It starts as just another toy to play around with in a few minutes of distraction in your Web browser – as if the Web were short on distraction. But then, something amazing can happen. Like a musical Turing Test, you start to get a feeling for what’s happening on the other side. Someone’s stream of colored dots starts to jam with your stream of colored dots. You get a little rhythm, a little interplay going. And instead of being a barrier, the fact that you’re looking at simple animations and made-up names and playing a pretty little tune with complete strangers starts to feel oddly special. The absence of normal interpersonal cues makes you focus on communicating with someone, completely anonymously, using music alone.

Dinah Moe’s “Plink” is the latest glimpse of what Web browser music might be, and why it might be different than (and a compliment to) other music creation technology. You can now create private rooms to blow off steam with a faraway friend, or find new players online. It’s all powered with the Web Audio API, the browser-native, JavaScript-based tools championed by Mozilla. That means you’ll need a recent Chrome or Firefox (Chrome only at the moment; this is a Chrome Experiment), and mobile browsers won’t be able to keep up. But still, give it a try – I think you may be pleasantly surprised. (Actually, do it right now, as you’ll probably be doing it with other CDM readers. I expect greater things!)

http://labs.dinahmoe.com/plink/

Thanks to Robin Hunicke, who worked with multiplayer design and play at That Game Company’s Journey on PS3 and now on the browser MMO Glitch. I think her friends were more musical than most, because the place came alive after she linked from Facebook.

The browser is becoming a laboratory, a place to quickly try out ideas for music interaction, and for the code and structure that describe music in a language all their own. As in Plink, it can also benefit from being defined by the network and collaboration.

Dinah Moe’s experiments go in other directions, as well. In Tonecraft, inspired by the 3D construction metaphor of Minecraft, three-dimensional blocks become an alternative sequencer.

http://labs.dinahmoe.com/ToneCraft/

There are many reasons not to use Web tools. The Web Audio API still isn’t universal, and native options (like Google’s Native Client) have their own compatibility issues, stability concerns, and – because of security – they don’t do all the things a desktop application will. Desktop music tools are still more numerous, more powerful, and easier to use, so if you’re a reader out there finishing a thesis project, you might look elsewhere. (Actually, you’re probably in trouble, anyway, by any nation’s academic calendar, given it’s the First of May, but I digress.)

But think instead of this as another canvas, and the essential building blocks of interface design, code, and networking as shared across browsers and desktop apps. Somehow, in the light of the Internet, its new connectedness, and its new, more lightweight, more portable code and design options, software is changing. That transformation could happen everywhere.

If you need something to help you meditate on that and wait for a revelation to occur to you, I highly recommend watching a soothing stream of dots and some pleasing music as you jam with your mouse.

Of course, in the end, like a digital mirror, it might inspire you to go out to the park with a couple of glockenspiels and jam the old-fashioned way. But maybe that’s another reason to make software.

(Here’s a video, in case you’re not near a browser that supports the app!)

More, plus reflections on adaptive music:
http://labs.dinahmoe.com/

It’s like musical survival training. Quick: you’re stuck in a hotel. Can you make some music?

Our friend Recue, aka Riku Annala, was unexpectedly being stranded in a hotel and made it into a musical opportunity. The results are damned fine listening. (Thank whatever act of God / airlines prompted this.) You can enjoy the results, free. Riku writes:

Dunno if you remember but some time ago I shared the little cheap tape head “saturation” thingy with you.

I was recently ‘stuck’ in an airport hotel room (for other reasons than music), but the good thing was that I had my mobile studio setup with me. The released set started out as this sort of a spur-of-the-moment, tongue-in-cheek live jam, as I was messing around with random hip hop/pop-music vocals on top of bits and pieces of my own projects. Eventually, it started to sound so twisted in a good way that I decided to record the whole thing. The set is split in half with the first part being a performance video and the second the complete set as audio. The tools and methods are exactly of those covered on CDM regularly (NI Maschine run as a plugin on Ableton Live and controlled by Liine Lemur on an iPad).

More:
http://www.recue.net

Sure, the accessibility and mobility of music making is seen by some as some sort of assault on civilization. (I think frankly those are the sort of people who don’t like food and hate joy, grimacing every time they pass a playground.) But if you’ve made an investment in some nice mobile music tools, put them to good use. Heck, hand-wash your underwear if you have to make more space for music tech. That next unintended layover (oops, thunderstorms) could mean a new album instead of a frustrated, wasted, lonely night. And I like to think that the beauty of modern music tech is that it salvages wonderful music we might otherwise not hear, allows it to come into being.

Have a listen to the full set, and give it a download:

“Timelapse” usually refers to the process of sampling small bits of video or film and piecing them together to form a sped-up version of reality. (Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. Any recording involves sampling small bits of time. Timelapse simply plays back those samples at a rate faster than reality, so that instead of playing back film frames recorded at 30 frames per second at a playback speed of 30 frames per second, you play back film recorded at one frame every ten minutes at 30 frames per second, for example.)

What if you made a timelapse of sound, and not simply image? Reader Andrew Spitz did that, building a sound-sampling app in visual development tool Max/MSP. He’s made the resulting tool available to anyone using Mac or Windows, for free, so you can try it yourself. In the demo video, what you get is a stuttering, rhythmic montage of found sound. But change the material or setting, and perhaps you can get very different results.

I love the word he’s using here: “phonography.”

phonoLapse is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows that lets you create audio time-lapses. For the 2010 Enterferenze New Art Festival I put together a little Time Lapse Phonography piece that followed me over the course of 24 hours (check the video below). I have been receiving emails from people wanting to create their own, and decided to work on a standalone version so you too can create some time-lapse phonography .

Grab it yourself:
phonoLapse {+ software} [sound+design]

By the way, Andrew is responsible for one of my other favorite recent projects:
Voice Messages Become 3D Paper Waveform Sculptures: Paper Note

Through the eyes of satellites, roving Google trucks, aerial imagery, and more, we have plenty of eyes on our planet. But what does it sound like here on Earth?

In a Web application and accompanying art installation, the world turns as it echoes sounds recorded around the world on Creative Commons-licensed site Freesound.org. It’s stunning to hear our world’s acoustic diversity – in some strange way, even more than seeing it, in that sounds can instantly give you a sense of place and time. You can load a version on your browser or on the iPad; then, from the world’s cities, listen as sounds mix automatically from one locale to another in an ambient sound score.

Browser Version (animates a bit slow for me, but works)
iPad World Sound Mix app [free | iTunes]
(via Hermann Helmholtz – great tip!)

The basic notion is something we see repeated regularly, even with this visualization; this is a fantasy those of us who work in sound routinely entertain. But it’s doubly worth mentioning, in that it’s an excuse to mention the lovely Japanese label/artist/laboratory 43d.

43d engages sound through a variety of tools. In the 43d laboratory, the spinning Earth interface finds its way into an installation (video below), iPad app, and browser app, as workshops send participants into the field to listen to their environment and gather more sounds. Such exercises have an added bonus for us electronic musicians, of course, as collected sounds can easily become the raw materials of music in any genre through the wonderful alchemy of our machines.

http://labs.43d.jp/

The installation and sound mix project:

“World Sound Mix for BankART LIFE3″ is a sound visual installation, generating new soundscape around the world. This work continues mixing the sounds at selected two points somewhere in the world from the database of huge quantities of environment sounds and generating new soundscape.

For this exhibition, we set up a magic box that resonates mixed soundscape in Sapporo and somewhere in the world. During the exhibition, a globe in the box keeps turning and resonating sounds in real time.

About sounds data:
World Sound Mix is based on a sound database from Freesound project, its sounds have been recorded and gathered by sound hunters around the world. The use of sound data is under the CreativeCommons Sampling+ 1.0 License. By the username and “freesound sound ID” shown on the globe, listener can refer to original content.

http://www.43d.jp/wsm2011/

Freesound.org, a terrific source of sounds:

http://www.freesound.org/

But what I especially like about all of this is that the environmental sounds don’t have to exist in a vacuum. 43d is also an ambient music label, the work of artist Junichi Oguro:

A sound artist who widens the realm of music. Born in Sapporo in 1974.
He started to compose music since his childhood, and received a grand prize at a national contest. In 2006 he visited Berlin for making music in various fields from commercial music for TV spots to sound space design in various areas of Europe. He also showcases sound art pieces in the realm of the contemporary art. He manages an ambient label “43d” which was established for creating leading edge sounds.

The just-released “Unfield” is breathtaking, turning effortlessly from rough-shod digital glitches to icy-sweet ballads and intimate, gorgeous vocals by Malloy Nagasawa. It combines custom software and control with more conventional recording techniques:

http://www.43d.jp/releases/

Have a listen:

Hope to hear more from this whole project.
43d.jpg

There are festivals, and then there’s Unsound. While so much in electronic music programming walks the line between club accessibility and more adventurous experimentation, some time falling over one side or the other of that divide, Unsound consistently hits the center of the bullseye with some of the most creative, imaginative music around. It’s just smart music. You can catch Unsound in its home city of Krakow, Poland, or you can find it as it pulls an international roster of artist to the metropolis New York City. And, at the moment, you can enjoy it from the comfort of wherever you call home, thanks to a nice stream from Hype Machine and Unsound that hops to the top of our must-listen queue for Monday.

Who’s in store? Alongside Polish animation and other goodness, expect a night of ladies whose names begin with the letter J working with experimental sounds (LA’s Julia Holter, Norway’s Jenny Hval, New York’s Julia Kent), a reimagining of Herbie Hancock by Poland’s LXMP, Germany’s wonderful Pole and the ongoing tour of Monolake’s visual-sonic masterwork, England’s Demdike Stare, New York’s own ambient imagineer Zemi17, and bass mainstays like Sepalcure and 2562. There are talks on history, explorations of music technique and particularly performance, and even a tribute to (too-often unsung) Manhattan minimal pioneer La Monte Young. (That great herald of experimental sound, The Wire Magazine is involved in discussions.) I’m probably most disappointed myself not to witness the premiere of “TRINITY,” a promising-looking, epic exploration of nuclear testing in New Mexico by Biosphere and Lustmond, bringing together two of the world’s most sonically-imaginative artists.

If you can make it to Poland or Manhattan, I certainly endorse experiencing the festival in person, but in the meantime, let’s enjoy surveying its musical treats:

http://unsound.pl/en

Get a whole new Live, for free. Smart users can make it happen.

Sure, just a mere mention of Ableton can bring out angry hordes of Live users waiting for whatever they imagine they want out of Live 9. We can’t comment on Ableton’s internal development process. So, why not instead make Ableton new for yourself – no need to pay for anything, all with free downloads, free tips, and more musical power? (Hint: I do expect an upgrade from Ableton – I, uh, don’t think they’ve abandoned their development efforts – but when you can upgrade your own music making, it’s even better.)

Our friend AfroDJMac, NYC-based producer and musician, has been producing amazing Live Packs over the past year. (In fact, while I expect I frightened away any non-Live-users with this headline, the audio is perfectly usable in any software you like.) Setting himself the ambitious goal of producing one Live pack every single week, he’s done the unthinkable. One year later, he has 52 Live Packs, all free giveaways on his site, all wonderful and unique. Everything conceivable and inconceivable is there: Commodore 64 drums, a Casio MT-68, Justin Bieber (third-ever mention of Justin on this site), water bottles turned into synths, Christmas Trees, Game Boys, glitches and resampling and bizarre sounds, Melodicas and Fenders, the works.

Grab #52 – built with the Korg iMS-20 app for the iPad as a starting point – then lose hours perusing all the other entries.

1 YEAR OF ABLETON LIVE PACKS! AFRODJRACK #52 “KORG-ASBORD”

(I read that initially as SAT word “abscond,” as in “I absconded with your MS-20; I’m very sorry.” If someone can make that pack, let me know.)

So, when you’ve pulled off those 52 packs, how do you one-up yourself? How about by starting all over again with a weekly series – this time, with two-minute video tips. (Seriously, man, can you let us know what you’re having for breakfast?) Episode #1: having learned the lesson the hard way, our hero AfroDJMac remaps the “stop” button on his APC to avoid utterly destroying a live set. (Doh!) Video:

2 MINUTE ABLETON TIP #1: REMAP DANGEROUS CONTROLS

Still hungry for more? We turn, then, to another friend, Austin, Texas-based Francis Prève. When we last joined Fran (who I hear turned 23 yesterday, making him one year older than me), we got to download via Vulcan Mind Meld and the Internet a wealth of tips, sounds, and Live Packs:

A World of Sounds: Academik’s Francis Preve Shares Label’s Music, Studio Advice, Samples for Live

Well, Fran didn’t stop there. His latest addition is a really cool patch, not so much because it manages to steal a sound design trick from Sweden’s OP-1 synth and Sweden’s Swedish House Mafia (though that is nice), as much as because the resulting use of Racks to morph from kicks to leads could help you find all sorts of new instrumental effects. Go. Download. Enjoy:

Free Ableton Instrument: One Trick Pwnage [Francis Prève blóg]

I do look forward to what’s coming in software upgrades – but I can’t wait to upgrade my own music-making first. Go forth. May your set not coming to a screeching halt as you play, may the white noise generator always be at your back.

Quietly, steadily, software has been making SoundCloud upload a standard feature. In some mobile applications, it’s second only to “save” as a feature. That makes getting your music online and shared uncommonly easy. Below, we’ve got the running list for mobile and desktop – and it looks very impressive, indeed, so we can at least get your attention with our own list.

But apparently Berlin-based neighbors Ableton and SoundCloud didn’t want their collaboration to be so quiet. To herald the inclusion of SoundCloud integration in Ableton Live, they’re giving away their products.

• If you’re a SoundCloud user, you get a copy of Ableton Live Lite for free. It’s not the full version, but it is a reasonably capable version for remixes, production, and DJing. (In fact, it does more than the early versions of Live 1.x on which I started using the platform.) That’s a copy of Ableton to some 11+ million users – a very big deal, as SoundCloud’s explosive growth has attracted a lot of users outside our normal music producer community.
• If you’re an Ableton Live 8 owner, you get five months of free SoundCloud Pro service.
• If you don’t yet own Ableton Live – or you own a version prior to v8 – you can get SoundCloud Pro free for 5 months when you purchase a new copy of Live or Live Suite 8 or upgrade your existing copy.
• You can now upload to SoundCloud inside Ableton Live.
• Make a track in 24 hours. From May 14-28, Live users will be able to download a free Live Pack of sounds by M83, Junior Boys, and Nosaj Thing – and once the download starts, they have 24 hours to finish a track. You can win prizes like lifetime software upgrades and SoundCloud service or a trip to Berlin. (This is different from the trip to Berlin I’m giving away, which can be yours if you send in your entry written on the back of a complete Buchla modular.)

Sweden and Germany haven’t gone together this nicely since I was eating meatballs and lingonberry at IKEA in Lichtenberg. (Hmmm… that’s a terrible line. I’ll let you know if I come up with a better one. I’m taking that one out of my pay for today.)

So, okay, the promotion is obviously designed to get people hooked on SoundCloud and Ableton. But it will be really interesting to see whether a free copy of Live helps attract SoundCloud’s non-specialized audience to get hooked on making music. As popular as Live is – and I’m told it continues to grow, even as we wait on the next major release – there are still plenty of people who use sound who don’t use Live or even a similar tool. Apple’s GarageBand helped bridge that audience, for one, by being included free on Macs. On Macs and PCs, as people start using SoundCloud for audio of all kinds (podcasts and spoken word joining music), we’ll see if more music tools can appeal.

SoundCloud and Ableton [SoundCloud blog]
5 free months of SoundCloud Pro for all Live 8 users [Ableton]

That’s the story with Ableton. But if you haven’t watched closely, a lot of software has been adding SoundCloud integration. Mobile apps are especially common, since the idea of uploading to the “cloud” and being mobile with a tablet or phone naturally go together. But desktop apps have been adding integration.

I was curious just to keep up with that list, so I spoke to Henrik Lenberg, VP of Platform for SoundCloud. He gave us just a few highlights. (If you’re a developer and left out, feel free to give us a shout in comments – there are too many apps to be comprehensive.)

Major mobile integrations:

- Apple GarageBand
- Korg iMS-20, iElectribe and iKaossilator
- Retronyms Tabletop
- Native Instruments iMaschine
- FL Studio Mobile
- NanoStudio
- BeatMaker 2
- AmpKit
- Yamaha TNR-i
- Music Studio
- iRig Recorder
and more…

Major desktop integrations:
- Ableton Live
- PreSonus Studio One
- Avid Pro Tools
- Steinberg Cubase and WaveLab
- Cakewalk Sonar and Music Creator
- Magix Samplitude and Music Maker
- OpenLabs Music OS
and more…

FL Studio is another important one – thanks to reader Brandon Adkins for the reminder! It’s especially interesting, as Image-Line briefly had a tool called Collab which was intended to encourage its users to share their work. Now, they get more features – and easier collaboration across different tools and platforms – on SoundCloud. (I will say, there were a couple of nice things about Collab. It opened actual FL files, and had a live chat; I even wrote the thing up for Keyboard, but it didn’t last. Still, SoundCloud and FL could go together nicely.)

I have to ask the obvious question. Does having SoundCloud integration right in an application matter to you? Or would you rather take your time, export normally, and upload separately? And is it as important to you on a desktop as on mobile?

Which of these tools matter most – is any bigger for you than Ableton?

Beyond that, how do you use SoundCloud with your music software – if at all?

Let us know what your online/sharing workflow looks like; I’m very eager to hear.

http://soundcloud.com/peterkirn
http://soundcloud.com/cdm

The abundance of music, and the preceived ease of producing it, comes to some as bad news – or even harbinger of apocalypse. But load up a craft with quantity, and quality is what stands out.

Francis Prève is a perfect Renaissance producer. With years of experience as a music technology journalist and sound designer, his own, signature flavor of tech-house is uniquely focused on timbre. His label, Academik Records, debuted last year at Austin’s South by Southwest, but it’s just now kicking into high gear. (If you are in Austin for the world’s best known week of music, be sure to check in on the second party, running downtown from afternoon past midnight, for free.) Sure, a city like Berlin is associated with such things, but in the Internet age, Texas works just as well – minus the vitamin D deficiency.

Academik Contest giveaway
Lanai Rooftop Party, Saturday March 17 3p – 2a

Francis has rounded up a gang of emerging and known artists for Academik, and while age range and style are loose – sometimes dubstep, sometimes tech-house – what those signees have in common is attention to detail. They’re a veritable faculty in how to use Ableton Live and Massive so that you don’t sound like everyone else who’s using Ableton Live and Massive just because everybody else happens to be using Ableton Live and Massive.

The output is nicely represented in a podcast, mixed by Francis, that very much embodies his style:

Alternatively, check out the SxSW 2012 Chart Francis put together for Beatport.

Anyway, party – if you’re in Texas, go there, dance, have a good time.

But if you’re not from Texas, or you’re avoiding it because all your exes are there (okay, darnit, I’ll stop quoting song lyrics), through The Power of The Internet, we have a bunch of music to hear and tips and techniques and samples and loops and Ableton Live Instrument Racks and Sets to download – all free.

That’s because Francis has been as sharing music and techniques for how to produce it as he has the usual label activities (remix, release). Now, disclosure: I’ve known Francis for a long time, as a colleague at Keyboard. But it’s partly because I know him that I have a sense of that quality of attention to detail – because we’ve spent countless hours discussing the fine points of synth design and production technique, because he’ll call me up to talk about some particular I happened to mention writing, because he even spent hours with me and James Grahame talking about the exact organization of knobs and switches on the MeeBlip. I figure part of my responsibility in this world is to get to know people like that really well. (It happens to be a lot of fun, too.)

As it happens, you can be in on the same conversations.

Analog+Digital, Hardware+Software

One ongoing discussion has been ways of bringing in a few, select pieces of beloved hardware into a software studio. Even before talking about sound, the motivation is clear: it can make music making a lot more rewarding. And we’re not talking wildly-expensive modular setups, either – even inexpensive offerings like the KORG MonoTribe can get in on the action.

A lot of people working with software aren’t clear on just how to make hardware and software integrate nicely. Francis wrote a really comprehensive article on that subject, using his own rig as the subject, for Keyboard recently.

He writes about the process of using Live’s brilliant – and sometimes underused – External Instrument and External Effect devices:

The first order of business was to create custom devices in Live for sending MIDI to a specific synth—for example, the Phatty—then routing its audio output back into that same device via the MOTU [UltraLite Mk. 3 audio] interface. I then saved the results as presets. Thus, when the laptop is docked, all I have to do is drag the device I’d created for the Phatty into a track, and the Phatty comes online…

The next thing I did was create an External Audio Effect device that sent audio to a device but didn’t receive any audio back … by setting it up to send audio but not receive, I can drop it at the end of an instrument chain within an Instrument Rack and send any soft synth into the Moog, SEM, Dark Energy, or Monotribe. From there, the combined analog-plus-soft-synth audio runs from the analog synth back into a free input on the MOTU, to be recorded in Live.

By doing this, I can use Operator, Razor, Kontakt or any soft synth as the “oscillator bank” for one of my analog synths. The whole of digital tone generation combined with the warmth and fuzz of analog filters and the snap of analog envelopes is far more than the sum of its parts.

Francis also describes “hybrid” devices, combining Ableton instruments like Operator with outboard ingredients like the Moog Little Phatty filter and amp — all while controlling modulation and step sequences and such on the hardware with MIDI and Live clip envelopes. (He even talks about how to tame the MonoTribe, despite its – cough – lack of MIDI.)

The full article is online:
The Integrated Synth-Based Studio [Keyboard Magazine]

Free Sounds

Apart from being a producer, Francis has long been a sound designer, working for the likes of Roland and Ableton His free-sampling, hardware-loving, sound design-addicted spirit has been gradually developing a vast selection of free sample packs on his blog. Some come from software (NI’s Razor), some from new hardware (Moog’s aforementioned Slim Phatty), and some from oddities (my favorite being the Mattel Synsonics drum machine toy).

But whereas the Academik Records music will be dependent on your personal taste and aesthetic, here these are sound packs that are versatile enough to bend to your will and needs, and to produce something very different from what anyone else might produce. And that, ultimately, is the point.

So here, all in one place, are those great downloads from Fran’s blog:

21st Century Sawtooth Pad [Instrument Rack/Live Set, Live 7+]

The String Machine [Instrument Rack and Live Set, Live 7+]

Arkade [8-bit emulating Instrument Racks, Live 7+]

Ableton Preset: Wavescraper [Simpler-based Instrument Rack using Saturator waveshaping, Live 7+]

Sine of the Times [All sine-wave Instrument Rack, Live 7+]

Mattel Synsonics drum machine toy [Drum samples, Live set]

M-Audio Venom Loops [128 bpm, in C | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Native Instruments Razor Loops [128 bpm, in Cm | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Moog Slim Phatty Loops [128 bpm, in C | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Okay, I may be in Germany (see you next week, Messe!), but if you’re in Austin, Texas, the CDM radar is picking up some strong blips of things you probably want to be doing, starting today, Do. 15 Mär. (Erm, uh, sorry, Thursday March 15!) Highlights include a Neon Indian show paired with visuals, music, and the good folks of Switched On, fine music from Robot Koch, TYCHO, and Sepalcure, a Saturday night dance party with Academik on a beautiful rooftop in the heart of town, and workshops – much of this free and not requiring a badge. A few, select picks:

Daytime plan: Dubspot workshops. If you are in Austin, by all means stop reading this and go to a set of afternoon matinee workshops that starts with Maschine and proceeds to Moog Minitaur and Voyager and wraps up with Livid’s CTRL:R for Live. Friday and Saturday are packed with more free workshops ranging from production and sound design to DJing, theory, and licensing. Faculty DJ Shiftee, DJ Kiva, Martín Perna Chris Petti, Daniel Wyatt, and Pat Cupo – some seriously talented guys – are on-hand. These are folks I feel I learn from every time I’m around them, so highly recommended, and the price is right.
http://blog.dubspot.com/dubspot-sxsw-2012-edu-sessions/

Also during the daytime, if you do have a badge, you should check out Exhibit Hall 5 for a bunch of gear showcases – a bit like being at NAMM, but in the middle of a massive music festival instead of in the middle of Anaheim. (No Disneyland, though.)

Thursday night plan: Switched On / Moog / Neon Indian showcase. Moog Music and Austin’s best music gear store, Switched On, are teaming up tonight for one hell of a showcase. Neon Indian is headlining, but that band’s Alan Palomo is bringing along synth-laden music from his Static Tongues imprint. By the way, 2012 is somehow bringing back the acronym EBM, among other “pinch-me-I’m-dreaming-and-went-to-synth-heaven” aspects of this year. The action runs 7pm-2am.
Facebook event

Thursday night backup plan: high-quality bass. The name’s a bit misleading – SxSWhomp is perhaps to appeal to those American kids – but if you can’t get into Switched On, this nicely-curated range of bass music from dubstep to experimental looks like the perfect ticket. Just after midnight is one of my favorite solo artists and producers at the moment, Berlin’s own Robot Koch (also the guy behind the excellent Jacoozi), alongside the likes of Kraddy and Noah D. It’s no cover, first come first serve.
Facebook event

Friday night plan: Tycho, then Sepalcure. Tycho, aka Scott Hansen, is both one of our long-time favorite artists and favorite taste-makers, as helmsman of the ISO50 blog. His new live show is terrific, and hits at 21:15 at Clive Bar. Then, it’s the team of Machinedrum and Praveen, aka Sepalcure, for some warm beats after midnight.

Saturday night plan: dance with Academik. Academik Records is back on the rooftop of Lanai in the heart of Austin – an ideal way to cap off your week with some actual dancing, courtesy some high-quality electronic dance music. DJ sets from Francis Prève, Jan van Lier, The Chaotic Good, and SecretPandaSociety ensure music ranging from finely-crafted tech house to breaks. (CDM is a sponsor in absentia, and you can win a MeeBlip on the spot, among other analog and digital hardware and software prizes.) There’s a great lineup of tech sponsors (Dave Smith!), no cover, and having DJed the same party last year, just the kind of atmosphere you’ll need Saturday.
Academik Blog Post
Facebook event
Giveaway (including some prizes you can win if you aren’t in Texas)

Don’t miss the Academik podcast, mixed by our friend Francis Prève, on SoundCloud, natch:

I’m sure I’ve missed some stuff, so send it in and I’ll consider adding it to our top picks. (And obviously, there’s the rest of SxSW – but this is just the kind of electronic-leaning material I expect you might otherwise miss.)

Apple yesterday described their iPad as “this magical pane of glass that can become anything you want it to be.” So – how about making mobile devices into what you want it to be?

With the help of author Peter Brinkmann and publisher O’Reilly, we’d like to give you a taste of Peter’s new book, Making Musical Apps: Real-time audio synthesis on Android and iOS. Imagining that a lot of you are especially curious about iOS, we’ll include the chapter on how to get started with development. It really gives you a sense of how easy this can be; the challenge is, as it should be, coming up with musical ideas. And Apple did say that they thought that technology was at its best when it was “invisible,” not when it was “inaudible.” So let’s make it make some noise.

(Android developers, libpd actually got its start on Android and runs quite well even on very primitive Android handsets, so consider this a sample; the full book – and the libpd site – include loads of examples on the Android side, too. In fact, because libpd works basically identically on the two platforms, it’s a great choice for making cross-platform development easier.)

In this excerpt, Peter covers:

• How to set up your development environment
• Starting a project with Xcode, and including Pd
• How to make a Pd patch run in your app
• Making the Pd patch and your UI connect with each other (here, from the app’s UI to Pd; the book covers both directions)

In fact, in just a few pages, you’ll have a working guitar tuner for iOS. Have a look:

Read it on CDM’s Scribd page:

Making Musical Apps (Excerpt: How to Build a Music App for iOS)

Direct PDF download link, hosted by CDM (please don’t link to this file directly):
Making Musical Apps (Excerpt) [PDF]

I’ve read an advance copy of the whole book, and my review is simple: if you’re curious about this stuff, get this book. Peter’s style is friendly and precise; no technical detail is left out, and yet those details aren’t overwhelming. The book can be accessible to those new to development, which is essential for a title that’s likely to be read by people who are used to Pd, but dipping their toes into Java and Objective-C for the first time in order to get their patches running on a device.

Ready for the full book?

Get a printed copy on Amazon:

Or read the Kindle edition:

For multi-platform epub, mobi, and PDF formats, head straight to the O’Reilly page:
Making Musical Apps [shop.oreilly.com]

http://libpd.cc/read-the-book/