I’m pleased to announce the first-ever CDM Giveaway. We’ve got over US$4,000 of hardware and software tools for music creation, and we’d like to give you the chance to win them. To do that, we’re holding a good, old-fashioned prize drawing — I’ve been warming up my true random number generator — so that all you have to do is enter for a chance to win. To better your odds, each prize will get a different winner.

CDM Giveaway Info Page; official rules (no purchase necessary).

Here’s what we’ve got:

Akai MPC500 mobile music workstation
Ableton Live 6 music production software
Alesis ControlPad drum pad controller
Glyph GT 050Q 250GB eSATA/USB/FW400/FW800 hard drive
Moog Music Moogerfooger FreqBox VCO effects box
Native Instruments Absynth 4 soft synth
Native Instruments Elektrik Piano soft synth
Numark Total Control DJ control surface
PreSonus FaderPort

…plus boxes of Ableton beanies and AudioMIDI.com Synth Legends DVDs. You can check everything out on the giveaway page.

And get some link love, too: Eligible residents of the United States can enter to win any one of these prizes. Unfortunately, for legal reasons we can’t extend the whole sweepstakes to international readers. To make up for it, we’ll be watching international entries for the best blogs, project pages, and music websites to feature on CDM, and we’ll send out Ableton beanies and/or DVDs to our favorite entries. (American readers, we’ll be watching your pages, too, so be sure to include your URLs when you enter.)

We’ve been putting this together for a while now and it’s been a lot of work, so I’m excited to be able to roll it out. We’ve hand-picked some of our favorite gear and software makers to partner with, or we wouldn’t be doing this.

Full details on the giveaway page. Enter now, because at the stroke of midnight following Monday, June 11, the contest is over. And I really want to get these boxes of gear and swag shipped. It’ll be a lot more fun out of the brown cardboard boxes, I’m sure.

Update: If you’re not from the US – please do fill out the form, if you include nothing other than your URL (so we can check out your site) and your country. (Nothing else is required.)

We’re really sorry we weren’t able to go global on this one for legal reasons (I try to explain why in comments). But that’s all the more reason to find out where you’re from. Server stats provide a very incomplete picture of what country people are from, and we would like to know. And if you include contact info, I might at least be able to get some of you some swag.