Steinberg announced today that their Cubase iC controller app for iPhone and iPod touch is now available. If you’re a Cubase 5 user, this app gives you loads of control over your set wirelessly. It looks great, even if you have an existing controller – it’s just like having an extra, more pocket-able remote control. Control features:

• Position: Check out the clever position displays and feedback
• Transport: You can jump to markers, toggle the metronome and precount and cycle, and punch in recording.
• Arranger: Turn arranger on and off, play, and jump within an arrangement. You even get interactive buttons with labels for arrangement points, as pictured below.

If you’re a Cubase user, go enjoy:

Cubase iC

If not, I know what you’re thinking – how can I do stuff like this with other software?

Sometimes, audio products come in sexy, exciting packages. But sometimes, they simply solve a set of problems. And the products that fit into the latter category can be as beloved (dare I say sexy), if not more so.

Since I first saw a prototype in the fall, I’ve been eagerly awaiting trying out Cakewalk’s V-Studio 100. It immediately resonated with features I wanted to see in hardware. Rather than talk the specs, let’s talk about the kind of problems you might like to solve in your mobile rehearsal, production, and performance rig:

• You want to mix live, but don’t want to carry a mixer. You’ve got a laptop set, but you’re mixing it with other sources – and you want to be able to add live instruments / voices / Nintendo DS / circuit-bent creations to your main output without routing through the computer (which also saves your bacon when the machine crashes / you accidentally overload the CPU in Live)
• You want to record your live sessions. ‘Nuff said. Sure, you have a portable recorder, but then you have to patch it in…
• A lot of the time, you reach for the mouse because a control surface wasn’t convenient. And then there’s the fact that, while keyboards now often have mixer controls, the faders aren’t motorized.
• You want to carry less gear, but you really need an audio mixer and some live effects and some recording and a control surface for your software mix.

And, of course, yours truly has been sort of encouraging all of these problems with talk of Game Boys and iPhones and custom-built Theremins and actually playing live instruments and pushing your Live set to the envelope and … oh yeah, then you want to record the whole thing.

I can’t vouch for whether the V-Studio 100 fulfills all my wishes just yet, because I don’t have the thing here. But while there are inevitable compromises in multi-function designs, the V-Studio 100 is set up in a way that appears to come close to what I think a whole lot of us need as laptop musicians. And despite the Cakewalk name, it’s actually aimed at users of a variety of Mac and Windows tools:

What could a pocket-sized computer be? It could be a new kind of album extra (yawn), a new kind of generative musical format that samples and responds to the world around it (whoo). It could be a more effective controller (fun), or an Indian drone (really). The Apple iPod touch / iPhone, as always, brings both wonder (potential as an art platform or recording device) and trouble (respectively, restrictions on who can see your art and problems actually getting mic input or transferring files). So here’s this week’s snapshot of what’s happening on Apple’s micro-sized pocket Mac phone mediaplayer thing.

First, some quick updates that I’m genuinely pleased about:

Ableton Live controllers are suddenly everywhere, in commercial products and DIY creations. But an in-progress prototype being designed by Serbia-based creator Sasa Djuric, found on the CDM Flickr pool, goes the extra distance to integrate more effectively with the software. The hardware looks more like the on-screen UI, for starters – an elusive objective for many controllers. And by working with the Mackie Control protocol, Sasa is able to make communication between hardware and software fully bi-directional, so the controller gives you essential feedback. There’s even a facility for scratching. The design is based on the popular MIDIbox platform.

Sasa writes with details of what the creation process is like. It’s all still very much in progress, so we’re really excited to see how it evolves into a finished design.

Sasa explains (with videos to follow):