Deadmau5 interview with Dancetracks from Dancetracks on Vimeo.

Our friends over at Dancetracks Digital send along their video of Deadmau5, the top mouse-headed act on the planet right now. Deadmau5 may surprise you, with some good things to say about playing the open-source, sustainable, OSC-savvy monome controller – the controller that had big grids of buttons before big grids of buttons were cool. He also talks about not being a DJ, which means, I suppose, he’s one of us.

Say it with me – M-O-U-S-E! Or, um …five.

Okay, enjoy your weekend.

Touch Mix is a simple music app for the iPhone and iPod touch that lets you play, mix, and remix ten exclusive tracks by producer deadmau5. Now, of course, you’re unlikely to grab this in order to DJ nothing but deadmau5. (The all-deadmau5, all-the-time approach?) But the app demonstrates that iPhone-only artist releases can be a whole lot more fun than just a few tracks and some static album artwork. And it also shows off what a handheld DJ interface could look like, with a pretty efficient one-screen-per-deck design that doesn’t overwhelm your fingertips.

Features:

• Two players, two sets of playback controls
• Interactive display warns you as the next track is queuing
• Separate crossfader, volume
• Effects: loop, filter, flange, delay
• Adjustable speed, bpm
• Scratch, back spin by touching live waveform

Yes, that’s quite a lot more than simply plopping in some static content. Just guessing, but I imagine we could see this app applied to other music, as well. (What you can’t do — yet — is bring in your own waveforms, which would make all the difference.)

Touch Mix is the work of Future Audio Workshop, the folks who brought us the lovely drag-and-drop, OpenSoundControl-compatible Circle synth. FAW’s Gavin Burke had a chat with us about how he thinks about design. (If Touch Mix isn’t meaty enough for you, you can use your iPhone or iPod touch to control Circle in real-time; you’ll find an app that works with the popular TouchOSC to ease setup.)

Touch Mix deadmau5 Edition
iTunes App Store Link

The FL Studio community was rocked earlier this month as producer Deadmau5 claimed the use of his samples was “stealing,” even though these samples were bundled with the software and assumed by most to be licensed royalty-free. FL Studio developer Image-Line has not responded to a CDM request for comment, but they did talk to MusicRadar.com. Managing Director Jean-Marie Cannie told that site:

We’ll remove all melodic loops from FL Studio to avoid this kind of stuff in the future but that won’t change a lot I’m afraid. Our demo material has been stolen 1000s of times in the more than 10 years we have been doing this. The difference here is that this time it was stolen from a user that made it big.

I’m going to ignore for a moment the question of how “that won’t change a lot” – people will be able to steal demo content even when it’s not there? That aside, there are two odd things about this story:

1. Image-Line seems to helped create the problem by shipping sample content in software without being clear which license covered that content and which is which, then responded with the inexplicable argument that that sample content was supposed to be for “demo” purposes only (with nothing that I can see to back up that statement, and evidence that precisely the opposite was the case). No one is angry enough to dump FL, because it’s an excellent tool, but I sure hope Image-Line learns from the experience.

2. Many users are nonetheless responding “good riddance” to the loss of sample content.” For a lot of people, the bigger question here really is artistic, and maybe it’s time for computer musicians to draw a line.

Who’s sampling what? When is sampling stealing? Who’s stolen sampled samples, and was the sampling stolen stealing? Is anyone actually playing live? Does anyone know what the law is? Does anyone care?

Yes, it’s been a lively November so far for massive, complicated legal battles, PR battles, who-said-who-sampled-what battles, and general sampling messiness. Here’s a quick round-up for those of you who haven’t been able to keep up (understandably).

And we’re going to play a game. I’m going to start talking, and you can see at what point your head starts to spin and you need to go lie down.

Ready?

Here’s the executive summary:

• Justice steal samples and talk about it, because you can’t recognize them.
• US courts said long ago “nowhere to run, nowhere to hide,” to the dismay of even the RIAA.
• German courts, disagreeing with the US and with other German courts, say it don’t mean a thing if you can’t hum along.
• FL Studio turns “Faxing Berlin” Deadmau5 demo content into “Berlin” mostly-the-same demo content and a bunch of people start screaming obscenities at each other and most of us lose interest.
• Justice can’t keep their USB cables from falling out, may have to pirate samples of themselves.
• The Killers (or MTV, more to the point) plagiarize an entire stage.
• My head hurts already.