Now, Rax is due for a major update, and it’s getting one, in the form of a new UI, powerful routing, and clever MIDI mapping capabilities. It’s still not for everyone — there are other instrument/effects hosts, there are features in DAWs like Ableton Live’s Racks, and of course Kore. But it could be a worthy addition to your Mac arsenal, and it promises to fit certain production and performance jobs very, very well. Beyond Rax, the whole category, including those other tools, could use more attention and more active musicians. I hope the developers of those other tools have a good look at Rax 3, while they’re at it (or second look, in the case of Apple). More on this soon; in the meantime, here’s a preview video:

Rax 3 Sneak Peek from Audiofile Engineering on Vimeo.

Via primasluta on Twitter.

plasq, the wonderful people who brought us Skitch and Comic Life, have been giving their audio tools new lives rather than orphaning them. We’ve already seen plasq’s live performance-savvy instrument and effects host Rax show up as an Audiofile Engineering product, and AE in turn recently promised in comments that great things were coming for Rax.

Now, we have some great news for Wormhole2: it’s gone open source:

Wormhole2 @ Google Code

Product Page and Features (still up at press time)

Discussion at plasq.com Forum

End users can just download AU (Mac) and VST (Windows) binaries, plus a PDF manual. It’s even a Universal Binary for Intel Macs.

Developers: because VST isn’t an open-source format, you have to download Steinberg’s VST SDK to use it, but plasq will actually go the trouble of sending you the files once you agree to Steinberg’s license agreement. (AU isn’t either, but Apple ships all the developer tools you need with the OS.)

I’m really hopeful someone will build something cool with this. You’ll need something else to route MIDI (though the Mac does that over networks out of the box, cough, Windows). But there are powerful audio-over-network options here which would be hard to work out on your own. It’s unclear how useful Wormhole2 will be to the existing, open source JACK audio project, which is also capable of routing audio between apps and (via netjack) networked computers. JACK uses a client/server model as opposed to Wormhole’s plug-in approach. But for end users, having both tools available free is a very good thing, and the price tag is an extra incentive to be brave and see if these tools can help power up your rig.

You may also recall that Audiofile Engineering recently rescued the excellent instrument and effect host, Rax – formerly developed by our friends at plasq. It is clear that Apple borrowed heavily from Rax’s design choices and intentions with their new MainStage application (bundled with Logic 8) but with its impressive features, custom interfaces for audio units, cool visualizer support, and active development, Rax is still the application to beat in this domain.

Competitive upgrade, crossgrade and educational pricing, sleek new icons, one of the finest audio application suites in the industry (and did we mention a simple, non-draconian form of authorization?) – Audiofile Engineering has definitely brightened the days for Mac users this season!

Rax, the clever audio effect and instrument host for Mac, got a major update last year with performance rigs, custom visualizer support, and a slick UI designed by plasq. It’s an ideal tool for loading up some instruments and effects and playing on your Mac, especially if you want software that gets out of your way while you play another instrument or sing and don’t need a full app like Logic or Live onstage. But it never caught on with Mac users, even after I wrote a glowing review in Macworld. And it has certainly been overshadowed by more popular plasq products for the general Mac market, like Comic Life and the upcoming Skitch. So it was clear this unknown gem needed a new home.

Happily, Rax has now changed hands to another of our favorite small developers, Audiofile Engineering. Their Wave Editor has won over CDM’s game composer / contributor Brent, so we’ll be curious to see how they handle Rax. They’ll be supporting existing customers (few of them as there are out there, I expect there’s a good chance they’re reading this). Their 2.1.0 update is a minor release to bring Rax into the AE fold:

• New Preferences window
• Integrated Help Desk
• Updated About Box
• New licensing system
• Removed PYMIDI framework, replaced with Audiofile MIDI framework

Interestingly, in their press release the developers at AE note that Rax, with its pure-Cocoa implementation and unique design, was an inspiration for their tools. (Also inspired by Rax: fluqe OnStage, a Logic Pro set management tool used by the Arctic Monkeys, among others, that I hope got some notice from the folks at Apple for the next Logic!) And Rax will continue to grow based on its existing features:

• 16-channel mixer, with 25 effects racks
• Setup of sets and songs for live gigs, with notepads / lyrics for each and preset management for your AU plug-ins
• MIDI file playback
• Live audio inputs
• One-click recording
• Live visualizer support (via Quartz Composer)
• Slick UI redesigns of the included, free Apple plug-ins
• OnStage view that you can see easily while you play an instrument

For more information:

About Audiofile Engineering
New AE Rax Product Page
Rax announcement at plasq

From my review for Macworld.com:

Rax 2.0, a music utility from plasq, the creators of Comic Life, brings the same kind of easy access to virtual musical instruments and effects plug-ins that Apple’s Front Row provides for music, videos, and photos. With a virtual mixer, a facility for creating custom songs and sets, and a full-screen OnStage mode with support for live visualizers, this radically redesigned new version makes playing live music with your Mac easier than ever before, for both the casual musician and the gigging professional. It acts as a digital hub for instruments, effects, and visuals in the studio and on stage.

Macworld Review: Rax 2.0

I’m really impressed with the utility, particularly for its innovative interface, and the ease with which it allows you to manage songs and sets for performances. I’m surprised, honestly, that more Mac musicians haven’t noticed Rax, so feel free to spread the word to those who would benefit from it. I wish software like Ableton Live had the same kind of set management features.

The only real bad news, through no fault of plasq’s, is that you’re restricted to using Rax with plug-ins; it doesn’t work with built-in instruments and effects from GarageBand, Logic, or Live. If you’re a Logic user, you’re in luck; see OnStage. But it’s too bad there’s no seamless solution for managing sets in Live, an otherwise brilliant tool for live performance (hence the name).

Rax is also notable for its ability to switch fluidly between visuals generated in Quartz Composer, the free Mac developer tool and visual synthesizer. Rax comes with a rich set of sample visuals built in QC, and you can add your own. It might be worth a look for this feature alone, if you’re a Quartz Composer fan, particularly since it lets you work around some of the issues with getting MIDI and audio input into QC so that your visuals follow your playing. Watch Create Digital Motion for a follow-up story on that, or the previous story from CDMusic below.

I’m working more with Rax and hope to share some power tips with the program soon, including some hacks for making it work with Live via AppleScript. Stay tuned.

Previously:
Front Row for Music: plasq Rax 2, Mac Music Host, Takes You Onstage

Create Musical Visuals with Rax and Quartz Composer on Mac: Free Software Download

Feel free to share your feedback or questions on Rax and the review here.

Update!: Paul wrote in to tell us that he’s found a source of polymorph in Australia, at the soldergeekly favourite Jaycar! It’s reasonably expensive at $10/100g, but the material is infinitely reusable, and if you have an ABN you can get it through Jaycar’s wholesaler, Electus.

How is this relevant for CDMu readers? Well if you’re able to browse a few pages of CDM stories tagged “DIY” and not end up with a brain full of custom controller ideas, then you must have a much more focussed brain than I do. I’ve been working on a more visually focussed prototype, and as I couldn’t get my hands on any thermoplastics I ended up using casting resin.

Resin gives you a very pretty result but it’s not much fun to work with. Unless, of course, you enjoy inhaling noxious fumes, getting dizzy and spending the rest of the afternoon on the sofa with a headache (I’ve purchased a proper fume mask for my next batch). For a prototype it’s way too time consuming and permanent, so I’m still looking around for thermoplastics. The fact that Keith found my site and has had similar troubles locating any in Australia indicates that there may well be others out there in our situation.

So if there are any Australian readers who can help us find please hit the comments. If you’re also looking for this stuff leave a comment too and we’ll notify you when we’re successful in tracking some down.

Ed: I definitely want to make sure Jaymis gets some of this stuff in Australia because then he and I can work on DIY projects using it and share the results with you loyal CDMers! I’m also interested in hearing if any of you know about this material or alternative materials and want to tell us about your experiences with it, so non-Australians, please hit comments, too! -PK

That’s where plasq’s Rax 2.0 comes in. As we saw earlier this week, Rax lets you build set lists for performance, with different software instruments and effects loaded for each song. Here’s the cool bit: Rax also lets you load Quartz Composer visuals. Since you can load different visuals for each song, you can use Rax to easily switch between QC compositions. (In fact, if visuals are what you really care about, Rax could even be thought of as a MIDI and audio-savvy VJ hosting application.)

On top of making it easy to switch between visualizations, Rax is set up to make MIDI assignments much easier. Rax’s custom QC template allows compositions to:

Receive Midi notes (in a ‘friendly’ format) from multiple devices
Receive ‘Learnable’ CCs messages formatted into a Rax Quartz Composition standard
Receive audio levels directly from the Rax output
Receive CPU usage information (allowing your composition to scale its usage accordingly, if required)
Change your Quartz composition with each song in your set.

(Source: Rax/Quartz Composer “SDK”)

And the beauty of all this is, you can make your visuals look like whatever you want.

Here’s all you have to do: go grab the templates, instructions, and tester application from plasq, plus a copy of Rax, and you’re good to go. The template takes care of what would otherwise be some messy MIDI and audio routing; the tester application lets you see the results, try out MIDI and audio, and test CPU load.

If you make any interesting visuals, send them our way!

1. Set Lists and Performance: Rax was always an easy and useful way of hosting AU plug-in effects and instruments, with full control for MIDI and audio routing. But you probably don’t have the same setup in every song. Rax lets you set up a series of songs as a set for a stage performance. This is clearly essential for bands and live performers, but I’ll bet even many electronica-oriented artists and DJs will find it useful. There’s also no reason you can’t configure useful sets for studio use, too.


2. Front Row for Music: Ever seen Apple’s media app, Front Row? With the new Macs, press a button on the wireless Apple Remote, and your Mac enters a full-screen mode for playing your media files (video, tunes, photos, etc.). Now imagine that idea, applied to music, and you’ll be close to Rax 2’s OnStage mode. A full-screen mode shows your set list in large print, stores notes about each song, monitors MIDI and audio levels, and lets you switch from song to song. It’s all big enough that you can see it from a distance, and so that you don’t have to hover around your QWERTY keyboard, Rax features . . .


3. Remote Control: Use any MIDI controller or even the wireless Apple Remote (if you have a newer Mac) to switch between songs.


4. OnStage UI: A high-contrast UI with a bright border is visible even under poor lighting, from a distance, onstage. (Yep, been there.)


5. Recording and Playback: MIDI file playback gives you the ability to load simple backing tracks with your sets. One-click audio recording lets you save your finished performance for posterity.


6. Re-Skinned Apple Plug-ins: Apple has some very high-quality AU plug-ins that come free with Mac OS X; they’ve even been adding new ones in recent OS releases.


7. Built-in Quartz Composer Visualizations: Here’s the surprise feature. You can run real-time visuals driven by audio and MIDI from your Rax setup, using either built-in visualizations or by building your own in Quartz Composer. (Building your own is a little tricky, especially if you’re unfamiliar with QC; watch this space for a tutorial.) Since it’s been challenging to get useful MIDI control over Apple’s free visual development tool, and even harder to switch between patches in performance, Rax could be useful to VJs and visualists as well as musicians. Best of all, thanks to the fact that the visualizations are extremely modest in their usage of CPU (the visuals run primarily on your graphics card GPU), you can run the visualizations alongside your soft synths and effects on the same computer. Naturally, this runs on a second display, so you can run your visualizers on a projector while your “heads-up” display for your set list shows up on your laptop. (Video, incidentally, would be trickier as it is quite CPU-intensive — for that you’d want a second machine.)

In short, you have a host that actually understands what’s needed for performance, from an interface you can see to robust remote control and easy switching between songs and sets.

And the whole product could be yet another reason to buy a MacBook. It’s a Universal binary, of course (though you’ll need Intel-native plug-ins as always), and optimized for dual-core chips. The word I’ve heard from plasq’s internal development that the visualizations work just fine on the integrated graphics chip on the Intel minis and MacBook, so you don’t even need the more advanced graphics card on the MacBook Pro.

Cost: US$49.95
Compatibility: Mac-only, Audio Unit plug-ins, Universal binary
Availability: Now (30-day demo available)

I’ve been playing with the beta for several weeks, and it looks very promising. Congratulations in particular go out to long-time CDM reader and occasional contributor Cris Pearson (aka atariboy) for his thoughtful design work for plasq! This month you can stay tuned for more coverage on this program and how to use it, here and on Create Digital Motion. In the meantime, go grab that demo and let us know what you think:

plasq.com – Rax 2

Enjoy!
Of course, the real reason I bring this up is I’d love to get some help making music-themed comics using plasq’s superb Comic Life. Any takers?

Wormhole2 is a plug-in that lets you route audio via a network, between any computers you’ve got handy (Mac or PC). You could save processing power by letting different machines handle CPU-intense effects and instruments, or share audio onstage. (You’ll need to send sync separately.)

It gets cooler, especially with new features added to version 2:

Automatic configuration

Easy routing and option configuration, via a gorgeous interface by CDM reader Atariboy

Low-latency, and automatic latency compensation for round-trip audio

VST (Mac/Win) and Audio Unit (Mac), US$49.95. By the way, if you remember this as an apulSoft app, you may have notice it’s gotten the plasq treatment, from some of our favorite (and now award-winning) music developers. Go try the demo and let us know what you think!