Scratching with a mouse just doesn’t feel right. One solution, as in FinalScratch and other products, is to print timecode onto the vinyl. But then there’s the direct approach: strap that mouse right onto your turntable and hit the club!

That’s just what the DIY-oriented community of users of terminatorX have done. terminatorX is a fully open-source scratch synth on Linux, with support for files like OGG, MP3, and WAV, and even (recently) Linux’s open stereo plug-in format, LADSPA. terminatorX lacks fancy features like support for timecode-printed vinyl, so users take a more literal approach to melding mouse and turntable.

Practical? Well, not especially. But fun? Heck, yeah. (Added benefit: a couple of these are far lighter and smaller than a real turntable.)

Necessity is definitely the mother of invention:

• Some of the projects use a series of belts to connect rotation mechanically to the mouse apparatus
• Toqer worked with a DIY optical sensor apparatus; several of these use optical sensors on the mice to keep from touching the records (thus making these even kinder to records than an actual cartridge would be)
• A number of projects feature full-blown motors and entirely-concealed mice
• Adam King built an entire DIY turntable with a mouse connected inside the unit (pictured, top)
• My personal favorite, Fernando S. Fabreti took the brute-force approach and put a mouse directly on the tone arm. (below) Insane. Brilliant.

More projects, photos, and links to specs and how-to instructions (I imagine you could do damage with ideas like this using other software, or even applications other than turntables):

terminatorX Turntable Gallery

This should also leave you more than typically safe from stepping on any N2IT/FinalScratch patents. Thank Douglas Englebart for this one.

Scratching began as a practical means by which DJs could cue records. (So say originators like Grandmaster Flash; if you’re interested in the history, check out the fantastic documentary Scratch — trailer above.) But something about the gesture, the mechanical feeling of scratching, and all that history has made the turntable compelling as a controller. It’s even taught as an instrument at Berklee.

So, what if you want to scratch for purposes other than conventional DJing?

Getting at Timecode

Digital vinyl systems like Serato Scratch LIVE and Native Instruments Traktor Scratch are designed for DJs. Part of the whole advantage is that you get an integrated system with vinyl, decoding capability, audio interfacing with the computer, and software for DJ functions. If you want to take the turntable to other frontiers, you have to find a way to get the timecode data from the vinyl directly and do something different with it, like control an instrument or scratch visuals. (Only recently did a big-name, mainstream DVS, Serato, take on visuals, as seen on Create Digital Motion, and even then it makes some assumptions about what you want to do.)

We’ve seen a few examples of how to do this:

Here’s a phrase you won’t hear often on, say, Download Squad:

"PS The AmigaOS port will be up in a few days."

Welcome to the wacky world of trackers, the music production tools time forgot. While the rest of the world frets over the environmental impact of computing and the cost of digital tools, the music community has a solution: recycle that garage sale / $50 eBay computer as a powerful music tool that might even be better than what you’ve got now.

If you have something with a CPU, odds are pretty good MilkyTracker runs on it. That includes Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel), Windows Vista and XP — oh, and 2003, 2000, NT, Me, 98, and 95, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, FreeBSD, and emerging builds for popular Linux distributions and, yes, AmigaOS. It’s not just cross-platform. It’s pan-platform. (Hey, just for old time’s sake, anyone want to start a Mac versus Amiga flame war in comments? Go for it. Be brutal.)

MilkyTracker has some other good news: as of this weekend, it’s fully free and open source (GPL).

The new release (unceremoniously titled 0.90.80) has new features, too: tabbed modules so you can see up to 32 modules at once on the desktop version, playing simultaneously and copying-and-pasting between, new resamplers (even including Amiga-style resamplers) for better sound quality, direct rendering, and lots of other goodies.

So, this means MilkyTracker is the tracker to beat, right? Wrong. Tracker preferences are personal and nuanced, and competing tools offer subtle, unique workflows, plus features like the ability to run as plug-ins or support ReWire, and support for gaming platforms and other devices. But if you’re looking for a tracker to try, this should definitely be on your list. And soon you may be able to get that Amiga out of the closet. Reusing beats recycling any day.

MilkyTracker

Proof in pictures that MT can run on lots of different platforms

A crazy scheme in which you pay a monthly fee and get unlimited music, huh? Imagine that.

Part of what was strange about flat fee advocate Jim Griffin’s new proposal for an ISP monthly fee for music is that subscription-based music lives already, from digital radio to music services. Amidst rumors that Apple might add subscriptions, the Zune, Rhapsody, and Napster all have flat-fee subscriptions right now, thank you very much. (I’m even told there are music players aside from iPod, though I don’t know if I believe this.)

I was a big fan of YottaMusic, a friendly Web front-end that connected to Rhapsody, and mourned its passing at the beginning of this year. But here’s good news: you can restore Yotta’s best feature, which was keeping track of music played in a Web browser for the superb Last.FM music community service.

Rhobbler

Rhapsody is clever enough not only to work in Web browsers on multiple platforms (even Linux), but generates an RSS feed of music you’ve been playing. Rhobbler hooks into that RSS feed and uploads to Last.FM. It’s a kludge, certainly — I’d love to see this built into the Rhapsody interface, along with other improvements. But it works: sign up once, and you’re done.

As some commenters noted in regards to the Griffin story, there’s a lot of music out there to keep track of — and a lot of us are listening to more than ever before. But that’s why it’s so nice to have tools like Last.FM. I also find, curiously, that subscription music for me feels like on-demand radio; instead of reducing how much music I buy outright, I just buy music I’m even more excited about.

If you’re not already a member, be sure to join our CDM group on Last.FM:

CreateDigitalMusic @ Last.FM

… and yes, promoting your own music there is encouraged! (Albums at right represent albums heard last week by CDM members. And, uh, dude … the group is all guys at the moment. I know ladies reading the site, and Last.FM has plenty of women, so join in and share your listening tastes!)

“Sure, the OLPC project is supposed to do wonderful things for children of the world, but what has it done for me, lately?” Well, if you fancy yourself one of the Earth’s children, the OLPC organization has assembled 8.5 gigabytes of sample content that’s free and Creative Commons-licensed — free to acquire, and free to use.

Jacob Joaquin, who runs the terrific thumbuki blog and the Csound Blog and is part ofthe team developing Csound for the OLPC’s XO laptop, shares the news via Dr. Richard Boulanger at Berklee. (See the press release as a zipped .doc.)

Plenty of people contributed top-notch sound: the Berklee College of Music, Csound developers around the world, electronica celebrity BT (himself a former Berklee and Boulanger student, among other alums), M-Audio and Digidesign, and the Open Path Music Group.

They’re donated under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so you can “freely create, compose, mix, remix, share, distribute and redistribute these samples and use them for any purpose as long as you clearly attribute the source.” That means anyone, anywhere can make use of this library — no OLPC required.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Sound_samples

Csound, OLPC Style

Whether you like the OLPC laptop itself or not, there’s plenty going on with the project. There’s the immediate impact of the hardware and software, yes — and plenty of opportunity to praise or criticize its utility there (perhaps the mark of a good, ambitious project). But there’s also the secondary impact. The OLPC has captured imaginations in terms of what future computers might be, and what they might mean to more of the population of the planet. More importantly, perhaps, it’s building a family of open source, Linux-based (and cross platform technology-based) tools, which could ultimately outlive the hardware platform. I have my own doubts about the OLPC itself, but the ideas for open sound making are about more than just that hardware. (For instance, just testing Processing, Arduino and Java on this kind of mobile platform can improve that software.)

The sample library is only part of the story; software tools is another part. Powered by Csound, the OLPC team wants to put sound synthesis and music production in the hands of kids — we’re talking serious digital synthesis here, not just GarageBand-style looping. That goal could ultimately go well beyond just the OLPC.

Csound is a free and open source development tool for sound design, synthesis, and signal processing, with a lineage that goes back to original developer Barry Vercoe and in turn descended from the first digital synthesis tools created by Max Mathews. It is the audio/music development system for the OLPC project, with integration with Python (though I’ve heard we should also see additional Java development).

Those geeky details aside, you’ll see in many of the reviews of the OLPC writers mentioning unusual and fun music toys. Those journalists are stumbling upon some of the projects below, and the process is just getting started.

Jacob had shared some brief looks at what he’s working on on his OLPC, but here’s the full overview from Dr. Boulanger, because there’s quite a lot happening:

In case you haven’t seen it, Nine Inch Nails has taken to the multi-touch Lemur control surface and More Buttons Than Thou top-end Monome. There’s a short video of an experiment combining the two with a real (MIDI-enabled) Yamaha piano. It’s just under a minute, but already evocative — I’m not entirely sure why Alessandro is manning the touchpad on his laptop given all this hardware around, but the cascading patterns on the Monome suggest both LED art and a digital take on a player piano.

More videos on the official NIN YouTube page, which has recently launched a visuals contest for interpreting music from the new album.

But lest you think you need all that pricey hardware to make use of an unusual tool, look no further than MilkyTracker. Platform wars end here: MT runs on Windows (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista), Mac OS X (PowerPC, Intel), Linux (x86, 64-bit x86, PowerPC), Linux game/mobile platforms (GP2X, ARM), UNIX (FreeBSD x86), and Windows CE. Wowsa. And it’s all yours for a donation, if you can spare one. Heck, there are even video tutorials on the site.

But geekdom aside, I love that MilkyTracker ninjas can make so much music out of so little. Without taking on the aesthetic style here, if that’s not your thing, it’s a reminder that economical choices with your tech can produce all kinds of different sounds. So, maybe rather than loading that preset, try to construct a drum kit out of basic waveforms.

Enjoy!

Video by extrabajs; for some reflections on MilkyTracking, see our friend thumbuki — who, speaking of doing more with less, is working with an OLPC. Economical hardware use is back in an age of power efficiency and computing beyond the deep-pocketed “first world” — and everything old is new again:

Milky Tracker @ thumbuki

What? MilkyTracker is fanning the flames of a platform war with the Atari ST? No worries: MaxYmizer is a newly updated (yep, you read that right) tracker tool for the Atari platform. Polyphonic MIDI input and MIDI clock output means it should easily integrate with your existing studio. See the Digital Tools blog for full details.

Processing is an open-source coding tool, built in Java, designed specifically to be versatile for artists and friendly to non-coders. Code is elegant and simple, but can take advantage of all the potential power and performance (no, really) of Java. Java really can be fast enough to use in live performance situations, though its one Achilles’ heal is that automatic memory management — the very thing that makes coding easier, via something called a garbage collector — can make sound glitchy at lower latencies. (JavaSound seems worst on Mac OS X, as implementation of the sound API by Apple hasn’t kept pace with improvements in Java audio on other platforms. It is possible to build a real-time-ready Java implementation that performs as well as languages like C++ for audio, but right now there’s not yet a mainstream implementation of this type.)

That doesn’t mean Processing isn’t useful for musical applications. With experimentation, sound libraries like Minim can perform quite well, especially if extreme low-latency is unnecessary. (see Processing’s libraries page for more.) And you can always use Processing as a visual front end, while sound comes from elsewhere (Max, Pd, Reaktor, or even Ableton Live or a plug-in.)

There’s plenty of incentive to work with the environment as an artist. People who never coded before are able to build entire projects in Processing, not just uber-programmer-geeks. Even experienced coders can find it a fast way of experimenting with ideas — sometimes better-suited to tasks that are more difficult with patching environments. Despite all the hype around Flash/AIR/Flex and Silverlight, I find Processing easier to develop in, and you have far more robust development options, free and open source tools and libraries, and genuine OpenGL 3D capabilities.

I put out a call for people working with Processing for music, and we’ve already got a handful of interesting examples. Because of the open community around Processing, code is available for a couple of the ideas here, so you can have a peek and learn from fellow Processing coders.

nodeSeq from Jared Arave on Vimeo.

Commercial music development on Linux is at a trickle, but a real gem as far as music production is now available: Renoise, the modern tracker tool.

Not only is Renoise a cult favorite for its unique approach to composition, but the Linux version looks to fully embrace Linux technologies. And that’s a big deal, because many music and audio users aren’t interested in Linux for political correctness. We want audio functionality and performance. Renoise promises:

• ALSA support (the high-performance audio and MIDI system for Linux)
• JACK audio support (for interconnecting application audio and other features)
• LADSPA (the native, open Linux plug-in format)
• Native Linux VST support

Renoise 1.9.1 Final and public Linux demo [Official announcement]

If you give Renoise a try on Linux, we’d love to hear about it. Renoise joins EnergyXT, another unique music creation tool — but hopefully with better native Linux support, which seemed a little less mature on EnergyXT.

Of course, “support” is an open question. We heard mixed feelings last summer when EnergyXT arrived on Linux. Part of the appeal of open source software is the ability for programmers to fix issues with code. Renoise supports Linux technologies, but it’s not open source. Still, if an application is fully supported — and you’re willing to pay the (low, in this case) price for that — I wonder if for-pay, closed software isn’t such a bad coupling with an open OS, after all.

The big question: will musicians adopt Linux, and will Linux users adopt (and pay for) payware apps. If they do, more apps could make the OS leap, too. Let us know what you’re using.

Thanks to Scott Meschke (who calls Renoise “awesome) and karhu (aka Niklas) for the tips!

Previously:

Renoise 1.9 Music App Begins Beta; Why You Shouldn’t Overlook This Tracker