David Zicarelli has announced that Cycling ‘74 is discontinuing Max/MSP Pluggo-based products, meaning the company will no longer develop Pluggo, Mode, Hipno, or UpMix. More significantly, this means an end to the use of Max/MSP as a way of developing plug-ins; David writes that there will be “no further development on … their supporting technology.” It’s the supporting technology that Max patchers have relied upon to make their own instruments and effects for VST/AU/RTAS Mac and Windows hosts, and its demise to me is the real news here for the Max community.

The article touts the upcoming availability of Max for Live as an alternative. Now, I think Max for Live is a very exciting technology – I’m finally editing some videos and discussion with Jeremy Bernstein, so we’ll have a preview next week. The flipside is:

Ah, the seasoned OS zealot. Never fear: no actual issues of substance will ever distract them from one-dimensional tirades about how their platform is best. And so, in the last week or so, you may have run across angry Free Software advocates railing against the inclusion of Windows on the OLPC ("One Laptop Per Child") XO laptop — or, in a really surreal turn, people waxing poetic about XP, like this commenter on the Win Supersite: "We get a world wide audience of children who will embrace XP and gain valuable lifetime skills."

All of this is a complete waste of time, not because the OS question is unimportant, but because it’s detracting from the more important question of education, which was supposed to be the point.

Part of why the OLPC mattered — and continues to matter — is it raises questions about what computers mean for learning. That’s a question we haven’t asked enough recently in the US, let alone across the planet. Whether Negroponte and the remaining OLPC project leaders have lost their way or not, that central question of computers and learning seems to be lost in the usual blog banter. Fortunately, it’s a discussion I think will survive after the immediate technologies have faded away.

“Sure, the OLPC project is supposed to do wonderful things for children of the world, but what has it done for me, lately?” Well, if you fancy yourself one of the Earth’s children, the OLPC organization has assembled 8.5 gigabytes of sample content that’s free and Creative Commons-licensed — free to acquire, and free to use.

Jacob Joaquin, who runs the terrific thumbuki blog and the Csound Blog and is part ofthe team developing Csound for the OLPC’s XO laptop, shares the news via Dr. Richard Boulanger at Berklee. (See the press release as a zipped .doc.)

Plenty of people contributed top-notch sound: the Berklee College of Music, Csound developers around the world, electronica celebrity BT (himself a former Berklee and Boulanger student, among other alums), M-Audio and Digidesign, and the Open Path Music Group.

They’re donated under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so you can “freely create, compose, mix, remix, share, distribute and redistribute these samples and use them for any purpose as long as you clearly attribute the source.” That means anyone, anywhere can make use of this library — no OLPC required.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Sound_samples

Csound, OLPC Style

Whether you like the OLPC laptop itself or not, there’s plenty going on with the project. There’s the immediate impact of the hardware and software, yes — and plenty of opportunity to praise or criticize its utility there (perhaps the mark of a good, ambitious project). But there’s also the secondary impact. The OLPC has captured imaginations in terms of what future computers might be, and what they might mean to more of the population of the planet. More importantly, perhaps, it’s building a family of open source, Linux-based (and cross platform technology-based) tools, which could ultimately outlive the hardware platform. I have my own doubts about the OLPC itself, but the ideas for open sound making are about more than just that hardware. (For instance, just testing Processing, Arduino and Java on this kind of mobile platform can improve that software.)

The sample library is only part of the story; software tools is another part. Powered by Csound, the OLPC team wants to put sound synthesis and music production in the hands of kids — we’re talking serious digital synthesis here, not just GarageBand-style looping. That goal could ultimately go well beyond just the OLPC.

Csound is a free and open source development tool for sound design, synthesis, and signal processing, with a lineage that goes back to original developer Barry Vercoe and in turn descended from the first digital synthesis tools created by Max Mathews. It is the audio/music development system for the OLPC project, with integration with Python (though I’ve heard we should also see additional Java development).

Those geeky details aside, you’ll see in many of the reviews of the OLPC writers mentioning unusual and fun music toys. Those journalists are stumbling upon some of the projects below, and the process is just getting started.

Jacob had shared some brief looks at what he’s working on on his OLPC, but here’s the full overview from Dr. Boulanger, because there’s quite a lot happening:

It’s tough to make money selling music software. The market is small to begin with, made smaller when an unsettling number of users use pirated software, and divided into pieces by a range of different software. Sometimes, dead software winds up disappearing forever (Opcode Studio Vision), but sometimes it winds up free.

CPS is a powerful host for plug-ins. Like Native Instruments’ much-hyped platform KORE, it can be a plug-in in other hosts or host plug-ins itself. CPS is unusually powerful, with some truly unique features (aside from the normal VST/VSTi hosting on Mac and Windows). Director and Web browser supports makes this particularly worth a look if you’re building an interactive kiosk or a project involving live animation:

Doh. Got the HTML screwed up here — now updated and fixed.

Okay, I expected I’d get called down by a reader for criticizing Csound. Instead, electronica legend BT is here to set the record straight. And, as the hackaday post said, part of the reason Csound is popular is because it’s so easy to learn, right? Wrong. BT says, “”It’s a b****, the learning curve on Csound but once you get in there . . . I’m just like, I’ll build an oscillator that splines between rhythm and pitch.”

“Literally, we have a class in my studio where we study Csound every week. We have homework and everything.”

BT is also a fan of the free Mac audio software Super Collider. Now, in my defense, BT’s audio gurus have been telling him many things are easier to do in Cycling `74 Max/MSP. That’s next on his learning agenda, so stay tuned. And incidentally, another advantage of Max — easier to perform with than Csound (though, believe it or not, the latter is possible, and as I said in the last post, you can integrate the two if you want to go uber-geeky with sound).

Bottom line: if you want to get deep in sound design, regardless of the tool, leave some homework time. And on that note, I’d better get back to Max patching. More geeky tutorials coming soon.

Previously: Hackaday working on cool Csound tutorial, I complain about Csound, everyone waits for the “how to build your own hardware tutorial”