There’s a special love among certain Ableton Live users for the Korg KAOSS Pad KP3, Korg’s lovely and capable sampling/effects box. Al, aka DJ Chinkial (see his trippy MySpace page) has a free VST for free as a holiday gift to us all (Windows-only). The basic idea: make a beatbox plug-in for your computer, using the KP3 as outboard controller, complete with visual feedback. (If you don’t have a KP3, you can use any controller, minus the blinkie lights – monome hack, anyone?)

The results are very wonderful: the KP3 becomes a synth drum machine. The only problem: some bugs may yet need to be ironed out, as the plug-in eats some CPU resources and this is a first version.

I don’t have a KP3 to try out that aspect myself, so if you grab it, let us know how it goes. (Your mileage may vary.)

Al writes us:

the info u posted is on one of my first attempts at a vst version of my reaktor beatbox live machine

kaoss64 is a 16 step 64 part sequencer
that triggers the slices of two bar
loops like a sort of rex file player for wavs

oh and if you’d like to try it out
it would work with any old midi controller just wont have the visual interaction

x position is cc10
y position is cc24
pad trig is cc25 but thats just used for visuals

the abcd buttons are the lowest register keys on a keyboard

cheers again and have a good christmas and new year al.

Description

Direct download link Link not working; exceeded bandwidth

Updated: CDM is now hosting the file as kaoss 64.rar

PLEASE don’t link directly to the file without linking to this post! Thanks!

More from MySpace:

You liked Gary Kibler’s all-Korg KAOSSilator album just a little too much, and his bandwidth is gone. So, if you’ve had any trouble getting at the music, we’ve got a brand new link on ReverbNation.

But that raises another question. As it happens, CDM community member FauxAudio was just asking about hosting music files on our forums:

online audio host – reccomendations?

So far, in the running:

• Amazon S3 (and as I noted, Yahoo just opened up their player tool)
• musicane.com (also sells albums)
• payloadz.com (ditto)
• Twango, which also hosts video and still images but supports an embeddable audio player (thank you, Nokia)

Interestingly, Amazon S3 seems to be the current favorite.

What would you want from a music host? I guess that’s the first question. Other experiences / preferences?

Data center photo: skreuzer, via Flickr.