God Bless Russian engineering. As of this summer, it’s the only ticket to and from our space station, via a capsule that Just Works. It gaves us the very first electronic instrument (thanks, Professor Theremin). And it gives us an insane music tracker slash production tool slash soft synth selection slash modular hosting environment that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm, Windows Mobile (yes, you’re reading this list right), and now iOS and iPad.

Well, don’t just thank Russian engineering. Thank Alex Zolotov, who sends along his latest work. Highlights:

• Waveform drawing
• A drum synth
• Sample recording
• Side chain compression (top)
• iPad MIDI keyboard support (second from top)

Fortunately, if you’re not a mad scientist, we’ve got a lineup of videos that show you what all of this does and how to get started with this eminently affordable, insanely powerful tool. (Cue someone complaining in comments that they can’t read the interface, etc. Uh… well, you can’t have everything, eh? Bifocals?)

And in case you don’t believe this is a music tool, we even have some music created in it. (Actually creating digital music – interesting.)

Now, let’s Crash Adobe Flash(TM) with a bunch of videos:

More New Features

Where to Start

And yes, even where to start performing live on an iPhone / iPod touch:

More video tutorials:

SunVox Video Tutorials @ warmplace.ru Forum

Official SunVox page:
http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

SunVox, the quirky and cool modular music creation software, already runs on a ton of platforms. Starting now, most of those platforms can run the tool for free. (The one exception: iPhone/iPad.)

That means you get a rich music creation environment that can run on everything from an ancient PDA to a desktop computer, complete with FM, virtual analog, and sample-based synths, effects, modular routing, musical arrangement, and even tracker-level detailed editing, all for free. SunVox works on Mac, Windows, and Linux, plus mobile platforms Palm, Windows Mobile, and iPhone. In fact, it’s an ideal choice to resurrect one of the now-nearly-worthless yet still-very-powerful used PDA devices. Seriously: hit auction and used sites or ask someone for a device, or perhaps search your own closet, and you have an extra music-making device that costs you nothing. (I’ve heard some arguments about the iPad and value, and ditto $300 or $400 netbooks, but I’d like to see the iPad or new netbook compete with $20 or free.)

SunVox

That said, if you do own an iPhone or iPod touch, SunVox is a no-brainer at US$4.99.

And developer Alex Zolotov tells CDM he’s submitting an iPad version of SunVox for Apple’s new platform, as well, plus working on new features. Stay tuned.

Reware your PDA from Hans-Christoph Steiner on Vimeo.

Give a hoot – don’t pollute with your old mobile gear. Make musical creations with it instead, powered by Linux.

Sure, there are wonderful things happening with mobile music applications on platforms like the shiny, new iPhone. But remember how technology was supposed to democratize access? Lots of us don’t have the money for a new iPhone or iPod. And how many of us have outdated Pocket PCs and Palms collecting dust? How many of these highly toxic devices get thrown away?

Linux to the rescue.

One of the biggest hits of my talk at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon, Portugal was the mention of the Reware, a project by Hans-Christopher Steiner, who is doing research at New York’s Eyebeam. He has literally a box full of old PDAs – the kind a lot of people would give away at this point – which he has rescued in order to reuse as development platforms and musical devices.

There’s something just stunning about watching an old Pocket PC transformed into an interesting musical device. It’s like the feeling you get when you save a puppy with the help of a rescue / adoption agency, and instead of being put down, Buster turns out to be an agility champion. (Sorry. I really love dogs.)

Reware Project at Eyebeam

For a sample project, here you can dual-boot Linux on an old Palm:

Reware your PDA: dual boot Linux on a Palm TX from an SD card

Once you’ve done that, you can run your own creations and even Pd patches on your mobile. Even old iPods can work.

Pd Music Patching on PDAs

It’s a little trickier to recycle older embedded devices than it is desktop computers: for one thing, many of these devices lack floating-point calculation capability. (The FPU on the iPhone is one of the things that makes it so nice.) For fans of the multimedia environment Pd (Pure Data), the variant PDa (“Puredata anywhere”) is the solution. It rewrites signal processing as fixed point (integer) processing. It’s nowhere near as fast as a floating point-native Pd, and there are some other caveats, but there’s still a whole lot you can do with it. This is also good news for the currently-shipping Google Android handset, the HTC G1, which also lacks an FPU.

PDa 

Gunter Geiger is responsible for PDa, with help from lots of other folks. Now Hans is packaging all this stuff together to make it easier to run.

See it in Person; More Soon!

If you’re in the New York area, next week Hans is coming to Handmade Music to show off the work he’s doing. Check out the lineup on our new, evolving Handmade Music minisite:

http://handmademusic.noisepages.com/

That’s free, 7:30pm Thursday, May 21 in Brooklyn at 3rd Ward.

For fans of Android, I’ll be talking about development on Google’s own open source, Java-based mobile platform, which also runs the Linux kernel.

Android is itself getting ported to alternative platforms, again thanks to the magic of GNU/Linux and open source. Here’s just a small sampling:

Android Ports and Hacks Round-up

If Android also gives us native library access, it could become powerful for music. Even with just the 1.5 SDK, there’s a Java library for interactive music production. Both projects should cross-pollinate, though, because of the common Linux kernel between them.

If you’re not in the New York area, we’ll post details early next week about a live webstream. And we should have additional video after the event.

Hans and I are also working on getting Pd running on the BUG, which is both open-source software and hardware.

To round things out, here’s a video by Public Radio International’s Takeaway, showing how Hans is working with hackers doing other super-cool projects at Brooklyn’s NYC Resistor. It’s just one of many hacklabs sprouting all over the globe.

Apple’s iPhone should be a herald of a new age in interface design. But now, with speculation that Apple and Palm could get into a patent battle, and murky concerns about patents in multi-touch interface design in general, it’s unclear how much intellectual property legal wrangling will have to happen first.

I’m going to resist turning this into a long rant – partly because I think the jury is out on so many issues. It’s never been entirely clear what Apple continues sacred in its intellectual property on the iPhone. It’s even less clear – with similar multi-touch designs spreading back decades and murky law around gestures in general – what their legal standing is. No one knows at this point whether there will actually be a lawsuit between Palm and Apple (or which direction). But one thing I can say with confidence: we need alternatives to Apple. Even if you love your iPhone, I think you’ll agree it’d be tragic if other vendors didn’t push the technology forward. And we need alternatives like Google Android that support real open development, release free and open source code, and provide an option to Apple’s deeply proprietary, restrictive development platform. Innovative music software in particular won’t be able to thrive if alternatives are closed or nonexistent.

Here’s a quick look at where we’ve been, and where things are:

This has been a storm cloud since the beginning. Me, in January 2007, immediately following the keynote: Macworld: Will Apple Keep its iPhone Closed? Multi-Touch Patents? (I wish I had been wrong. No one believed me at the time that these two areas would be big issues.)

The original tech predates the iPhone. Engadget in 2007 on Apple’s multi-touch roots – FingerWorks gave them a patent portfolio and some key technology.

Google may have dropped out of the race. VentureBeat has a source that claims Google voluntarily dropped multi-touch to keep Apple happy. Even if that’s not true, I think potential legal battles with Apple – and the incorrect notion among consumers that this is Apple’s invention – could have a chilling effect. Update: There may indeed be some chilliness in the air, but there’s strong evidence that Google didn’t “cave” to Apple somehow — they just didn’t get around to it. And a multi-touch G1 may not be far off. Just asked the guy who’s already hacked the G1.

Both Apple and Palm are loaded up with patents – and no one knows what will happen. Engadget analyzes the potential for a Palm/Apple legal standoff – but there are two major issues here. One, Palm has a healthy patent portfolio of their own, meaning they could counter-sue. Two, no one knows if anything will come of this – aside from some saber rattling, we’re not even sure there will be a suit.

Just to keep things in perspective, though: I think multi-touch in general is safe. It’s a technology coming to phones, mobile devices, computers, Windows 7, Synaptic trackpads, Linux … the list goes on. To me, the question is whether developers will be free to try ideas without lawyers breathing down their necks, and that’s very much an open question.

And I think the deeper questions about whether open development, as on Android, can be competitive, may prove to be more important in the long run. Apple aside, we need more common-sense, modernized patent law – even if the Android in this case voluntarily dropped a feature, you can see that the issues are linked. And we need to have open development if people are to have freedom to experiment with design. This is about more than Palm and Apple; it’s about how we interact with our tech.

Assuming you’ve survived hours of waiting on line or weathered various technical problems, Apple’s app store is online. Anyone with iTunes can have a look; it’s right inside the iTunes Store (formerly the iTunes Music Store). But while Apple’s development platform is impressive, early in the game a lot of the actual music apps seem to me to be, frankly, underwhelming. (Some of the non-musical apps look far better, like the lovely free client for awesome note-taking service Evernote.)

Click through to App Store > Music, and you may feel like you’ve entered a time warp to simplistic handheld music apps from the Palm and Windows Mobile platforms, only dressed up with shiny new eye candy – and $5 and $10 prices. You’ve got your choice of several guitar tuners and metronomes, and various sound toys that mimic instruments. Also, I find the iTunes interface rather annoying. You get a bunch of shiny icons but it’s hard to find specific tools. So, after all these years, are we still struggling to catch up to late 90s Palm apps? Really?

There is one potential standout: Karajan is a polished-looking handheld music theory tool for quizzes on intervals, chords, scales, and pitch. Then again, Karajan will cost you US$15. For free, you could head to Ricci Adams’ musictheory.net and get more detailed lessons and trainers in your browser. (It’s even Creative Commons-licensed, so if Flash ever runs on iPhone, we could see a port.)

Don’t get me wrong. The platform’s new, and I expect we’ll see better offerings over time. In fact, I think it’s natural that early offerings would be on the simple side. The problem is, the hype from the iPhone loving crowd is amped up so high, you begin to feel like we’ve left reality entirely. I wonder if the press will overlook real handheld music apps, like the powerful offerings available for PSP and Nintendo DS. And I feel obligated to point out that, bizarrely, you can get a heck of a lot more power for handheld music by hacking a game system and download free games than you can by paying hundreds of dollars on hardware, potentially many hundreds on service, and (in many cases) spending money on apps for Apple’s official mobile platform. (Maybe some of the talented developers are more drawn to the hacked platforms, anyway, contrary to conventional wisdom – partly because so many interesting mobile apps are labors of love, done outside their day job.)

To have a really good time, I’d be tempted to fire up a used Palm or PocketPC for the wealth of music apps available on those platforms – real sequencers, notation software, and unusual instruments. And that’s to say nothing of the PSP and DS. Sure, the iPhone may have powerful hardware, but as we’ve seen with Nintendo (ahem) that doesn’t necessarily yield great game design. I’m not crazy, right? Doesn’t this look like more fun to you, too? And without the hassle of a big mobile carrier. (The iPod Touch, at least, fares better, and it’s not as though there are many cool apps for the Zune.)

Then again, maybe all of this is a good thing. Old hardware is notoriously hard to recycle, hard on the environment, and loses its value quickly. Musicians, after all, form affectionate relationships with old instruments. Maybe it’s best to leave the disposable gadget culture to the tech freaks, and go find tools that’ll really give us a musical experience. Someone’s got to pick up those cheap eBay PDAs.

Updated: See comments for some insight from Chad, who’s written some awesome PalmOS apps at minimusic.com. He talks a bit about some of the specific hurdles facing developers for writing mature music apps — which, by definition, are tougher to develop and more demanding of the platform.

Given the iPhone/iPod Touch OS’ audio features and horsepower, there are clearly some interesting apps down the road. But then, that’s part of why I point out that this generation is a bit lacking — it’s because I think it’s a shadow of what’s possible and what we should see. We’ll be watching.

AxisPad miniMusic [Product Page]

Interestingly, the X/Y pad here can both control internal sounds (designed in miniMusic’s own software), or act as a MIDI controller for sending data to other devices or software. US$19.95, with a full demo available; could be worth it as illustrated below. miniMusic also make various other nice tools for the Palm platform, this being just one of them.

In fact, the only hardware left out is the Windows Mobile / PocketPC platform, unless anyone knows of a solution. (I wonder if miniMusic’s stuff will work with StyleTap, which lets you run Palm software on Windows Mobile gear.)

Other X/Y controllers? Do let us know.

BeatPad 1.1 is an update to miniMusic’s pattern sequencer. The “point-one” is actually a pretty major upgrade:

Built-in sounds: The Krikit soft synth is now built-in, so you can incorporate multi-timbral, polyphonic sound on supported Palm devices (including the Treos).

Pattern features: Pattern chaining and a library for organizing your patterns

MIDI export: Here’s the real killer feature — you can export beats as MIDI files, so you can use your Palm as a scratchpad, then load into Reason / Live / Logic / whatever when you get home. (That’s missing in most other handheld software I’ve seen.)

US$29.95 on its own, but miniMusic has also introduced its Pro Music Suite, with BeatPad, the NotePad notation app, and the SoundPad synth editor (for creating Krikit sounds for the other two apps). Plenty of other ssoftware from these guys, too, including a Kaoss Pad-like X/Y touchpad synth called AxisPad, coming soon. We’ll be watching. (Of course, I’m still PocketPC loyal; anyone know if there’s a Windows Mobile app that supports MIDI export?)

Cris (aka atariboy) sends us Theremin emulators for your PDA — it’s theremin to go. Cris writes:

Pete Moss ThereMini (US$10):
This guy has a Theremin emulator with MIDI out, no less! For PalmOS on his Palm software page.

Got a PocketPC? check out Clanger. (Free) You can even change the tremelo rate and decay time.

Cool stuff. Got an app you love for your Palm, PocketPC, or phone? Let us know. (Okay, my current favorite phone app is the “off” function, but how about you?)