Fans of the Nintendo DS may have been immune to the siren song of Nintendo’s tweaked DSi model. Unfortunately, I have a feeling a bunch of you are about to upgrade your handheld game system. Why? Because the folks at AQ Interactive are doing an upgraded version of the DS-10 software synth for the game platform, now on the DSi. Palm Sounds gets the scoop.

New in this version:

• Twice the analog synths (4 of them, instead of 2)
• Twice the drum machines (8 instead of 4)
• Twice the tracks (12 instead of 6)
• Expanded song mode: programmable track mute, realtime editing (that is, edit parameters inside the song mode

They’re also announcing distribution through retailers. The new features appear to be platform-specific — that is, all this doubling business appears to be thanks to the greater horsepower of the DSi. My guess – though this is unconfirmed – is that if you can get this for the pre-DSi DS, you won’t be able to switch to the “Dual Mode.” The other slight disappointment is that it doesn’t sound as though online features or collaborative features have been enhanced. On the other hand, AQ is promising that they’ll be in brick-and-mortar retailers, not the online-only distribution they had on the original. I’m hopeful that may also mean distribution outside the US — either for an online DSi purchase, perhaps, or for the cartridge. (The DSi still supports physical carts – hence the mention of retailers.)

The best part of all of this, though, is watching Nobuyoshi Sano – the composer/arranger behind Namco games like Ridge Racer and Tekken – do a Steve Jobs keynote impression.

Via Brandon at the best-game-blog Offworld, who notes that in US dollars this represents a $10 discount.

For those of you longing to mutate beats like so many promiscuous Petri Disk bacteria, programmer Bret Truchan is a kindred spirit. Bret has created a series of instant experimental classics for the Nintendo DS: glitchDS, a cellular automaton music sequencer, repeaterDS, a visual sample mangler, and cellDS, a grid-based sequencer you can script in Lua.

The Nintendo DS is portable and cute, but it’s not normally open to running software without the Nintendo Seal of Quality. (Insert snickers here.) To run Bret’s software, you need specialized hardware that fools the DS into running software. The DS isn’t entirely stable when it comes to things like timing, either, and it doesn’t have the flexibility of computers.

Enter the netbook. The netbook is nearly as portable, completely open to running whatever you like on Windows or Linux, and boasts easy USB connectivity, a big screen, and … well, you know, all the things you like about laptops. When it comes to musical productivity, much as I love the DS, the netbook has a whole lot going for it, and still has that added ultra-portability that makes you feel you can make music anywhere.

Bret recently made the jump to desktop software with Quotile, a step sequencer you can live-code for mighty morphing beats. Quotile is cool, but for many, glitchDS was the star. Now you can run glitchDS anywhere – just the job for a laptop you were going to retire, or that new netbook.

Not Sequencing, Glitch Sequencing

Glitch-sequencer is a sequencer, so it needs to either talk to a software synth or external hardware. Bret likes to hook it up to his machinedrum and monomachine. Our own Handmade Music event was the (unofficial) first public outing of the software, and included an HP netbook and the machinedrum, which makes for a sweet, mobile combination.

Despite the appearance of a grid and sequences of levels, this isn’t an app that works like a conventional sequencer. Here’s the basic breakdown:

• Cellular Automata via a seed + playback grid
• Trigger and value sequencers to determine which MIDI events the organically-generated mutations produce
• Pattern length, clock division settings for setting metric values
• Sync settings

The Cupertino-Mushroom Kingdom gap has been closed: you can now mix and match DS and iPhone/iPod touch for wireless control of music and visuals. DSMI, the homebrew library that has enabled wireless and serial MIDI connections from the Nintendo DS, has come to iPod touch and iPhone. That means anyone building instruments and controllers on the iThing can now add wireless MIDI controllers that talk to computers – or other mobile devices, including the DS. It also means that DSMI’s acronym standing for “Nintendo DS Music Interface” has only one word that describes all the things it does.

If you’re a developer, you can grab the open source (LGPL-licensed) code. If you’re a user, apps are already supporting the new wireless features. There’s MIDI Motion Machine, which provides tilt and 16 triggers, and iXY, a 99-cent app for KAOSS Pad-style X/Y touch control. The MIDI Motion Machine author, TheRain, takes an interesting approach: there’s both a free and pay version, and the free version has source code.

Tobias Weyand, DSMI’s original co-creator along with TheRain, writes:

My friend TheRain has ported DSMI to the iPhone! This enables iPhone deveopers to easily integrate wireless MIDI in their applications, making it possible to control any MIDI application on the PC with the iPhone. The Wifi-to-MIDI bridge is the same DSMI server application that is also used for the DS, thus it works with Windows, OSX and Linux.
Also, like on the DS, both OSC and MIDI are supported!

DSMI for iPhone is available from our Google Code site (http://code.google.com/p/dsmi/) together with an open source example application called MIDI Motion Machine that is a tilt-based xy-controller.

The cool thing is that this library takes away all the hassle of communicating MIDI messages to the PC and makes development of MIDI controllers very very simple. So, we hope that people will use the DSMI to create a lot of innovative iPhone MIDI controller apps.

Pretty cool, isn’t it? :-)

The creator of the wonderful glitchDS, repeaterDS, and cellDS Nintendo homebrew music apps has turned his sights to the free and open coding-for-artists desktop tool Processing. The result: a drum machine that mutates and morphs in wonderful ways via a command-line interface. (I almost put the command line bit in the headline, but while I actually adore command lines, I think the more interesting part of it is the way it mutates its patterns in lovely ways. No boring endless step sequence repeat here.)

The tool is called Quotile, and since it is built in Processing and the code is entirely free, you’re welcome to try it out and change it around if you like! Apparently the Mac camp are having some troubles, but I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t work on Mac; the problem is generally that getting Java MIDI running on Mac has some tricky bits because Apple dropped support for the Java MIDI API, even though it’s a standard part of the Java platform. In this case, I expect it’s the library’s reliance on mmj or people having trouble installing that MIDI subsystem that’s the culprit. Keep the faith: it can work, and I hope we can get a standard, reliable MIDI library soon.

The sound source above: Machinedrum, of course.

I’ll give this a try on Linux later today, on the platform that I think has the best MIDI support, hands-down – yes, even compared to the Mac. (I’ll explain why I think that soon.)

Speaking of MIDI libraries, the Processing library this is based on is a new one called MIDI Bus. It’s very similar to wesen’s rwmidi, which we’ve covered before.

The project:
Quotile – new PC MIDI sequencer written in Processing at glitchDS

The free library for Processing (Mac + Windows + Linux)
Small But Digital – themidibus

Previous musical creations in Processing:
Strange, New Musical Interfaces, Built in Processing
DIY 3D Controller: Inspired by Theremin, Powered by Arduino, Processing
Tiction: Animated, Nodal Generative Music App in Progress, in Processing
Build Your Own Game of Life Sequencer in Processing: Video Featuring rwmidi
Help! I’m Trapped in an Acid-Colored Wash of a Thousand General MIDI Pianos!
Spaces and Roots: Manipulating Sound with Processing + Touch, Tangible Interfaces

The Nintendo mobile is a solo instrument no more. Lovers of the Korg DS-10 cartridge for the Nintendo DS handheld are making their own ensembles. And one such trio is a selection of who’s who in Japanese game music.

The Korg DS Trio performed a celebrity concert after the Tokyo Game Show. GameSetWatch has an extensive interview with the three. Nobuyoshi Sano (composer, Ridge Racer series) and Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger) are two familiar names, joined by Michio Okamiya of Final Fantasy hard rock cover band The Black Mages. All three had input into the creation of the DS-10; two connected over drinks. (That’s one of my favorite places to have product meetings, coincidentally.) As a trio, they have the unique opportunity to cover their own music.

It’s interesting me, this aesthetic interest in miniaturizing and making the DS into this sort of musical device. It’s an interest that has been particularly strong traditionally in Japan, it seems. They have a lot to say about DS-10 and game music:

GameSetInterview: Korg DS Trio Talk App Creation, EXTRA Concert

Of course, part of the vision of DS-10 was to create a democratic tool for music creation, not just a toy for some of Japan’s leading game composers. (Hey, they do need to unwind, too!)

ThisIsNot shares his own DS-10 jam, this one a four-way jam in Melbourne, above. (Thanks for sending us the tip! You may have seen the jam blogged elsewhere, but I think some of the sites missed the video, which gives you some idea what they were up to.) He writes:

I was invited by Jed to join a korg ds-10 jam at More Bass recently as part of 13 years of IF records
there was Jed, Enclave, one others and myself playing. We didn’t sync the DS’s over wi-fi or anything and had no pre planned approach , so this was purely improvisation and jamming along.

4 way nintendo ds jam with korg ds-10 [Acid Box Blues]

Audio:

Lastly, our friends over at Boing Boing’s Offworld gaming blog have been all about the DS-10 lately. Receptors, aka 8-bit Operators curator Jeremy Colosine, has an exclusively DS-10 album. (Okay, the novelty is wearing off a bit after the all-Tenori-On and all-Kaossilator album and whatnot, but if it’s musically satisfying for the maker and the music’s good, I’m game!) It’s free for download from last.fm, so the music-per-dollar equation is off the charts.

If you haven’t yet seen it, you should definitely check out the DS-10-as-talkbox video demo, but the man who created it – Jetdaisuke – now puts together everything mobile we’ve been talking about for the last six months and plays, all at once, Bloom (iPhone / iPod touch), Mokugyo (with Cat) (iPhone / iPod touch), ElektroPlankton (DS, by Tenori-On creator Toshio Iwai), and Korg DS-10 (DS), plus a Korg Kaossilator. Impressive, but it is missing a Game Boy running Nanoloop and LSDJ, a PSP running PSPSEQ and PSP Rhythm, a Palm, a Windows Mobile device, a Nokia, rjdj, LPDJ, a SIDstation – the battle is on.

For those of you who are sick of mobile music, watch this video and see how high your blood pressure can go!

In fact, now, with the Game Developer Conference coming up, I think we need a DS Boys’ Choir with one hundred of these things playing at once, like a swarm of so many digital bees. Anyone know a good party to crash?