Come on – you know that occasionally you want technology to respond when you slap it.

As my sister watched an episode of the television show Quantum Leap, I thoroughly enjoyed watch Dean Stockwell’s character Al give his pocket computer, looking for all the world like a 7″ tablet, little helpful smacks.

SmackTop does that for music. Yes, we hear, ad infinitum, the complaint that laptop musicians simply stare inertly at blue glowing laptops as if checking their email. Now they get to put a little skin in the game, literally. And a version 0.3 update makes this humorous novelty genuinely useful:

Imagine your laptop as a MIDI drum kit. SmackTop is an open-source application for Mac laptops which translates physical motion into MIDI messages. Through real-time analysis of the built-in accelerometer’s output, SmackTop is able to classify four different ‘smacks’. Now you can control your favorite DAW by simply tapping your computer. Slap samples, ping notes and hit record – SmackTop is the MIDI controller you already own.

Try it yourself, free:

http://code.google.com/p/smacktop/ (they miss the obvious name, “SlapTop,” but…)

Got another motion-sensing laptop that’s not a Mac and feel jealous? Maybe someone can port this.

In January, we also expect to catch up in person with developer Raymond Weitekamp and Interface LA, the awesome live performance collective in southern California. Stay tuned.

Slap that laptop, make it free!

Now, a tribute to slaps we love…

Ah, there’s nothing like bleeding-edge laptop performance. And to really convey to your audience that you’re indeed playing live, there’s nothing like glitches, dropouts, and crashing in the middle of a live set. It brings that homespun, digital authenticity to your performance, as you…

Okay, who am I kidding? You may be longing for a more stable, predictable, controllable mobile music rig. One way to get there is with the Linux operating system. The problem, however, is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, that setup can wind up being less stable, not more stable. Because Linux is about freedom and endless choice, you have the “freedom” to combine software in ways that … uh, doesn’t actually work.

I’m all for continuing to document ways of improving your Linux experience. At the same time, part of the free software business model – even according to the die-hards at the Free Software Foundation – is that custom configuration and distribution is a reasonable way to make money.

The best-available plug-and-play Linux music solution right now, hands down, is Indamixx. It’s got basically everything going for it:

• A highly-tweaked Transmission OS, as developed by 64 Studio
• Based on Ubuntu, so you can install recent Ubuntu packages for maximum software compatibility
• Carefully-tuned, custom real-time kernel for maximum audio performance
• Bundled with some great proprietary software, too, specifically ArdourXchange so you can import AAF files from your Pro Tools session – making your free software and proprietary software coexist peacefully
• LinuxDSP suite of mastering effects and plug-ins, specially tuned so they’ll work well even on Intel Atom-powered netbooks

The surprise: with the setup tuned in advance for you, Linux can be the friendliest out-of-box experience of any OS for music performance – seriously. Don’t get me wrong – it’s possible to get glitch-free performance out of Windows and Mac OS X, too. But Linux does offer a level of control and inter-application connectivity, as well as uniquely-strong performance on certain audio interfaces, that makes it a strong choice.

With tools like Pd and SuperCollider and the superb Renoise now on Linux, there’s no reason you can’t migrate your live performance rig to Linux – even if you choose to keep your production tools on another OS.

Normally priced at US$69, the Indamixx digital download is on sale for $49, and if you use sale code CDM, you get it for US$39. You have to purchase by January 19, and you have to use “CDM” as the code when you check out.

What you need to run it: Any PC netbook or laptop (and even UMPC/MID machines) should work. Note that Macs are not yet supported in this release; they’re trickier to dual-boot, but that support should come in the future. (If you know what you’re doing, it is possible to dual-boot the Mac, and honestly if you know your way around EFI and drivers I expect you could even use this distro.)

I’m not getting any money out of this deal, but I’m hoping for something far more valuable – it’d be great to have a little community of Linux users here on CDM so we can share tips with one another. As with, frankly, any OS, compatibility requires testing and tweaking. (That’s true even on the Mac, with a relatively limited hardware selection.)

Indamixx Digital Download

There’s also a USB key version, though it’s just as easy to buy or reuse a USB key of your own and use that.

I can certainly say, having tried various Fedora, SUSE, and Ubuntu configurations, I think the Indamixx/Transmission setup is the most painless and audio-friendly out there.

Lenovo IdeaPad U110 [ Early Specs at GottaBeMobile.com]

• There’s not that much of a price premium: it’s US$1899.
• The specs look good: a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo ("Merom") plus up to 3GB RAM — not high-end specs, but more than enough to run SONAR, Ableton Live, and the like. (Similar to the equally-capable specs on the MacBook Air side)
• Lots of ports: 3 USB 2.0 ports, so you don’t run out of ports when you plug in, say, a keyboard, an audio interface, and a high-speed USB storage stick. (Here’s where it bests the Air.)
• Lots of slots: Express Card supports high-end audio interfaces, and having an onboard card reader is nice for your camera and mobile recorder
• 2.4 lbs, .66 inch thick (actually slightly thinner and lighter than the MacBook Air) … and super small, meaning this is easier to tote and keep inconspicuous onstage

What’s the catch?

There’s only a 4200 rpm 120GB hard drive, which would likely be an Achilles’ heal. I do think the ThinkPad comes a heck of a lot closer to the mark than Apple’s MacBook Air, which sacrifices virtually all your ports and expandability — a black mark no matter how pretty the Air is. In fact, a lot of my live Ableton sets fit easily onto a flash drive, so I could imagine popping that into a machine like this.

Then again, that’s not really the competition: a US$1000 PC or Mac laptop could easily best these specs with only slightly more power consumption, size, and weight.

I still find these machines interesting, though, in that they demonstrate cooler, lighter, smaller, thinner, power-miserly directions for the same laptop platforms — all things that could make their way into more practical machines in the near future. And while I can’t really recommend the Air over the MacBook or MacBook Pro on the Mac side, on the PC side the U110 is at least in the running for those willing to make some (significant) sacrifices, which is a big change from the recent past.

Asus has launched an “SDK” — a bit of a misnomer, as you don’t really need specialized tools to make Linux software for these machines. But it is a nice, packaged set of free tools you’ll need, as a ready-to-go distro. Curiously, it requires an installed partition on your machine; there’s no live CD mode. Digital wunderkind Brad Linder is all over it:

Asus launches Eee PC SDK [Eee Site]

OLPC XO, Eee, or other Small Computer reports? We’d love to hear them. And maybe someone can tell us how to pronounce Eee. Now, back to my desktop behemoth to burn some non-renewable resources.

Photo: raster. And yeah — it’s that small. (What, AP, not Strunk & White?)

See also: Computer Music Magazine’s mini Eee PC review [musicradar.com], though it still leaves some questions unanswered … let’s keep the chatter going!