Critics frequently attach the phrase “lock-in” to Apple’s iTunes Store – iTunes – iPod/iPhone combination. But, in the post-DRM age, what does that mean, exactly?

First, you have to recall that while for many of us the manual drag-and-drop music management is appealing, it isn’t so for many average consumers. They want sync. That means that music will be stored in iTunes and synced to Apple devices and nothing else. Apple is serious about locking you to their store and their devices, enough so that they frequently update their software with special keys that prevent the use of devices. iTunes is “free,” but Apple determines which mobile devices you can use and which you can’t. And Apple has gone after anyone who dares give you the ability to use your own music software or own devices, including efforts (ironically) to make their iPhone and iPod work with Linux and open source players.

These efforts don’t protect the music or prevent privacy – they protect users of Apple’s software and mobile devices from using anything but Apple’s tools. Yet Apple has used the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to take legal action over anyone who dares to even talk about how to use legally-purchased music and hardware:

OdioWorks v Apple

Perhaps suspecting their case was too thin to defend, Apple eventually backed off that particular claim — after, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “7 months of censorship and a lawsuit.”

Apple Withdraws Threats Against Wiki Site

But the software and hardware locks are unchanged. And Apple has won, in my view, an even more important battle: they have a monopoly over mindshare.

four tiny drum machines from ALH84001 on Vimeo.

Cybernetics is poised to make a comeback. The theory is, everything from electronic circuits to plants and animals can be understood in terms of feedback loops, as organisms – mechanical or organic – respond to input from their surroundings. The father of modern cybernetics, MIT mathematician Norbert Weiner, was inspired by working on the guidance systems of missiles. His writing was picked up Louis and Bebe Barron, informing their organism-like sonic circuits, as used in the film Forbidden Planet. The word cybernetic itself comes from Plato. Plato was talking about human self-governance. But designed with cybernetic ideas in mind, technology, too, becomes self-governing and autonomous – and the sonic circuits, too.

Young designers like Eric Archer are to me the newest continuation of work like the Barrons’. Inside his lab, Eric and others are creating hardware that behaves like intelligent life. In the video at top, four tiny drum machines, equipped with insect-like brains and reflexes, network together wirelessly over infrared, responding to light by way of photocells. These tiny devices form a colonial consciousness.

Eric may be a mad scientist, but he isn’t keeping his work secret or proprietary. He’s sharing the tools, sharing his methods, and with a whole growing crew of sonic DIYers in Austin, Texas, inviting anyone to join the revolution under the banner of the Handmade Music series. (More on the upcoming event shortly.) If you’re not from Texas, a lot of this documentation is also appearing online.

Here are more of the creations, plus the simple but powerful circuit that makes it all happen.

And yes, there’s a lot of potential to wireless IR sync.

Here’s a superb reader tip: DJ Josef Prusa has been using SugarSync to synchronize Native Instruments’ Traktor Pro DJ software, so that he and his brother have their full music collection at the ready at gigs. (Naturally, this same technique means that if one of their MacBooks should die, bro to the rescue!) Not only does music get synced, but playlists, collections, MIDI mappings, and settings do, too. Now, you could use something like the ubiquitous free command line utility rsync to do the same thing, but SugarSync has the advantage of giving you cloud storage, too, so you have an additional backup and always-on access to your files.

Traktor is just one example. You could do the same with any other essential files. Josef also syncs Max/MSP patches for monome, plus a promising-looking, in-progress wifi controller. File sync in SugarSync works across Mac, PC, and now iPhone, Windows Mobile, cell phones, and Android. (One gripe: no Linux support, something DropSync can muster.)

Synchronize multiple collections of Traktor PRO automatically

Before this becomes a SugarSync ad, though, I am interested in what other solutions people are using. There are various cloud storage and sync services. SugarSync is fairly unique in providing both true sync/remote access with cloud storage. But maybe you have added your home server to the mix, or found another solution.

Josef seems to be the perfect geek DJ – check out his iPhone-MIDI hack and (while not musical) iPhone R/C car control.

Readers have complained that we’re doing so much mobile music coverage that it’s hard to wade through it, specifically in regards to the iPhone. I’ll be consolidating that news into a more manageable weekly post. The goal is to make this information more manageable both to those who love mobile music making, and those who don’t. Unfortunately, in my haste to do so, I got something wrong, and I think it deserves a separate correction.

Update: The iDrum mobile app available today will indeed allow you to use your own samples and exchange files with your desktop computer. The original story has been updated:

iPhone News: iDrum, BtBx In; Mixtikl Out Citing Apple Rules

That’s important, because the fundamental issue that determines whether a handheld music app is a toy or something that matters to your music is workflow. If you can complete something musically meaningful on a handheld device, or you can work on something related to what you’re doing on your desktop/laptop computer, then obviously, it’s useful, and that’s what we care about on CDM.

Over a hundred years ago, Thomas Edison first attempted to record sound and moving image in synchronization (a task that still challenges undergrad film students). The results were believed lost for many years, until the sound was recovered on a broken cylinder. Edison’s original experiment actually failed, but in the hands of legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch, these 17 seconds of film history are now restored realized more perfectly than even Edison could:

1895 Edison “Kinetophone” Test, shot by William Dickson [Internet Archive]