If 16 bits spoil the mood of your All Hallow’s Eve, and you need some chips with your treats, the good peoples of the chip music community are hear to make sure the celebration of the visiting dead are properly accompanied by a free musical soundtrack. The download is free to grab, and fully Creative Commons-licensed for noncommercial, ShareAlike use.

The lineup:
The Guillotine Factory – Assembly Line
NESMETAL – The Throes of Wickedness
Heosphoros – A Traditional Childrens Waltz
Chema64 – Mictlantecuhtli
Norrin_Radd – Reciprocal Dimensions
Mr. Doom – Poison’d Candy
Nestrogen – Infernal Misanthropy
Dr. Zilog – Sanguinary Sect of Worship
arottenbit – Chemiotrails
FTF – Phobos & Deimos
Baphomania – Roaming Spectral Shores
Peter Swimm – illithid
H-Pizzle – Ghosts of a Fallen Empire

Enjoy!

All Hallows Eve in 8bit Hell Compilation

And you can add this to our exclusive, blippy, delicious Liz Revision Mix:
Exclusive Liz Revision Mix

It’s nearly Election Day again here in New York. But it’s also Musical Election Day worldwide for the Efficient Music Competition with CDM, portable Linux-powered studio Indamixx, and modern tracker Renoise. In an age when technology tends to mean more, these artists are making music with less, carefully optimizing Renoise-powered tracks to operate well on lesser CPUs. Now’s your chance to hear the fruits of their labors, and register your vote. (And because these are Creative Commons-licensed, they’re free to share and share alike, too.)

Here’s what to do:

A challenge to efficiency brings some terrific results. We’ve got tracks for you to hear, a few quick tips on production with Renoise, a place to go talk about the tracks and how to optimize them for netbooks, and a new extended deadline. And if you’re curious what kinds of music can be made with trackers, now’s a perfect chance to give folks from this community a listen. You may be surprised by the breadth of what you hear.

The forward march of transistors has led to maximalist ideas in music technology. The only problem: musical composition often benefits from efficiency. I remember in the early days of Cakewalk for DOS wondering what I would do with their thousands of promised tracks – and that was before digital audio, soft synths, 64-bit, and the like.

The Creative Commons-licensed Indamixx + Renoise + CDM music competition we introduced last month returns to that idea of efficiency. You use a tool with a different creative approach (Renoise, a modern tracker), then work to conserve computer resources instead of squander them. The music can then successfully run on – and you can win – a lovely, ultra-compact Indamixx Netbook.

And while you’re doing more with less, we’ve decided to give you a little more … time. We didn’t want to exclude anyone from getting in entries, so the deadline has been extended – meaning if you submitted already, you have a chance to revise and polish or respond to feedback (including, importantly, CPU optimization feedback).

New deadline: SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25

New full-blown entry + discussion site (with audio, full XRNS files, and plenty of chatter on improving production quality and optimization):
http://www.renoise.com/competitions/indamixx/

Need help with testing? Once you’ve got an entry in, Ronald Stewart of Indamixx has offered a free download of their Transmission OS (based on Linux), which you can run on your laptop for testing purposes. Contact him via the inquiry form, and be sure to mention you’re entering the contest!

And folks, so far, some brilliant work. The contest organizers (myself, plus the folks from 64 Studio, Indamixx, and Renoise) have been going through entries and are blown away.

The KORG nanoSERIES has a rabid following among many Ableton Live users, and with good reason. The nanoPAD and nanoKONTROL street for about US$60, provide basic knobs + faders + transport (KONTROL) and pads and X/Y control (PAD), plus a fully-featured, cross-platform editor, but still fit in a backpack. They’re small enough to use in coach on an airplane.

Having to open Live templates, however, just to get the mappings you want is a big pain. So, instead I’ve created a basic set of MIDI Remote Scripts and Kontrol Editor templates for Mac and Windows, Live 6.x and later, and wanted to share them with you.

If you’re Windows-based and a big fan of the nano, I will say that I recommend you use something else altogether – the brilliant nativeKontrol. It’s a hell of a lot more sophisticated, gives you more control, and still requires no template:
nanoLive

Of course, there are some advantages to my (otherwise inferior) humble solution. It’s free, it works on Mac, it’s completely editable, and much of the idea was to provide an easy way of learning about MIDI Remote Scripting. (Check out the tutorial below.) Now, knowing CDM readers, I imagine someone out there can improve what I’ve done, so feel free to modify it and please send us a copy of what you’ve created!

korgnano_live.zip [Cross-platform archive; will update with a fancier release later on once I've gotten some feedback]

Ableton Live MIDI Remote Scripting How To: Custom Korg nanoSERIES Control

And, of course, read all the instructions…

Speaking of games, you can expect game production to start to attract the attention of musicians and web publishers. Whereas a few short years ago, targeting musicians might mean dangling rock club gigs or album sales, now a lot of those same music makers want to break into gaming, too.

Kongregate is a bit like public access, only on steroids and for games. The idea is this: get indie game makers in one place contributing games, then get lots of people playing those games, then support the system with ad revenue shared with the game makers. The model has grown rapidly, with millions of users and over 15,000 original games.

The newest project from Kongregate looks to connect artistic talent on projects, including musicians, composers, and sound designers wanting to work on game projects. The Collabs section will see artists and sound and music creators uploading their work to find collaborators. Initially, there’s a contest on, with competition for attention, cash, and studio prizes.

http://www.kongregate.com/collabs

The competition aside, this could be the beginning of a successful community for collaboration in the indie Flash gaming world. Assets are often uploaded under a Creative Commons license, and I see one of the top sounds draws on samples from Freesound.org. While career success is an obvious goal, the contributors so far appear to see sharing as a way to get there – in stark contrast to the model in the mainstream, big-business game industry. Quality is, of course, variable, but ask anyone in the game industry how to become successful and the answer is always make as much as you can. Getting work out there, even primitive, can be part of a learning process. So I’m eager to see what transpires as these kinds of communities grow.

There is an invariable comparison to Deviant Art – and you’ll see they’ve already begun to invade.

Oh yeah, and I quite like these glassy tendrils, rendered in Cinema 4D. Image (CC) Chaodeath. Now, make that run real-time. Or, erm, imagine those are virtual renderings of artists … collaborating.