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:

Celemony in trouble over DNA promise
"The technology demoed in Celemony’s upcoming Melodyne Editor used prefabricated loops and edits to illustrate a ‘what if’ scenario.
An insider told us: Everyone’s panicing behind the scenes at Celemony. Peter used a mock-up of proposed technology for live demos. In reality, producing a fully working version is proving to be impossible. When he produces a mini demo for one sampled phrase the whole thing breaks for other phrases. He’s panicing because very soon he expects Celemony to retract the promise of the holy grail DNA feature and apologize to the userbase. Peter has taken a month off work after a row with Editor’s project manager over his persistent failure to make the feature a reality."

Now, I find this all strangely alluring: Peter Neubaecker, the mad genius behind Melodyne, locked in a basement cursing his audio algorithms, perhaps with a computer hooked up to a giant lightning rod. His elongated beard only helps him fit this role. Betrayed by his assistant, Melodyne DNA becomes an utter failure. (“Are you saying that I put an abnormal brain into a seven and a half foot long, fifty-four inch wide GORILLA?”) You know, something like this:

Strangely alluring – just not terribly plausible, and, according to Melodyne, entirely made up. A representative for Celemony points me to this quote from forum host and site webmaster Claudio d’Allere, who tries to dispel the speculation:

Nobody is panicking at Celemony. We know we are late, and that may have raised some speculations. However, DNA still works as intended, and we are happy to invite you to our public beta test that we expect to start in late May or early June. Feel free to try this beta with your own audio files and not just "prefabricated loops"."

So, yes, the story – sit down for this one – is that the software is late. Let me explain something: late is much, much, much better than early. Early means that someone has shipped software before it’s entirely baked. I know this comes as a shock, of course. Just as we know it’s utterly unheard of that software or other technology be delayed (the horror!), we certainly have a hard time imagining anyone shipping any music technology with some features missing or lingering bugs or anything like that. Jeez.

Anyway, all my sources say Melodyne DNA is very much on track, and still looks fantastic to me. I’m sure, as with any audio algorithm, you’ll find audio that doesn’t work perfectly, but that’s true even of simple things like a Compressor.

The good news is, if you don’t have enough to do or have extra time on your hands, you can use the affordable Melodyne Uno to have fun right now, by recreating the spooky voice of the GLaDOS computer from the video game Portal. Behold:

Lately, I’ve had a number of conversations with audio and music tech industry figures in which they complained about the untamed wilderness of the Internet. These chats didn’t necessarily start with “You crazy kids and your…,” though I suspect that may have been implied. I’m sure that odd twists like this rumor were what they had in mind.

The Web does indeed give the power to transmit inaccurate information quickly – but it’s equally quick at correcting it. And it does gives us things like this awesome GLaDOS tutorial, so to me, it all balances out.

I am a crazy kid, though. Guilty as charged.

Stay tuned for that beta.

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.

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?

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:

We can add this to the long list of things we’d like to put on t-shirts. This is the same event at which Henke told a crowd that no one needs 64-bit, and sometimes you don’t even need 16.

And, yeah, the debunking music video is more fun that the original rumor. Speaking of which, I suppose Ableton could still be working on a vocoder. After all, Steve Jobs infamously told the press in 2004 that Apple might just as well make the iPod a toaster as add video capability. (Engadget, tragically, said something even more embarassing: "Fair enough, but it means that they’re basically ceding the market for personal video players to Sony, which will be making a big push in this department soon." Uh … right. The PSP and UMD destroyed Apple’s future.)

Just to cover my own blog, I’ll say this: Ableton could turn all of Live 9 into a giant vocoder / talkbox. Think drum racks, but the whole Session View is one big carrier. It’ll be sold as a separate bundle, and Laurie Anderson, Daft Punk, and Kraftwerk will contribute presets.

Or not.

It could, or could not happen.

You heard it here first.

Okay, update — as it happens, check out comments for some excellent arguments for the vocoder resurfacing.

Since I can’t bring any resolution to the existence or non-existence of an Ableton Vocoder (and if I knew of one, I couldn’t tell you, anyway), I’ll just conclude with this: it doesn’t matter. No, really — it doesn’t matter. If Ableton builds a vocoder, we’ll have a blast with it. It won’t influence the development of Live the host, just as other instruments haven’t; the host has continued to mature. If they don’t, well, we’ll go make one in Reaktor or Max or Pd or something. (It’s not actually that hard to build a vocoder technically, which could give people additional fodder to assume they may have done it.)

Ableton, you’re welcome to use my name suggestions if you like. ;)

Latest updates on the forums: Robert didn’t know about the parody video, and supposedly Ableton is working on a vocoder, or some other special effect.

Read more here (for Robert) and here (latest forum discussion).

Ah, but how do you know I’m not working for Ableton to put everyone off the scent.

And I could be inside Robert’s mind right now.

Thank goodness music software companies aren’t as secretive as some companies in the tech world.

That said, readers, what’s your favorite tracker of choice — particularly when it comes to a “tracker to go” on your mobile device? (If I could get one running on Java, I could set up a Blackberry tracker — surely that friendly QWERTY keyboard could come in handy.)

An anonymous readers tips us off on new control surfaces from Euphonix, a maker usually known for products at the higher end of the market. Whether this was an intentional post or not (it looks like you can pre-order the product), it’s definitely something new, and could mean you get a little Euphonix love in your home studio in the "affordable by mortals" territory.

We’ll be reporting from NAMM, so I’ll be sure to drop by Euphonix and see if we can see these up close and personal.

Reader X writes:

Doing some searching for studio control surfaces at Sweetwater.com turned up the following two product listings — which oddly enough aren’t anywhere on Euphonix’s web site, nor have they even been announced yet, to my knowledge – there’s been no news or blogging about them whatsoever. Could this be an accidental leak? If anything, they seem to represent a real breakthrough in price-performance and they look pretty slick…

Euphonix MC Control — a slim-profile control surface with 4 moving faders and a dynamic touchscreen display, plus hardware jog/shuttle wheel, list $1999, retailing for $1499, or roughly 1/10th of their flagship MC Pro DAW controller. (!)

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MCcontrol/

Euphonix MC Mix — a $999 surface with 8 moving faders and parameter-editing displays; I presume this could be used in conjunction with the MC Control much like a Mackie Expander, etc.

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MCmix/

Both of them use the EuCon protocol so I guess you’d need compatible software (logic pro over logic express, for instance).

Those links are live as I write this. Looks like potentially good stuff, and at a price that starts to be competitive with products like Mackie Control.

Java may not be on the radar of the average Mac user, but to the Java development community, Leopard has been a bombshell. Apple’s been slow with Java releases before, but something’s different this time: there’s been almost no information on the topic, and Apple has even pulled an existing Java 6 development build (released for Linux, Windows, Solaris, and every OS on Earth late last year). While Java and Apple apologists alike bend over to explain why this doesn’t matter / isn’t really an issue, we received an interesting comment here on CDMusic that suggests something big has happened they’ve all missed. This tipster argues Apple has all but eliminated its Java development team, and future development may (finally) fall to Sun. From our comments:

i had a long chat with a sun engineer over tea today where this issue came up as well. he was basically saying:

• apple has moved all developers from the java team to the ical team except for one poor bloke who is mainly working on a stable java 1.5 version
• the guy doing the actual 1.6 port left apple, apparently finishing the port is just a piece of cake, could be done in a few days but for legal reasons he cant do it anymore.
• apple will most likely never release an opensource version of their vm because it is a big dirty mess using various old frameworks all tied together in spaghetti code/ secondly it seems to require sourcecode access to the mac os x standard frameworks sources e.g. coreservices etc.
• some people at the java fx team at sun have started making their own java 1.7 runtime for os x which hints that eventually sun might take java for mac back under its control
• speaking of sound and other java things missing in osx – the answer is: wait for java fx! its very promising, you’ll be surprised.

Why this sort of rumor may be wrong: Note that it’s not clear how much of this is an accurate picture. Java isn’t dead in Leopard — on the contrary, Java 5 has been updated for the new OS, even if Java 6 is missing. And there are still developers at Apple working on Java, as they regularly appear on the java-dev list — and there’s more than one person. Even among Java developers frustrated with Apple’s progress, it’s clear that those engineers do a terrific job — though they may need more resources, and it is unclear whether it’s still advantageous for Apple to be maintaining Java in place of Sun in the first place.

Java everywhere, media everywhere: Why bother putting this on a site called Create Digital Music, and not, you know, Create Digital Java Applications? Because Java is a key, cross-platform development platform for music and multimedia, in the form of tools like the open-source coding-for-artists platform Processing, and a significant amount of media research. The alternative is generally less-elegant, more time-intensive C and C++ code; Ruby, C#, Python, and others haven’t really proven themselves for multimedia applications.

That said, this tip — if accurate — promises some hope for future cross-platform multimedia development. The issue is, Java in its current state has multimedia issues on all platforms. JavaSound is way behind on Mac OS X, but it’s also fairly limited for synthesis and audio performance on other platforms; that’s why virtually all cross-platform audio development is based on C/C++. If Sun is serious about multimedia support in JavaFX, we could finally have a more accessible cross-platform environment for doing sound and video coding. And, quite frankly, that could mean Java 7 developed by Sun on Mac would be better than the missing Java 6 from Apple. Not to mention, having Java in sync on Mac, Windows, and Linux is kind of the whole point.

All of this is speculative, because there’s been no official statement from Apple or Sun about Mac OS X and Java. So, here’s our plea — and part of why I would even reprint such a rumor — let’s get some official information out there. Java 7 is still in development, but surely Apple and Sun can start communicating about Java 5 and Java 6.

Related: what is in Java 5 for Mac/Leopard, including the major addition of a 64-bit virtual machine, though nothing directly relevant to audio development.

In other words, Microsoft is up to something, and I look forward to whatever it is, but it’s the long view that will ultimately matter more.

Numerous outlets are reporting that Microsoft is expected to introduce its gestural, multi-touch technology, called PlayTable. I’m not quite sure why the product name sounds ripped off from the ReacTable. But, while I’m interested to see what Microsoft is doing, I’ll give the ReacTable the edge, unless Microsoft open-sources its software, builds a library for Processing, and starts touring with Bjork. (I’ll take Radiohead + PlayTable. No? Not happening?)

I do think, though, that after over two decades of mainstream computer software interfaces using basic pointing devices not far removed from joysticks, multi-touch is pretty inevitable at this point. So the real question here is, can Microsoft deploy the technology, or is this just another prototype? Even Apple’s iPhone uses only the most basic two-fingered gestures, and still says nothing about what Apple might ultimately do with their hardware and OS.

Also, now that multi-touch technology is starting to grow, it’s time for the tech blogs to understand not all the technologies are equivalent. We have multi-touch built into hardware, and multi-touch built into displays. We have display technology that works with embedded hardware (like LCDs), and display technology that requires projection (and thus, lots more space, as with the frustrated total internal reflection system employed by Jeff Han and many of the tables-with-blocks-on-them schemes). We have systems that use touch against undifferentiated surfaces (like the JazzMutant Lemur) and systems that provide tactile feedback (like the blocks). My sense is that what we’re really waiting for is multi-touch as a commodity, not one-product innovations. Look no further than touchpads, displays, mice, laser optics, keyboards, sensors, circuits, microprocessors … you get the idea. From DIY to mass-market products, each of these has depended on basic hardware building blocks that can be had on the cheap.

One good piece of news, though: the more these technologies proliferate, the less likely a single company will be able to control patents on the general techniques — hardware specifics, yes, but not generalities. And the more likely hardware will become available to the rest of us to use.

In fact, if we got something useful from Microsoft, it’d be operating system-level multi-touch intelligence more than hardware. That would give others a platform on which to build a variety of hardware, which might finally break up the rigidity of computer design (Mac and PC alike) that has reigned effectively since the Apple II.

If you think about the current restrictions of music software, a lot of them have to do with the pointing interface. Heck, some musicians like QWERTY keyboards so much, they build them into instruments. The problem remains pointing. So, nothing against the mouse, but if multi-touch really does go mainstream, the possibilities for music software look good indeed.

That may be quite a few midnights, though. Let’s sleep on it.

1. A method comprising: generating a constant beat parameter; adding the constant beat parameter to a pitch signal to derive an input for a first oscillator; and combining an output of the first oscillator and an output of a second oscillator to generate a music synthesizer output with a substantially constant beat.

2. A method as in claim 1, further comprising: deriving an input for the first oscillator from a linear pitch control signal.

3. A method as in claim 2, further comprising: combining a detune parameter with the linear pitch control signal.

Patent: Music synthesizer and a method of generating a synthesizer output with a constant beat

The patent, in other words, covers a basic synthesis technique, and that’s raised some controversy as this patent has spread online among synth geeks: why would anyone want to patent something so basic?

If you detune by an amount in cents (or any other fixed interval), the rate of the beating will change proportional to the amount of the original frequency; that is, your beats will change in frequency as you change pitch. This is especially amusing to me, because before I read this patent, I was explaining this very property to my Computer Music class at Brooklyn College. Happily, Chad the Physics major helped remind me how arithmetic works, and we got our detuned oscillator equation working perfectly. Normally, you want to maintain the interval of the detuned oscillators and not the rate of beating, because that’s the traditional detuned synth sound to which we’re all accustomed.

The situation described in the patent, while not as common, isn’t new: it’s natural to want to use the beating as a rhythmic device and keep its rate constant as you change pitch. In fact, this was the feature we “fixed” in our Max class example. It’s much easier to translate up and down by Hertz in digital synthesis; it’s just less typical.

“Less typical”, however, does not mean you should run out and patent it. I checked with a colleague as I first heard about this, and he immediately mentioned Kurzweil synths.

In fact, this has even confused people on the Core Audio API Apple developer list. They’ve singled out specific Kurzweil models and, prior to that, even modular synths used for the same technique (plus the obvious ability to do this in modular synthesis software like Max, Reaktor, Csound, and so on).

How simple and banal and obvious is this? In the judgment of the developer list participants, it’s “give it to your class as a work problem” simple … “patenting breathing” simple.

I’m not sure Apple’s patent lawyers have some evil plan here. This is so banal, no one is likely to go to court over it. In fact, if anything, it seems like a waste for Apple to even bother with a patent application in the first place. It certainly wouldn’t hold up under a legal challenge. Or else we’re all missing something fundamental. (But the patent is very explicit about what the result is, so even if the method were novel, it’d still be useless. It’d be like inventing some wild, new technique to sync oscillators.)

I’m curious: does anyone have any idea how this stuff happens in the first place? Is the legalese so thick that when you describe flying cars, it comes out as oscillator detuning? (Well, except that this isn’t legalese, and many of us understand every word it’s saying, and it’s wrong, because this isn’t new.) Is there some sort of bizarre miscommunication going on between developers and lawyers? Should I go patent my next Max pitch transposition patch?

As regular readers know, I’m someone who’s happy to learn I’m wrong. So if someone can explain what seems like utter nonsense, I’m all for it.

Thanks to Matrixsynth: Apple Patents New Synthesizer Method