There’s a strange debate going on over the free software (as in freeware, not necessarily open source) issue of Computer Music magazine. After seeing the magazine’s top 10 reasons to use free software, commercial developer IK Multimedia got surprisingly defensive, and issued a rebuttal:

Why you shouldn’t use free software – a commercial developer’s view (at Music Radar, the online site for the magazine’s publisher)

Now, there’s probably a much simpler way to put this.

Why to use free software: It’s free.
Why to use free and open source software: It’s got source that’s free and open.
Why to use commercial software: It’s supported, and you probably can’t get exactly the same thing as free and/or open source.
Why to use a combination of all of the above: Because then you get a combination of all of the above.

(For more of the above, stay tuned for “Peter says not very interesting and obvious things Special Issue,” not coming to newsstands soon. The bonus disc includes a 2-oscillator virtual analog synth that has no interface and produces no sound.)

Why is this a Debate?

Obviously, most of us use a combination of different kinds of software. If you’re serious about using commercial software, you pay for it, because you’re serious about support and you’re smart enough to understand that if you don’t send the developer money, they won’t make any more software. If you love plug-ins, you try free plug-ins, because it gives you more tools, and if you believe in the power of communities and sharing for technology, open source software is at least part of your setup, too. I find even people running Linux passionately often use some proprietary software, like the recently-released EnergyXT for Linux or any combination of software they’ve bought inside the Windows compatibility environment WINE.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that, despite the rebuttal from IK’s UK representative, commercial developers were not calling Future Publishing to cancel ad accounts when they heard about the free software. They don’t host ritual burnings of Computer Music’s cover disc, nor spit on newsstands when these issues come out. Presumably, they instead assume the obvious, that these discs generate interest and get more people involved in the computer music market, which is good.Native Instruments, for instance, supported the issue and involved their own free Kore Player instrument.

But forget NI for a moment — how about IK? IK Multimedia have themselves long used free software editions to promote their for-fee tools; I included not one but two free instruments from IK on the cover disc of my book Real World Digital Audio. It was actually IK’s idea.

Now having said the obvious, there are elements of the software development landscape that are anything but obvious. If you work for a proprietary developer, you had better be thinking about some of these issues. When does it make sense for something to be free? How do you get people to pay for software, if that software requires money for development and you require money for rent? As musicians, when do we benefit from software being proprietary versus open source, and when to we benefit from paying for it versus getting it for free?

Richie Hawtin actually topped the list of people CDM readers don’t want us to interview at NY’s Minitek this weekend, which I’m tempted to take as a challenge. (Hey, I’m all for combating hype and talking to the many talented but under-appreciated artists out there. I just find it amusing how much negative energy Hawtin attracts.) In the meantime, CDM’s resident electronic scenester Liz McLean Knight notes that he has revealed some of how he works live on his blog.

M_nus label owner and minimal techno pioneer Richie Hawtin has eschewed the “trade secret” mentality (and ridiculous toupe-combover hairstyle, thank god!) and shared brief videos on his myspace blog explaining his live setup.

Traktor lies at the base of his arrangement, and in particular he makes use of Traktor’s Four Decks. Much in the way Ableton Live enables live syncing of basic elements, Hawtin uses elements of unfinished tracks, such as a partial demo track from label-mate Marc Houle, as building blocks in a live set.

And in a move that some people consider controversial in the DJing world, he admits to using the Sync function, as it allows him to focus on other things such as four-deck manipulation and playing with effects, a view to which digital musicians are more sympathetic.

Richie Hawtin: My Setup

I don’t think using four DJ decks can really be considered innovative any more, frankly — not with Ableton Live in common usage and live electronic musicians pushing in other directions. But this is how Hawtin works, and he’s more than entitled that. It’s also nice to see someone who actually uses NI’s four decks rather than just talking about them. And for all the hating around here, I do think Hawtin does deserve credit for having been at the digital DJ phenomenon from just about the beginning. (Whether that phenomenon has been a good thing, that’s a separate issue to debate.)

I’m equally interested to see, though, where people go next. I think Hawtin rightfully deserves credit for his taste factor and the influence that had — even if you hate him, here’s a guy who was able to really build a brand an a musical identity not only for himself but his label and self-imagined genre. If the ongoing attention following Hawtin seems disproportionate, perhaps that’s because others have failed to fill the void or find a way to be that successful moving in other directions.

Yes, that’s meant as a challenge.

Update: here’s a compilation of all the videos. (Thanks, Louis!)

Richie Hawtin 2008 DJ Setup from Dean Koch on Vimeo.

Cubase 4.5 is here, with CC121 controller and MR816 audio I/O hardware integration, some new sample content, and a mysterious new “media management” format called VST Sound. It is nice to see the hardware/software integration we’ve been clamoring for. But will developers actually start supporting VST Sound and VST3? Will I manage to find a way to get excited about Cubase? We can only wonder… and it’s time for some Steinberg advocates to speak up.

Cubase 4.5 was released last week as a free update for 4.x users. The main story is that it integrates with the CC121 hardware controller. You may recall the CC121 as the hardware controller I just didn’t get, because it requires mousing over the parameter you want to control so you can tweak it with the hardware knob. Well, now here’s a rather lame marketing video from Steinberg, which doesn’t help. (Video via AudioPorn Central. Not sure why companies insist on making things like this, but they do.)

Help! Our band is caught in THX 1138! Hint to Steinberg: this is what a marketing video should look like. Okay, maybe you didn’t want to dump paint on your CC121.

Monome Life, indeed. What makes the Monome so wonderful is not so much that the hardware and software itself are open source — nice as that may be — but that they have become a platform for experimentation and personalization. Max/MSP, now freshly injected with life following its version-5 release, has a similar ethos. Here are a couple of the creations that have impressed me most recently: a hacked-together implementation of The Game of Life in Max and Monome, and an impressive DJ app, dj64.

This is Your Life

Bean (blog | twitter | flickr) clearly very much loves his Monome, as indicated by the slideshow above. I recently spotted an interesting creation on the CDMusic Flickr Pool — an implementation of the iconic Game of Life simulation/game — and asked him about it.

I made it mainly just because I figured it should be possible. It’s not terribly efficient, and occasionally stutters, but that feels like part of its charm. It is monome tailored, but would run stand-alone with a little tweaking.

I’ve got the cleaned up version posted on my page of monome-specific patches:

http://www.fourthirtyeight.com/monome/#maxlife

There are a number of downloads there, including that one, so Max users, have at them!

An old PC laptop could be relegated to the closet or (worse, since it’s highly toxic) landfill. But filled up with tasty freeware plug-ins, it’s a virtual studio full of tools and oddities. Via the feast of gear that is the CDMusic pool on Flickr, our friend Jumahat Leman aka uncle bigbrown artfully captures his budget software setup, described as follows:

• A 4+yrs old Acer laptop (a desktop replacement to be exact)
• Ableton Live 5.01 w/lots of freeware VSTs
• using same earphones/headphones/ToneportGx for recording

** My observation:
If you’re a “free VSTs/plugins” hunter/user like me, there’s tons of them available for download for the Wins platform in the worldwideweb. That’s where “cheap” Mac users/lovers (like me) are at a disadvantage with our OSX. So its always good to have a Wins machine at your disposal…

The Mac doesn’t get left out either, though. A G4 tower has become a virtual guitar stompbox and recording studio:

• 9 yrs old Sawtooth “Earache” G4 Mac
• Ableton Live 5.01 w/freeware plug-ins
• $80 Toneport GX
• old iPod earphones or $50 Sennheiser Headphones (for recording/monitoring/mixing)

**most times i load the “mixed songs” into the iPod to listen/compare/mix and check eq/volume.

(The guitar is a PRS SE Paul Allender.)

If these visuals got your attention, there’s another lesson to be learned here. Not only does this visual illustration give you a sense of what his workflow is about and perhaps passes along some tips, but he uses photos and illustrations as a great promotional tool. It helps that Jumahat is a talented designer. I love his mini-portfolio, below. He also makes wonderful promotional posters and stickers. As I noted earlier this week, the ability to make something visually expressive that is meaningful to your music can be powerful - starting with album art, but going beyond that.

Or, to make a more important point, Jumahat has one of the only tasteful MySpace pages I’ve ever seen — and that’s a feat.

Happy weekend projects to everyone; hope this provides some inspiration.

drechohead, Jumahat’s MySpace page
echoinmyhead @blogpspot, with more visual goodies

Updated: Plug-in List

Now, the answers revealed. (See if you guessed any of these correctly.)

Nova (audio by Helios) from flight404 on Vimeo.

The rumor mill’s conventional wisdom is that iTunes 8 will be part of Apple’s music-themed press event next week. That’s a safe bet — iTunes 7 is clearly due for an update. But Allan White has some interesting speculation with which I’m inclined to agree. There’s an excellent change Robert Hodgin’s excellent Magnetosphere visualizer is going to become an official visualizer for iTunes 8. That’s be a big win for Processing (site | cdmo tag), the visual code “sketching” tool — and a likely time suck for your productivity next week, if true, as you stare into its hypnotic pulsing orbs. (Just fair warning.)

Allan White writes on his blog — a lovely visit for fans of music and visualization:

[Robert] Hodgins built a wonderful iTunes visualizer called Magnetosphere a while back - which mysteriously disappeared from his site a few months back. I wrote him, and he said that it had been sold to a third party. There’s strong evidence that this third party is in fact Apple, and that it may ship with iTunes 8, which could be shown as soon as next week at an iPod Event.

iTunes 8 Rumors: is Magnetosphere the New Visualizer?

One way or another, it looks like we will be getting the visualizer. And getting it officially would be terrific — it’s about time the fairly moribund world of visualizers was reignited. (Just remember, musicians, work with a real VJ/visualist when playing live for the full experience. End public service announcement.)

Magnetosphere Video
(Above, a reskinned take on the original — Robert does wonderful things with iterating his code)

Magnetosphere iTunes Plugin Page

Flight404 on Create Digital Motion

Universal Audio’s UAD-1, a sound processing platform built on DSP hardware add-ons for your computer, has gotten a much-anticipated sequel this week. The UAD-1 was always a favorite choice for sound production, delivering tasty analog-emulating sound tools on a PCI card platform. The UAD-2, on PCI-express cards, offer up to “ten times” the processing power of the original — supposedly even the single-processor model delivers a greater-than-twofold performance gain. The DSP hardware is just the platform, though, and Universal’s main push here is its plug-in developers. Sure, these days your CPU is a plenty-powerful sonic number cruncher, so I think it’d be a stretch to say anyone needs DSP cards. But what the platform can mean is plug-in goodies not available anywhere else, with a no-nonsense approach to sound that may not be as practical in native plug-ins. (And with support from software like Ableton Live, Apple Logic, and Cakewalk SONAR, you can then drop these into your host of choice.)

Here’s a look from around the Web at what people are saying about the UAD-2.

Oliver Chesler at Wire to the Ear notes what could be a real “killer app” / highlight of the UAD-2: a Moog multimode filter.

Welcome to Reaperworld. It’s an alternative universe, in which a “2.4.5″ update is huge. Released yesterday, it’s a new build for what might best be described as an “indie” DAW from the original creator of Winamp.

Check out the full feature list, but here are some highlights:

• “Solo in front” for easier soloing
• Track folding for MIDI to hide unused / unnamed rows
• Multimedia keyboard support, so you can use those silly, useless buttons PCs have for something cool
• Mute fades, so you don’t get that annoying pop on muting
• A ridiculous number of MIDI workflow and technical improvements

What’s really nice is I get an overwhelming sense that they’re improving the kinds of arcane MIDI and plug-in details that users would want improved. You know, there are all sorts of little annoyances you find when working that developers probably don’t think of. Those kinds of VST and MIDI improvements might not make big headlines at NAMM or in magazine copy, but then, that’s why so many users pour over release notes — these are the things they actually encounter working.

If you’re interested in using Reaper, now is the perfect time to point out the work Peter Dines has started trying to optimally combine Reaper and Native Instruments’ Kore, with Kore providing various live performance, sound design, sound cataloging, and synth/effect features:

Kore Host How-Tos: Reaper, Affordable PC/Mac DAW [Kore@CDM minisite]

Mac Experience?

I haven’t really had a chance to try the Mac beta; anyone on Mac had testing experience?

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.

Last month we saw Sarah Angliss using the Theremin as an audiovisual controller. If you’ve got a Theremin and want to try this yourself — or try some other similar continuous input — here’s a really simple example of a patch that converts audio to MIDI. It uses Pd, Max/MSP’s open-source cousin for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

If you haven’t used Pd before, you should download pd-extended. It’s a stable, friendly installer for Pd with all the documentation and extras you’d need. Pd can be tricky to install, but this is friendly to just about anyone.
Pure Data Downloads (choose “most recent release” for the latest stable build of pd-extended)

In this case, Charles Martin, a percussionist from Australia, whipped up this simple patch and the fiddle~ object (which analyzes incoming pitch) to control effects in Ableton. Very cool stuff. He describes the patch and includes copy-and-paste code here, though I actually recommend going through the image above one step at a time and recreating it to better understand what it involves.

Theremin to MIDI Control program in Pd [Charles Martin Percussionist Blog]