Ah, Internet rumors: so adorable, so not actually true. But this one does demonstrate that people eagerly await the ability to edit audio with more flexibility. Something about Melodyne fires up the imagination.

Celemony caused a big stir last year with a video demonstrating Melodyne DNA technology – Direct Note Access. The YouTube video itself went semi-viral, demonstrating a kind of holy grail in computer audio: the ability to seamlessly edit audio note-by-note, even in a polyphonic texture, as easily as you can MIDI patterns.

Then, this month, a rumor started spreading through the forums that Celmony was “in a panic.” An alleged copy of a magazine I’ve never heard of, “Real Music,” claimed the mad scientist behind the technology had failed. The copy:

For lovers of the simplicity and fun of the Casio VL series, a successor seems is finally here. The Operator-1 (OP-1), even in prototype form, has us hot and bothered more than anything we’ve seen recently. We’ve been able to snag some additional details.

MusicRadar got a video with the creators, though you won’t learn anything new from that. In the interview, Teenage Electronics are just as tight-lipped as they were on the website, and the video “demo” is basically watching the OLED screen light up inside a glass case, with no sound – the prototype just isn’t ready to do more out in public yet.

However, our friend Nostromo did manage to get some other details.

• Swedish All Stars: The team includes veterans of Elektron, the ACNE design firm that worked on MachineDrum and MonoMachine packaging and UI, and Johan of LSDJ fame.
• Casio love: The inspiration is, not surprisingly, hardware like the Casio VL-1.
• Pricing: It’s unofficially expected to be “under the 1000 Euros mark." Note that the target price is EUR600, which is pretty far under EUR1000. Anywhere near that, and it’s a steal.
• Production: They do plan to put this into production. (I believe that, despite my awesomeness vs. shippingness graph – I’d love for them to be the exception.)
• The “mystery” sequencer: It sounds as though it won’t have a tracker as a sequencer, but may bring other “Swedish surprises” as Nostromo puts it.

Back from the messe [nostromo@noisepages]

And a friend of ours also sent along some impressions from the booth (with an even more encouraging target price, if they can pull it off):

The Operator-1 was under glass, so I couldn’t touch it. It is made of solid aluminum, and about an inch wider and longer than a nano controller (have you gotten yours yet, btw?). The OLED [Organic LED] screen is predictably gorgeous, and you really have to be off-angle for the contrast to be affected. It has a USB-rechargeable battery,

It has a rechargeable battery, but no real indication of what battery life is yet.  There’s a 1/8” in, and I was told It will apparently have sampling “in the future.”  They’re looking to hit a price of around 600 Euros, but who knows.  They’re currently working very hard on the sequencing bits.

Also shown by Teenage Engineering are these concept alarm clocks. When they’re not just empty boxes, they’ll have 16×16 LED displays, and the internal synth workings of the Operator-1. Wake up each day to a different synthesizer sound! This would last 10 seconds in my apartment, before I throw it across the room in a groggy haze.

Keep in mind, nothing here should be considered official or on the record. This is stuff that was overheard in the booth, and for a design that’s in-process. I can tell you from having worked with designers that finding price points is incredibly hard, so I feel their pain – even if you want to charge x amount, you may have to balance that against other design compromises you don’t want to make, to say nothing of scale.

Official information from their blog on the beta:

The Beta sign-up is non-binding and all of you who has signed up, will get a confirmation email when the time is right.  • The Beta release is scheduled (very) late this year.  • The hardware dev. is on schedule and will be finalized before summer.  • 4 synth modules are completed and 4 more are under dev.   • We will mail more information next week to all Beta prospects.

But I can certainly say, the thousands who signed up for the beta and I are very, very eager to watch this evolve.

And I want to wake up to those alarm clocks.

Apple is doing a live event to unveil new notebooks in Cupertino on Tuesday, confirms Engadget. It’s accompanied by one of the most unambiguous Apple teaser images ever, seen at right. (Guess they got tired of the overactive imagination of the rumor mill.) I expect this means one of two things:

1. Cosmetic changes, under-the-hood tweaks, don’t care that much. Hey, a pretty, new Apple laptop is all fine and good, don’t get me wrong. But PC notebook makers have in recent months rolled out new hardware improvements a lot faster than Apple, and often at a much lower price. That’s not to say the Apple don’t make a very good or even better deal … just that what generally happens is, looking at Apple’s lineup, improvements tend to get bundled together. Maybe I just hate the MacBook Air because it’s beautiful, I don’t know. So, I think this could be big news in the sense that people waiting to upgrade could be very happy, just not earthshaking news. Then again, what we could see is…

2. Multi-touch screens on the whole line. Now that could be interesting. Commodity touchscreens on laptops already appear imminent on PCs in general, so it’s not hard to see Apple getting into the game. And while many people rightfully point out that touch in a laptop form factor isn’t all that practical, for musical applications and live onstage use, it’s a dream.

All bets are off Tuesday.

Updated: Okay, so what we got was basically (1) — except that I missed the “and critical FireWire ports get Steved” part:

… on Create Digital Motion: New GPUs, Connectors; Non-Pro Changes and Did Apple Just Eliminate All S-Video, Composite Video Output?

… on Create Digital Music: Whither, FireWire? What the New Apple Laptop Port Changes Mean for Audio

For anyone who thinks Mac users are superficial and care only about form factor, ahem, we’re going to be talking about jacks. Got it?

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

Updated: Let me sum this up. Ableton may or may not have a vocoder in the works (signs actually do point to yes on that). The best part of this story is the remixed “no one needs a vocoder” video, which encapsulates electronic music’s current love/hate/cliche relationship with the thing. And other than that, there’s a lot of me talking without really have any idea what I’m talking about — which is why I usually don’t post on Sundays. Doh. Just watch the video / sample it in your next Live set.

I haven’t necessarily been following Live’s forums lately, but apparently one of the hot-button issues lately was a rumored "secret" vocoder in a future build of Ableton Live. The myth goes something like this: a camera crew doing a behind-the-scenes look at Ableton’s Berlin office accidentally captures a brief moment in which an unreleased vocoder appears in the bottom part of the screen. I’ve been hearing buzz about this for weeks, but Garret Collins is the latest.

I actually really recommend the Inside Ableton MusoTalk video (German); it’s a great little feature. But, of course, the hint of something new in Live has now upstaged that original video.

Live fans go even further, so that the Vocoder — hang on, it’d need a simpler Ableton-y name, like … uh … Carrier or Encoder — is part of a massive conspiracy by which Ableton keeps you from getting the bezier-curve envelopes you really want. (Side note: I prefer Catmull splines, myself.) And it turns out David Zicarelli was on the grassy knoll working for the CIA, or something. (Another side note: I just got to link to Geocities! And it’s still running!)

It seems zany, but then this is the week when the mainstream computer tech blogosphere is speculating about the likelihood of Microsoft switching to spherical interfaces. (Look out, Apple "i"! And will that get people high, like the sphere in Woody Allen’s Sleeper?)

No One Needs a Vocoder – Henke

Okay, I digress. The really amazing thing is this comes up today, again, when shortly after the original video was widely debunked earlier this year. Here’s the problem: just a few days after the video, Ableton co-founder Robert Henke had this to say about vocoders — hilariously: