Despite its quirks, Windows can be a wildly underrated OS for music. Of course, that has little to do with the way it works out of the box. It’s a matter of tweaking your setup so you reshape it into a finely-tuned musical tool. And I believe in sharing that info, because ultimately you should be able to make music on whichever OS you choose.

Rain Recording, a custom PC vendor that specializes in building systems for music and creative work, asked me to write up some of my favorite tools for just that job. For the first part, I looked at the unpleasant stuff — tools for troubleshooting your system and keeping it operating at maximum efficiency.

Part 2 is more fun — the goodies that actually help your musical workflow. I kept this entirely to utilities for MIDI and control, but thanks to the effort of some passionate musician-programmers, that winds up being an impressive toolkit. Quite a few items are Windows-only. (I do actually intend to cover Mac OS and Linux, too, but Windows stacked up pretty well.)

My picks, all free, donationware (and do donate and support these tools!), or relatively cheap:

Want to hook that joystick / Wii remote / Guitar Hero controller / something odd to your music software? If you’re on Mac, OSCulator is the do-everything solution. It’s pay-what-you-like software ($19 minimum for PayPal), and it just got a big update:

Announcement: OSCulator 2.6 [Unidentified Sound Object, as seen in our sound design round-up]
Download page, with changelog [osculator.net]

There’s a lot new in release 2.6; highlights include:

• Preset management
• Graphical OSC routing editor
• Wii Guitar Hero support (preliminary)
• Hook up more: up to 2 virtual HID joysticks, up to 8 Wiimote (does anyone own that many?)
• Make keyboard shortcuts just by striking the combo

And just to be clear, this app outputs MIDI. That means you can use whatever music software you like — so don’t worry about the OSC business if it’s new to you!

It’s not even really just for OSC, any more — does all kinds of input tasks. Windows and Linux users have plenty to be jealous of in this program. Major kudos to creator Camille Troillard; USO Project points to a terrific SEAMUS newsletter article on the software and its future.

The only sad news: this is the last release that will support Tiger; future versions are Leopard-only. (I’m curious, Camille — why? Lots of us still run Tiger for audio apps. Is this just to streamline testing, or is there really something in Leopard that OSCulator needs?)

You can add this to yesterday’s good news as far as OpenSoundControl — the iPhone/iPod touch app we saw released to the app store in yesterday’s round-up.

CDM World Tour: catch up with Mike and Liz in Chicago, and Peter and Jaymis in Perth and Brisbane (Australia)!

Dorkbot Chicago

Any CDM-ers in the Chicagoland area are most warmly invited to this months Dorkbot at Deadtech, 3321 W. Fullerton Ave., on Wednesday at 8pm for food, drink, and brain-swelling information regarding micro-sampling and alternative musical controllers like QWERTY keyboards, game joysticks, and bicycles.

This week’s presenters will be Liz McLean-Knight and Michael Una, contributors to CDM.

See you there!

ByteMe, Perth; CDM Me, Brisbane

Australia is CDM’s second home, land of crazy creative contributors and designers, and birthplace of the CDM logo and graphic identity. And now I get to go there.

First up is an epic visualist festival in Perth, 11/30 - 12/9. (Jaymis and I arrive 12/2.)

ByteMe Festival

Okay, odds are, you aren’t anywhere near Perth, as it’s supposedly the most isolated city on the face of the Earth. But on the off chance that you are in/near Perth, you’ll definitely want to come out for this one. Visualists like Artificial Eyes and Jean Poole, not to mention festival organizers VJZoo, join a convergence of visual artists from game development to experimental film and motion graphics and special effects. I’m on a panel Wednesday night, but mostly Jaymis and I will be hanging around covering the festival and chatting with cool people. And we get to see whether our first in-person meetup creates a geek matter-antimatter temporal singularity.

12/10 - 12/14 we return to Brisbane, and odds are far likelier that you live there. There’s talk of doing some kind of music event in Brisbane. If you’re interested in helping us organize even a casual meet-up, Brisbanites, let me know. -PK

How much do you get out of this "point-one" upgrade to
interactive modular software Plogue Bidule (OS X/Windows)? An insane
amount, including these highlights:

• Use joysticks, mouse, keyboards, and other HID devices for MIDI controls
• New audio looper with more options: graphical loop point editing, adapts automatically to meter and stretches time, and more
• A zillion new modules, including 32-channel audio playing and
  recording, a spectral file looper (!), and lots of new MIDI objects
• VST bridge, bugfixes on OS X

Head to Plogue and check it out.

It's beautiful — even visually. It's elegant. It's simple. It's
stable. It's flexible. It's cheap. In other words, it's not Max/MSP –
and, great as that program is, it's about time there was another tool
on the block. And it hasn't even hit 1.0 yet. Keep trucking, Ploguers.

Cost: US$75
Availability: Now, download only
Compatibility: Win32 / Mac OS X