It’s simply stunning some of the terrific instrument and effect plug-ins available that are now free and open source – yes, free as in freedom, not just freeware. I had commented in the past something along the lines of, “boy, wouldn’t it be great if this now meant, say, a Linux port?” and then went on the business of my daily life, which tends not to include re-compiling plug-ins. But now, the folks of JUCETICE have been busy doing just that, serving up delicious instrument and effect goodness, running native on Linux.

Translation: fire up that netbook and make some music.

Following up on our tutorial on Ardour and netbook-optimized music competition with Renoise and Indamixx, here’s what you need to get rolling.

Renoise has already earned a passionate following among lovers of trackers. The once-forgotten alternative to conventional sequencers, these music editors were beloved for their quick workflow and vertical, atomic approach to assembling beats and patterns. But Renoise is increasingly poised to appeal to other kinds of music makers, too, not just tracker purists.

2.1 you can sum up pretty easily: now you can integrate Renoise with other stuff easily. There’s ReWire support (appropriately enough for a tool beginning with “Re” in the title). And if you’re on Linux, you can pipe control and audio through the ultra-elegant, ultra-powerful JACK. (If you’re not on Linux, you may have just gotten a good reason to give it a try.)

http://www.renoise.com/

This is on top of a rapidly-growing set of features like multi-core balancing, automatic delay compensation, audio recording (cough, Reason), and MIDI inputs and outputs. In other words, this is a tracker you can use without giving up modern luxuries. Maybe it’s like the difference between having a tent in gorgeous mountainous wilderness, and having a mansion with a hot tub and a T1 Internet line.

ReWire is the headline, but some of the live performance tools may make an even bigger difference. Live control tools and live pattern sequencing could make Renoise a lot more useful in performance, even without just ReWiring into Live and recording clips. The pattern triggering looks especially nice, because it brings a feature Game Boy trackers have often used live. (Add JACK on Linux, and you could add your own custom instruments.)

And, oh yeah, the whole program runs on every OS, has an incredibly responsive and involved community that impacts the direction of the tool, and is distributed on a shareware model rather than with painful copy protection.

Full disclosure: I’m slightly biased by enjoying a couple of beers with Renoise’s Dac, and by the fact that I think this looks completely delicious.

Here’s the full changelog.

Now that Macs run Intel processors, what was once unimaginable is suddenly possible. There’s certainly no shortage of plug-ins available on Mac OS, but users may still have Windows plug-ins they miss. Released as beta today from SM Pro Audio, VFX is an app that lets you host your PC plug-ins on your Mac:

VFX Mac Beta

The requirements are modest — a lowly Mac mini should work just fine, and you don’t even need 10.5. But some of the specifics get a little weird. You have to run VFX as its own host. And you actually can’t use Mac plug-ins on the VFX, which means there’s not much advantage here versus just running on a cheap PC. (Especially given that you can build a pretty decent PC for under $300 these days.) And there are various stability and reliability issues introduced, as well.

We saw the V-Machine from the same creator — a small hardware box running plug-ins on Linux — at the end of last year. But in this case, it appears you can may be able to the software minus the hardware, which would make sense. (Otherwise, the hardware becomes a rather large dongle.)
V-Machine: Dedicated Hardware for VSTs, for US$599?

Basically, what VFX is is a nicely-packaged rendition of a Windows host running inside the open source, multi-platform WINE translation layer. WINE is actually a ground-up “translation” of Win32 — it’s not emulation or a virtual machine; it actually runs Windows apps as if they were native. (Thank Microsoft for keeping its APIs relatively open, even if the OS itself is closed as Mac OS is.) The discussion of whether or not this could work has come up before, as recently in a thread on KVR. VFX is proof that it can work, and I could imagine it’s even good news for some people. You can read the manual addendum at the link above and decide if it’s for you.

Here’s the irony: Mac users arguably don’t have it as good as even Linux users, let alone people just running Windows (and, one might add, on cheaper PCs).

Let’s start out with the easy part: energyXT is awesome. This wildly underrated host runs on Linux as well as Windows and Mac, has an elegant, simplified interface that hides some powerful sequencing and semi-modular features, and runs incredibly fast. Think ridiculously quick load times and working methods. I’m doing a lot more work in energyXT this year, so expect to hear about it.

The other nice news: energyXT will run from a USB key in its latest version. This isn’t just a dongle — it’s actually a way of moving from machine to machine more easily when you’re on the road. (It’ll still run without the USB key, too.)

I want to talk more about energyXT, but I did have to include the latest promotional video. In it, we learn that in Europe people work in beautiful, light-filled offices with clean desks. (I, uh… better actually clean my workspace this weekend.) And we don’t learn a whole heck of a lot about energyXT. But that’s okay – stay tuned here. I can even put on my best suit if you like, though I sadly don’t have a very cool accent. (I grew up as a kid listening to American public radio, so basically I sound like that.)

New in 2.5:

• Project templates, welcome screen
• New mixer view has collapsible EQ, effects sections, graphical EQ, “quick add” for inserts, sends
• Quick add in the sequencer for new tracks
• MP3 import + export via LAME
• Normalize, delete, trim, fade in/out, reverse audio processing
• Beatslice, autoslice audio (really? have to see how that works…), cross-fade 2 audio clips
• New preset browser for the synth/sampler
• Drum sampler gets new easy view with drumspads, full implementation of EQ, Insert and Send effects for individual drums
• New audio effects: bit crusher, multi-mode filter, compressor and high quality guitar amp

So, nothing earthshaking, but that’s the point. energyXT manages to add a lot of this functionality but actually cut straight to what you really need, and somehow the resulting tool doesn’t feel as heavyweight as some of its rivals.

We’ve obviously talked a lot about the forthcoming Ableton Live 8, and deservedly so. But the great thing about what’s available now is that you have some really strong tools for production, each of which has a unique approach to production. Instead of leapfrogging DAWs that duplicate the same functionality, these tools actually work in different ways. So expect to hear more about that through the course of this year.

http://www.energy-xt.com/

Addendum: Consider this a teaser. I wrote this on my way out the door this morning to go teach. We will talk more about the “why this is awesome” bits soon. And, you know, I’m glad people don’t love marketing videos, because then there’s a place for CDM.

Updated: Rewrite. We in fact had several users successfully upgrade from Live 6 to 7 overnight, for free. That seems to have been either some extremely particular circumstance or a server glitch. (Pointing to the latter, Ableton took their shop down for maintenance Friday afternoon Berlin time.)

I could try to explain what different upgrades cost and how much it costs to buy them when, but frankly a) I don’t understand and b) this goes well beyond the realm of “things interesting enough for me to spend time on.” Suffice to say, Ableton has some rather complex pricing in play based on whether you’re an academic customer, whether you upgraded from a hardware bundle (like Live Lite), what older version you had, whether you buy Live 7 now or whether you just bought it, whether you’re buying a full version or an upgrade, whether you have Live or Live Suite, whether the upgrade is discounted versus the previous upgrade price or free and for 7 or 8 or maybe 8 is free or maybe 8 is cheaper and 7 is cheaper but you still need to buy 7 … plus whether you’re buying a boxed copy or download…

I assume this is the work of accountants or something. I can’t personally see how having pricing this complex is a good thing, but it’s Ableton’s business, of course, and I’m not an accountant.

One important thing I can tell you is that owning Max or Live won’t get you Max for Live free.

But let’s talk about the version of Live that’s actually shipping.

Back to seven…