Apple’s iPad is here. It starts at $499. It’s a gorgeous, brilliantly-designed device that has the benefits of Apple’s cleverly-engineered, best-in-class developer tools for mobile. A lot are likely to sell. And unfortunately, to me that means bad news for the kind of creative computing we talk about on this site.

To put it briefly, I think the new, mobile Apple is doing immense harm to the computing legacy the company has forged. We could have had a Mac tablet today. Instead, we have a giant iPhone – and that’s a decision that has some serious repercussions. It’s a blow to open source alternatives, but also to open development in general: the power of interchangeable hardware and software, on which everything we do with music and visuals on computers is based.

For years, the Mac community railed against the perceived closed nature of Microsoft. Now, many are rallying behind an Apple with a vision more closed than Redmond’s.

This is important to both CDMs, because it’s on both these sites that I, along with readers and contributors, have advocated open computing as a creative outlet, for creation, sharing, and distribution of music, visuals, and knowledge.

I’m entirely biased by my own perspective. There are certain things I care about, that I believe in. I can talk about the technical, measurable values of each of those, but I can only speak for myself. With that in mind, the iPad, in a single device, embodies the exact opposite of all the reasons I’ve invested so much time in computing for the last 25 years.

Eat your heart out, Ableton/Serato The Bridge.

Native Instruments’ Traktor runs four decks at once without breaking a sweat, and there are various ways of incorporating sampling, scratching, and vinyl in a live rig that are pretty easy to set up. But lately we’ve seen some unusual options to build more elaborate setups. Rane even offers a digital mixer with two USB ports so you can, among other things, get four decks in Serato by running two computers at once. (Hey, never knock the brute force method of solving a problem.) And The Bridge, introduced to great fanfare by Ableton and Serato, synchronizes the transport and basic set information between Live and Serato. That’s to say nothing of the solution of using Ms. Pinky inside Live.

But none of this compares to Ilan Kriger’s method of getting four “decks” out of Ableton Live. He simply runs four complete instances of Live — one copy of Live 5, one copy of Live 6, one copy of Live 7, and one copy of Live 8 — in order to spread them out like the four decks in Traktor. (I’m not even going to ask Ableton whether this violates your license. Maybe you could start selling Live six packs?)

He uses a Mac for the job, but a PC should work, too. (Actually, that’d be an interesting performance comparison; you’d need to make sure your ASIO drivers on PC allow multiple apps to access the same interface.)

Go ahead. Hit the comment button. Tell us that this is an insane, impractical solution to the problem. (Really? Wow, I … didn’t … expect you to react that way. I must have entirely missed that.)

And good work, Ilan. Now, Ableton engineering teams, see how important the work you do on each release is? You never know when someone will run all of the different iterations you’ve built over the past four years at one time. Got it?

I think we need to invent a new prize for Only Because It’s There ingenuity. Suggestions? What should the trophy look like?

Ilan’s setup, blogged and translated by Google from Portuguese into English
Original Português

It’s a “tutorial,” in case you want to replicate the results. (In which case, I’ll have what you’re having.)

I will say this: inter-application communication is important, even if this isn’t the most practical example.

Original video (Português):

Ms. Pinky Revised from Mastah Lee on Vimeo.

What should DJing in Ableton Live look like? How could conventional vinyl cueing and scratching be integrated with the Live environment? Serato and Ableton gave us one possible answer to that question last week with The Bridge. Their solution: use your Serato DJ set normally, and simply sync the transport of Ableton Live when the two run simultaneously.

That solution could be ideal for some users, but it falls short of what many expected, which was the ability to scratch audio elements from Live as though they were on vinyl. Scratching Live clips would seem to be the best of both worlds: you get all the live sequencing features of Live, but you can still manipulate sound as you would on a turntable.

Enter Ms. Pinky. The vinyl control system has long been a highly-precise, solid-performing alternative to better-known names. Its ace in the hole has long been open control from your own custom patches, via an external object for the graphical programming language Max/MSP. The results have ranged from custom visual performance to a vibrating chaise lounge controlled by a turntable. With Max patches now able to interact more deeply with Live through Max for Live, that opens up the chance to build your own DJ-Ableton integration.

Ms. Pinky and Max for Live user Lee Goodrich has just done that. We saw an early version of the patch last month, but a new version irons vastly expands on the integration with Live, making this a truly complete solution for digital DJing.
Post on the patch with download
Information on the update

Some of the tasty features you get:

• Set Ms. Pinky to any track and use clips in that track
• Trigger a clip as you would normally, and it cues right into Ms. Pinky for scratching (see Lee in comments for more, but do note that the catch is that Ms Pinky actually loads the original file, because clips in Live don’t yet provide access to their playhead)
• Trigger different sequences of audio clips using a pattern contained in a MIDI clip (essentially automated cueing)
• Record clips using Live’s recording facility
• Scratch away with control vinyl

Games really are reshaping music. Despite their relatively simple gameplay, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises originated by developer Harmonix are stimulating interest in real music making. It’s no accident that you can walk into a Best Buy and, next to aisles of video games, find a growing selection of serious musical instruments and technology.

These titles are also stimulating interest in music and artists and producing a new distribution outlet, at a time when the distribution picture for music can seem bleak. But until now, that outlet has been limited to big acts, big tracks, and big deals with big labels. It has only promoted music you already know, not the discovery of new music. Rock Band Network could change all that.

We took a detailed look in August at how Rock Band Network worked technically, and how authoring a song for RBN could give you the same level of gameplay and choreographed graphics that the official Rock Band tracks get. But now here’s the big news: at long last, RBN is opening to the general public, starting with an open beta for artists and play-testers.

What it is: Rock Band Network is a new set of authoring tools (built around Reaper), a submission process (built around Microsoft’s Xbox 360 XNA Ceators Club), and an upcoming store to host indie tracks called the Rock Band Network Music Store.

What it costs: Rock Band Network membership is free, but you’ll need a $99/year XNA Creators’ Club Premium account to submit or test music.

There’s long been a massive gap in technique, capabilities, and workflow between DJ tools and performance, music production, and live electronics or live PA. Ableton Live’s original hook was that it
bridged performance instrument and arrangement tool. Now, in a product literally called The Bridge, we get Ableton’s and Serato’s first take on how to blend DJing and arrangement/electronic performance. It’s certainly not going to be the last word on the subject. On CDM in the past, we’ve discussed inserting DJ applications in Live, and using vinyl to scratch video (including with Serato’s own VIDEO-SL). The advent of Max for Live means new applications, like Ms. Pinky-powered virtual vinyl devices inside Live. But The Bridge has turned out to be something different, as I discussed Thursday.

And surprise: there’s even some relevance to Ableton Live users who might not normally ponder Serato, even if only to take advantage of improved transport operation in Live itself.

We’ve gotten to speak to Ableton and Serato representatives; see the short video of Ableton’s Dennis DeSantis and Ableton’s official overview of the tool, as shot by intrepid CDM NAMM contributor Neil Bufkin. Based on additional conversations, here’s what we know.

Ableton & Serato @ NAMM 2010 – The Bridge from Neil Bufkin on Vimeo.