Serato announced yesterday that they’ll be joining Ableton in a “creative partnership.” It’s not too hard to parse what this means from the announcement, which notes that Ableton Live’s strength is production and real-time remixing and beats, and Serato Scratch Live is about digital vinyl control, library management, and scratching. (Or, to say it even more simply: Serato is built around digital vinyl metaphors, and Live around remixable digital clips.)

Serato and Ableton announce a creative partnership [Serato News]
Ableton and Serato to work together [musicradar.com]

In fact, Ableton CEO Gerhard Behles spells out what this will mean fairly explicitly:

“Ableton and Serato take different approaches to modern musical performance”

Okay, so, Ableton fans worried that Live is going to just become a DJ tool, or Serato lovers who don’t want Scratch Live assimilated into Ableton, fear not.

Ableton has never had an answer for the DJ who wants vinyl control, and rather than try to emulate what Serato do so well, we simply make sure that our products work well together.

Got that? We hear DJs regularly complain about Ableton Live, that there’s not proper scratching control over waveforms, that you can’t see more than one audio waveform (”deck”) at one time, that it lacks vinyl control, and so on. But obviously, at least some of those metaphors don’t jive terribly well with Live’s clean, signature interface, which wasn’t built to do these things in a traditional way.

Sounds to me like the most likely result is some kind of Serato deck that runs inside Ableton. I feel safe in speculating about this because I haven’t heard anything from Ableton about this. And there’s cause for that, as well, as many Ableton Live users do Live PA, laptop sets with Live, and then turn elsewhere (often to Serato, if not to rival Traktor) for more conventional DJ sets. Regardless, those of you who could care less about conventional DJ features are likely to find this comforting news: Ableton probably isn’t going to muck around with your software to graft them in.

I think this could amp up the NI – Ableton rivalry; Native’s DJ division has been further beefing up their Traktor Scratch options. This comes right on the heels of NI’s own Traktor Scratch Pro offerings, but since I’ll be in Berlin by this time tomorrow and that’s a released product, I expect to talk to NI directly about that. (Of course, I’m horribly biased in that I’d personally rather hear sets with people doing strange things with Live and Reaktor, but that’s me.)

That said, clearly only Serato and not Native could partnership with Ableton, because Serato had “Live” in the name of their product. (Perhaps that was an early sign of Ableton envy?)

All of this probably reminds some of you of another strategic Ableton partnership, with Cycling ‘74, makers of Max/MSP. When announced some time ago, the expectation was that some product would come of that. We haven’t seen that product yet, but sometimes these relationships take time to bear fruit. I wonder.

Incidentally, what gets us most excited about Serato round these parts? Visual vinyl. See the Create Digital Motion hands-on review.

Updated: I should add, it is possible to add DJ capabilities to Live now by using a DJ host that functions in plug-in mode, as a couple of commenters note. Pinko’s Max/MSP-based “Pinky Pluggo” is one option; another is Image Line’s Deckadance. Both allow you to do vinyl control, too; Deckadance will work with any controller. I’m particularly fond of Deckadance’s absurd-sounding effects, which I think could add the sort of digital grunge to a DJ set or loop that will appeal to a lot of the Ableton-using crowd. And these sorts of tools are shipping now.

But of course, we really have no idea what it is exactly that Ableton and Serato are planning, whether it’ll be a new Live instrument or some other form of integration.

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?

Des collectors Emagic : ça vous intéresse ?
Logic 8 : Une nouvelle pièce au puzzle !

An excited French reader on Gearslutz.com’s message forum sums it up this way:

There will be no Logic 8!!!!!

The new app will have a new name.
They are working on it for 5 years and it will be out this year.
It will be a “Pro Tools Killer” with a Logic feel but in a new user interface and take advantage of OSX.5 (it will need it and don’t work on X.4 or prior) and new Apple hardware (touch screen display!).

More info: no more xskey and no more envirronement [sic]

Whoo, and it’ll make cappuccino! And it’ll have support for a new, high-definition replacement for MIDI that Apple will push to become an industry standard! (Not sure which of those is less likely, actually.)

Before you rule this out, though, there’s a well-reasoned argument for it at Barbarism Begins at Home:

Will There Be No Logic 8?

Fortunately, I happen to know absolutely nothing about future versions of Logic, so I think I can safely speculate, secure in the knowledge that anything I say that does happen to be true is entirely coincidental. A “Pro Tools killer” says more about the sales of the resulting product than the product itself, though I’m sure Apple would like to make some bigger inroads in Digidesign’s market the way Final Cut did with Avid. (Though there are plenty of Avid editors out there, still.)

I know enough to say this: the successor to Logic may be a huge upgrade, and may even have a new name, but it’ll still be aimed at musicians and will likely remain connected to the core of Logic and GarageBand. Beyond that, we can say anything we like and amuse the people at Apple (a number of whom read this site); they know more than we do.

Completely Uninformed Speculation Begins!

Does Apple still care about music? Apple has expressed real commitment to me to the music market — and by music market, I mean musicians, not just the nebulous “pro audio” or people doing audio post for its more lucrative video market. I do expect them to go after this audience more aggressively in an upcoming release. I also know Apple knows that its users haven’t been entirely happy with elements of Logic’s interface and design; long-time users master and love it, but some tasks are harder to perform than they should be. Logic 7 made big steps to making this app more Apple-like, but it’s obvious they’ll continue to work on that.

What about release dates? Why are Logic — and iLife ‘07 — delayed? Well, I heard from Apple developers — as from everyone else — that porting Logic to Intel Macs required some effort. It makes sense that that would have delayed the rest of the development pipeline. And it’s a safe bet to assume that Apple began looking at the big picture plans for Logic at the time of the acquisition of the software.

All of us were speculating at Macworld Expo that the absence of iLife ‘07 meant Apple would have its consumer app upgrades coincide with Leopard, to take advantage of new graphics features. That makes sense for iPhoto and iMovie, but it’s unclear what it would mean for something like Logic. I do know something about the graphics developments in OS X 10.5, and Core Animation and Quartz Composer integration look like they will impact a lot of applications from Apple and many third-party developers, as well. Anything with eye candy in it will get a huge boost. But as for music, that’s less clear.

Is Apple readying a new app? Maybe they’ll change the name; “Logic” sounds German and electronic music-related. (Doesn’t it just make you want to make some minimal techno? And Vulcans dig it.) But I seriously, seriously doubt this will be an entirely new application. Look at it this way: GarageBand is an entirely new application, but it’s also based entirely on the underpinnings of Logic, from its notation facility to looping to EXS24 sampler support, GarageBand is Logic Pro 7 with a different face. This proves two things: first, it’s possible to radically change Logic without altering its core or backwards-compatibility, and second, Apple would be unlikely to abandon that core because it would hurt both Logic and GarageBand.

Will it have a touchscreen? This seems like wishful thinking, but there’s one reason to believe it might be true. Apple’s iPhone turned out to be just a phone/iPod/browser, so I doubt you’ll be integrating it with Logic, much as we might like. But remember Apple’s multi-touch tablet patent? It specifically showed a music mixer application. This could mean one of two things: one, it was a research idea that got abandoned, but spread through the grapevine starting this rumor. Or, two, maybe we will see a multi-touch music controller from Apple. It’s an extremely unlikely possibility, but I wouldn’t rule it out entirely, especially with multi-touch tech getting used on the iPhone.

(Again, I can say this because I know nothing. If someone connected to Apple had told me something, I’d be saying nothing. Maybe there’s still time for them to add that cappuccino feature.)

Does this rumor hold weight? There’s really no way of telling. Apple has, bar none, the tightest ship in the industry as far as information leaks, so usually if you hear information from a non-official source, chances are it’s wrong. Moreover, a lot of rumors are based on real information that’s outdated or distorted. But you knew that.

There will be an upcoming pro music app from Apple — that’s for sure — and when we hear something real, we’ll pass it along. In the meantime, feel free to join the idle speculation. Speaking of which …

How about that music touch screen / hardware rumor?

More Apple Patents Suggest New Music App, Musical Instrument?

Multi-touch Apple music interface? Non-Apple music keyboard as a pet project of Emagic founder Dr. Lengeling’s? Nothing at all? Hard to say. Rumor mull, anyone?

Remember patent 0060026536? It’s the multi-touch, gestural patent Apple filed that was clearly the precursor of the Apple iPhone. Here’s the curious thing: the iPhone, as demonstrated at the Macworld keynote, isn’t all that focused on multi-touch. With the exception of Apple’s clever zooming gesture, most gestures are single-touch. Most are horizontal and vertical strokes similar to what you can already do on laptop touchpads.

A lot of what gets put into patents never shows up in shipping products, but I would be very surprised if Apple’s multi-touch abilities didn’t start to spread to new stuff. Touchscreens and eventually multi-touchscreens are likely to appear on more computers, PC and Mac alike. And other devices have likely lacked touchscreens only because the digitizer hardware — and the processors to deal with tracking multiple touches — hadn’t yet reached the right economy of scale, something that’s likely to happen soon (the iPhone in June being a good indicator). Phones have the advantage of subsidies from the phone carriers — the iPhone would presumably cost hundreds more if it didn’t have Cingular reducing the cost to get you on a 2-year plan. But the touch trend is likely to continue.

And that brings us back to the original patent. Could Apple in fact be working on a music mixer or other touch-enabled music interface? Or was this just a demonstration of an idea they had, and not a working product? Time will tell. I’ll repeat my concerns: touch is great in its flexibility, but losing tactile feedback is not — maybe something Apple themselves have discovered. But that’s unlikely to stop manufacturers from integrating touch into products for musicians in the near future, whether it’s Apple or someone else. And it won’t just be the Lemur.

Okay, no remaining stories this week will have headlines in the form of a question; I promise. “NAMM: New DJ Hardware????”

Music makers think that if they leak some teaser photos of upcoming devices, we’ll write it up. They’re right.

Native Instruments has released to CDM a small image of what appears to be an upcoming Traktor hardware device, as posted originally to the NI Traktor Forum. (Well, actually, I’m assuming that it’s part of Traktor: months after Native Instruments announces it’s dumping its long-term relationship with Stanton and Final Scratch, it posts what’s obviously part of a computer audio interface to its Traktor forum. You do the math.) Most interesting here is that it’s got 8 audio output channels. And a … hook. I’m too tired to analyze this, but I do hope I get invited to parties with 7.1 surround mixes.

See the post from “native girl” on the NI Forum.

NI isn’t alone. M-Audio is also teasing hardware … also for DJs … though bizarrely on MySpace. (That’s apparently where all the cool kids hang out, except Team CDM, because burns! It burns!)

Sneak Peek from M-Audio

Tom at Music thing got the jump on the upcoming controller, first decided it was for Ableton Live, then decided M-Audio has divorced Ableton and it’s not for Live.

There’s an easy answer to this question: the upcoming controller will probably be both. M-Audio’s X-Session Pro works just fine with both Torq and (via MIDI) Ableton Live; it even says as much in the docs. M-Audio is still bundling Live Lite with their gear. And the more copies Ableton sells of Live, the more potential customers M-Audio has for Oxygen, Ozone, Trigger Finger, X-Session, and so on. Finally, despite the fact that Live is a great DJ app, the kind of DJs who would primarily use Torq and those who would primarily use Live seem to be a pretty different demographic.

Nor is the hardware much of a mystery in this “teaser”: glowing Jolly Rancher color scheme, crossfader, EQ, effects (or whatever you happen to want to assign), and what appears to be clip triggers. I happen to like using DJ-style control schemes for Ableton Live even in non-DJ music sets, so I’ll be interested to see how this works out. And this fills a hole left by the X-Session Pro, which doesn’t have enough dedicated controls for some users. The only real mystery is what to call it. X-Session Pro Pro? Torqtroller? Or M-Audio could continue their gaseous theme (Ozone, Oxygen) with Carbon Dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.

KORE, patch librarian: A lot of people have focused on KORE’s role as a way of easily finding preset sounds. But by “universal,” Native isn’t necessarily claiming that every third-party soft synth developer is going to do what NI did and painstakingly come up with keywords for every single preset. For an example of one developer who won’t, check out a thread on KVR by star Mac plug-in developer Urs Heckmann. (Thanks to velocipede, in comments!) Urs rightfully points out why most developers simply won’t bother, since KORE is really NI’s creature, and NI already has a leg up with their own sounds. He also has some excellent points about why finding keywords for sounds is problematic, though that’s an issue with any catalog of anything. I still think having a catalog is better than having none.

So, will you see any sounds cataloged in KORE other than Native’s? I think so: remember, a lot of sampled soundware is distributed in formats based on Native’s sampler, Kontakt. Watch for big sample houses like East/West to start releasing KORE data for their sounds. Anyway, that’s the kind of content you’ll really need this for.

Other meanings of “universal”: I don’t think finding sounds is the only major feature of KORE. The key is the KORE hardware, which will let you switch sounds, navigate sounds and presets, and control plug-in parameters with high-resolution data. None of this has been easy to do without grabbing your computer mouse. Some of KORE’s other features aren’t so new, like setting up splits and layers and hosting plug-ins. But even there, other hosts don’t necessarily run as plug-ins; they either require standalone operation or at best run as ReWire. Ironically, a lot of the criticisms I’ve heard of KORE come from people who don’t want the preset librarian features. KORE certainly promises to do more than that, and while preset management is important, those other features will be at the top of my list when I finally get to test it myself.

Enter the user communities: It’s funny, everyone is assuming KORE will be snapped up by soft synth newcomers to make it easier to find the right organ preset. I think it’s far more likely that KORE will appeal to soft synth mavens, at least initially. Already, I’m hearing rumblings from would-be KORE users that they’re planning to immediately start programming KORE for their favorite soft synth. So, I think one of the first things we’ll see when KORE ships is pre-programmed libraries coming from users. Which brings me to my next point:

Reaktor KORE: For anyone who doubts a “niche” product at a reasonably high price point can attract a cult following, look no further than Reaktor. The Reaktor user community is nothing short of incredible: hit Native’s site, and you’ll find hundreds of user-built synths and a heavily-used forum. Reaktor users are some of the most passionate I’ve seen anywhere, and they’re proud of the content they create.

I think the Reaktor crowd could be the first to heavily adopt KORE. One major feature missing in Reaktor, in fact, is the ability to easily combine lots of home-built instruments and effects. Reaktor ensembles sort of do this, but in a really inflexible way. And while Reaktor has a plug-in, it’s dependent on your host, and navigating patches you’ve created can be tricky. I’m more excited about combining Reaktor and KORE than I am about NI’s other products, to be honest.

The competition: What’s nice about KORE is that it runs all your plug-ins, inside any host or in a standalone mode, and lets you easily move around files created in it. That makes it basically peerless. But many users are loyal to one given host, meaning KORE has plenty of competition. We’ve seen that already in feedback. NI might not think of Logic’s Environment, or Reason’s Combinator and Refill format, or Novation’s Remote SL keyboard, or lightweight hosts like Energy-XT on Windows, as competition. But to users, they are, because the major killer feature for many users remains playability and control, not necessarily preset management.

Want to weigh in?

Now, I’d really like to hear from you, whether you’re a developer or a user. What questions do you have about KORE? What would you like to see tested? What’s your personal take on it, and what are you planning to use?

The heated debate around this product suggests to me that it is raising some questions worth discussing, and might really be a new product category, particularly as soft synths start to reach maturity and computers onstage become more commonplace. I can’t wait to hear what you think . . . and I can’t wait to get my KORE, hopefully next month.

Previously:

Messe: KORE Pricing, Availability Official — US$579, May 8

NAMM: Why KORE Could Change How You Play Software Instruments

Case in point: the Moog Solar, which sites like Gearjunkies have been declaring “the new Moog”. Calm down; it’s not. Long-time followers of Moog Music’s differently-colored special editions of their flagship Voyager synth know that this is just their special electric blue Voyager (shown) re-released in electric . . . orange. Looks damn cool, but it costs US$3200 in an exclusive deal from Nova Musik. The free Moog Movie DVD they’re throwing in doesn’t really make up for the hundreds you’re paying for the color. Stick with blue and buy a nice Moogerfooger for yourself. Unless you’re, like, Herbie Hancock, in which case, buy a dozen.

No, hopes remain high that what Moog is planning is a “Moog for the rest of us” mini-Voyager or Voyager Lite. All bets are off next Wednesday.

In the meantime, Tom Whitwell is trying to explain to the general tech crowd why we’re so passionate about this story. You already know, of course, but check the link for a fantastic album cover, Country Moog.

My personal favorite, from Vintage Synth Explorer, is Amos’ Femto-Moog, with ultra-simplified design and a one-octave keyboard. You know, for DJs.

Now, more experiments in multi-touch interfaces are appearing by the day. Aside from mysterious Apple patents, we have, via We Make Money Not Art, new research in multi-touch interactions from a team led by Jefferson Han. (Demos pictured.) This isn’t just any touchscreen: not only does it recognize multiple fingers as inputs, but it projects whatever imagery you want in response, enabling new, fluid interfaces, and even responds to force feedback.

Internal tracking allows you to use up to ten fingers at once — that could be both your hands, you and a friend, you and four friends using two fingers each, etc. That much we’ve seen before, in the form of the one shipping product in this category, Cycling ’74’s Lemur.

But this research project features key capabilities the Lemur lacks: instead of fixed, pre-defined, static interface objects, Han’s research features back-projected imagery. That blows open the possibilities of this kind of interface, because it allows the team to experiment with fluid, game-like interfaces that provide the illusion of the tangible world. You’ll see demos of modular sound synthesis, lava lamps, and various other ideas. In other words, the touchscreen is finally as flexible as the computer in the graphics department, only now no longer limited to a single point of interaction (the mouse cursor). Han again applies his Frustrated Total Internal Reflection technique to tracking, the magic behind the multiple touch points. But there’s another twist: force sensing, granting this interface the potential for more realistic expression.

I’m not convinced these interfaces will ever replace the tactile sensation mechanical devices provide, as found on knobs, faders, and musical keyboards. But as computer interfaces, they could fundamentally change the way we relate to software.

Now the question is, who will get to market first with an affordable, mass-market device? The beauty of this research project is that the back projection can be whatever you want. Musicians could benefit from the mass market purchasing such hardware for other applications. Then it’ll be up to us to figure out smart musical applications — sure, the technology is cool in itself, but think how many possibilities there could be for each of those demos?

What does a digital lava lamp sound like?

Multi-touch Interaction Research [Description, QuickTime movie]

Gestures, not hardware: Hardware isn’t mentioned anywhere in the patent. The patent seems to suggest, for the purposes of the filing, at least, that Apple is developing a software method for processing multi-touch inputs from hardware, not proprietary hardware itself. Specifically named in the filing are data analysis and classification, gesture recognition, floating controls and interactive UIs that respond to touch, and several specific gestures: zoom, pan, rotate, scroll, and page turns. (Yes, that’s right: this could be an e-book reader and not a real tablet Mac. But let’s hope not.)

For a sense of just how many possible hardware solutions are out there, just read the patent: “The touch sensing device may be based on sensing technologies including but not limited to capacitive sensing, resistive sensing, surface acoustic wave sensing, pressure sensing, optical sensing, and/or the like. Furthermore, the touch sensing means may be based on single point sensing or multipoint sensing.”

The audio mixer: hrmpf.com gets points for the best anaysis of this. Aside from their ability to get the images on the US Patent Office website to work properly, they’ve noticed specific specifications for a mixing device. And yep, we’re talking mixer as in audio mixer. This may just be for purposes of demonstration — or, perhaps, Apple is planning a home entertainment interface. Mixers often make the least compelling application of touchscreens, because (as you can see from the image), they duplicate hardware exactly but lose the critical feature of mixers: tactile feedback. That said, it’s in there.

What this means for music UIs: The patent itself points out the limitations of conventional UIs: they’re built around the assumptions of mice and joysticks, of a single X,Y cursor point in space. I don’t think anyone would argue that exclusive model will work forever. Interestingly enough, most music software, as an on-screen replica of devices like mixers, isn’t built around this model. It already inherits the assumptions of real-world devices that recognize you can use more than one finger (cursor) at a time. Otherwise, all mixers would have only one fader.

Is this coming, and when? Well, “when” certainly anyone’s guess (confident Web speculation aside)! There are plenty of hurdles here to making this a mainstream computer device: making the hardware affordable, building new UIs from the ground up, fine-tuning gesture recognition, and then re-programming the UIs for applications to take advantage of the interface. Tablet computers are easy. Multi-touch gesture recognizing computers are harder. It took 20 years or so to get the mouse right; it could be worth the time to get this right, too. But “if”? Again, the underlying technology is there, and the basic interface concept is intuitive. I think you’ll see all sorts of applications of the idea, possibly starting with simpler products first, and it’d be hard to argue that this will never happen.

What about the Lemur? Music thing observes that if this ships, it moves in on the niche-marketed Lemur multi-touch device for music. Of course, patent filing or no, many of us have wondered if general-purpose multi-touch devices could eclipse the specialized Lemur eventually. (The “eventually” being extremely unclear, given the cost of bringing such products to market.) The Lemur has the advantage of a head-start, of course, so this argument is meaningless until someone else actually ships. But it’s also worth noting the things the Lemur isn’t: it doesn’t do gesture recognition. It doesn’t have a truly interactive interface: your fingers can’t create new interface elements, for instance. Instead, they act as a set of ten cursors in place of one: while the objects underneath your fingers move around and respond to physics, you’re still fundamentally just pointing at them. A real gesture-based interface as hinted at in the patent is potentially much more sophisticated. It would also be incredibly challenging to develop; let’s face it, even Apple is talking about more pedestrian features like “page turns.” So who knows how sophisticated the Apple R&D labs are getting. (I’d watch out for research from other large companies, too — someone with money to invest in this project and large potential markets, like a Samsung or even medical instrument suppliers.)

Bottom line? The potential of the technology, as usual, is more interesting than the Mac rumor mill. It’s great to hear Apple is playing around with gestures. But they’re not the only ones. I’ve even seen experimental music systems for gesture processing. Ultimately, we’re likely to see new hardware to play with, in low-cost, mass-produced form. So the challenge becomes the one Apple is trying to conquer: build brilliant software, brilliant interfaces, and make them work for music. That’s a challenge no one is likely to definitively solve. Trying — that’s the fun part.