stuck with software I’d paid for but couldn’t use.

Adam just doesn’t like copy protection, right? Well, no, in fact. The issue is that while PACE fails to stop piracy (something admitted by Waves themselves as they sue studios around the world for millions of dollars), PACE did succeed in stopping Adam from using his software:

I went to the Waves website, logged in to my account, downloaded the latest installer, and retrieved my iLok from the shelf upon which it was gathering dust. I backed up my hard drive (”once bitten, twice shy” and I’ve been bitten way more than once by PACE), launched the installer, and held my breath. The installer almost immediately informed me that it had to restart my PC, so I let it. It launched itself automatically after the PC rebooted, started the installation process, and then my good faith and efforts were rewarded with [a Windows Blue Screen of Death].

… A PC running Windows puts this up when something goes really, really wrong and the OS makes the unilateral decision to bring all proceedings to a halt in order to prevent further mishap. Seeing this screen is the computer equivalent of seeing your car deploy its airbags.

The final analysis:

PACE doesn’t stop piracy; any copy-protection system can, and will be, defeated. What PACE does do is prevent legitimate users of software products from using products which they’ve paid for.

Why I Boycott Products That Use PACE/iLok (and Why You Should, Too)

PACE/iLok is the leading provider of this kind of copy protection, so I expect we may hear a response. If I can get a statement from them, I’ll post that soon. But I will say, Adam is not alone in his frustration. Developers will continue to make the choices they feel are right for their business, which is their prerogative — but it’s likewise the choice of their customers to vote with their wallets. I do know users who are perfectly comfortable with iLok. Let us know how you feel, and whether copy protection has influenced your purchasing decisions.

Updated: Note that we’re talking about two different kinds of copy protection offered by PACE. One is the PACE software protection, which does not use a hardware dongle (or “hardware key” as PACE prefers to call it). The other is the iLok.

Already, readers are split: we’ve got Max/MSP users (myself included) who haven’t had problems with PACE software protection, and even some iLok hardware users who haven’t been bothered. But there are some strong arguments against the hardware dongles, to the point of cutting into sales, something developers may want to watch closely. Keep the feedback coming.

I’ve been hearing a number of reports that the Mac OS X 10.4.9 update causes significant issues with some Audio Unit plug-ins, including those from popular developers Audio Damage and Ohmforce. (See Analog Industries blog for a comment thread and reports on Audio Damage; there’s also discussion on the Core Audio developer list which I hope will yield some revelations. Update: Note that Audio Damage is having only development issues; their plug-ins will work just fine if you’re a user.) This update apparently installs yet another version of the AU validator, which could be one clue. Apple has also made significant changes to QuickTime in recent releases, which can also cause issues with audio software in some cases.

Your best bet: don’t install the updates the Software Update recommends unless you can easily go back to the previous version. And hold off on 10.4.9 for now.

Users and developers are understandably angry with Apple: rather than bundle updates together, Apple has been making lots of minor changes in successive updates, and developers too often find about changes after things break. That’s especially problematic when the changes are being made to an API like AU — the whole point is supposed to be providing a solid platform for developers. Apple either needs to adjust the way it rolls out updates or communicate better with its developers. Be aware, as well, that the upcoming 10.5 upgrade is an enormous release; I expect you may want to wait for updates to catch up with that when it comes out (when that is, no one knows).

Now, no Windows vs. Mac arguments, please: the bottom line is, developers are having a rougher time than they should on both platforms. (On the Vista side, what I’ve heard from developers is that they had the same difficulties the rest of us did — it was tough to get test systems up and running because of new compatibility and driver issues, so it was hard to test in advance.) Updates and the resulting bugs are a necessary evil, but there’s clearly room for improvement on both the Apple and Microsoft side that could result in a healthier, happier platform for everyone.