Electronic music making has had several major epochs. There was the rise of the hardware synth, first with modular patch cords and later streamlined into encapsulated controls, in the form of knobs and switches. There was the digital synth, in code and graphical patches. And there was the two-dimensional user interface.

We may be on the cusp of a new age: the three-dimensional paradigm for music making.

AudioGL, a spectacularly-ambitious project by Toronto-based engineer and musician Jonathan Heppner, is one step closer to reality. Three years in the making, the tool is already surprisingly mature. And a crowd-sourced funding campaign promises to bring beta releases as soon as this summer. In the demo video above, you can see an overview of some of its broad capabilities:

• Synthesis, via modular connections
• Sample loading
• The ability to zoom into more conventional 2D sequences, piano roll views, and envelopes/automation
• Grouping of related nodes
• Patch sharing
• Graphical feedback for envelopes and automation, tracked across z-axis wireframes, like circuitry

All of this is presented in a mind-boggling visual display, resembling nothing more than constellations of stars.

Is it just me, or does this make anyone else want to somehow combine modular synthesis with a space strategy sim like Galactic Civilizations? Then again, that might cause some sort of nerd singularity that would tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum – or at least ensure we never have any normal human relationships again.

Anyway, the vitals:

• It runs on a lowly Lenovo tablet right now, with integrated graphics.
• The goal is to make it run on your PC by the end of the year. (Mac users hardly need a better reason to dual boot. Why are you booting into Windows? Because I run a single application that makes it the future.)
• MIDI and ReWire are onboard, with OSC and VST coming.
• With crowd funding, you’ll get a Win32/64 release planned by the end of the year, and betas by summer (Windows) or fall/winter (Mac).

I like this quote:

Some things which have influenced the design of AudioGL:
Catia – Dassault Systèmes
AutoCAD – Autodesk
Cubase – Steinberg
Nord Modular – Clavia
The Demoscene

Indeed. And with computer software now reaching a high degree of maturity, such mash-ups could open new worlds.

Learn about the project, and contribute by the 23rd of March via the (excellent) IndieGogo:

http://audiogl.com

What should DJing software look like, anyway?

It’s just a teaser, but for once, the idea is simple, straightforward, and clear. Native Instruments have taken their DJ software, Traktor, and combined it with a grid of pads for sample triggering and loops. The upcoming hardware/software combination we expect later this spring.

At the risk of stating the obvious, what’s significant about adding loop triggering to any DJ set is that you can more easily move beyond playing and mixing tracks. Even without drum machines, this kind of manipulation is part of the grand tradition of DJing, made all the more impressive when ground-breaking DJs were able to accomplish it using only a turntables. (It’s perhaps a triumph over the linearity of recorded music in the 20th Century that, at last, artists found a way to subvert recorded music’s permanently-frozen state and reclaim the playback device as an instrument.)

What the upcoming product does is to take the virtual deck metaphor of Traktor and makes each deck a sampling machine. Each deck can trigger one-shots and loops, coupled with the mixing, cueing, and effects possibilities of Traktor as a DJ tool.

The obvious comparison will be to Ableton Live, but here, it’s as significant what is different as what is not. This wording from NI’s description will admittedly sound a lot like Ableton Live and colored renditions of the monome: “Stylish multi-color pads trigger loops and samples, allowing for on-the-fly remixing.” There’s definitely some influence there.

But the grand-daddy of all these things is sampling drum machines, the first instruments to popularize triggering one-off or looped audio content from a grid. (Tip of the hat here to Roger Linn and his designs.) Ableton’s breakthrough was taking that sample-triggering grid metaphor and cross-breeding it with the DAW, the all-purpose studio workstation with its channel strips, tracks, and arrangements. In Live, the track is king.

NI’s breakthrough here promises to be seamlessly making each deck – not each track – the focus for sample triggering. And their hardware literally combines the DJ mixing and effects functions with those pads. In the future Traktor tool, the deck, not the track, is king. And that makes all the difference. The deck will behave like a deck for cueing (a common complaint about Live), for one, but it’s also important that whereas Live gives you as many tracks as you want, you’re forced into the limitation of four decks in Traktor. That limitation is neither positive nor negative, but rather something that will influence every other decision you make. (Having looked over the shoulder of Richie Hawtin’s impossibly-enormous Live set recently for Plastikman, with tracks that scrolled on seemingly endlessly, I can tell you this isn’t a minor point.)

Of course, the other amusing point is the timing of when NI is tipping their hand. NI already makes a popular sampling drum machine, Maschine, combining a dedicated controller with software. Akai has just entered the ring with their own revision of the MPC – combining a dedicated controller with software to make a sampling drum machine. NI, for their part, here reveals that their next move is a new dedicated controller/software combo that also adds in DJing.

Anyway, for now, it’s just a video, so everything else is speculation. Feel free to have a look and let us know what you think, which, knowing comments, I’m certain you’ll do in no uncertain terms.

Side note: My brain is fuzzy; can anyone remind me of the capabilities of 4decks? This was, as I recall, a Reaktor patch that combined looping and decks.

I was actually pleasantly surprised to see our MeeBlip open source synthesizer make a cameo in the latest teaser video for Lemur on iPad, the app I saw in action at Berlin’s Watergate. I expect we’ll have full details soon – and I hope to visit the MeeBlip-in-a-book again soon; even apart from being flattered and gratified to see it use our synth, it’s one of my favorite synthesizer housings ever. But, really, truly, I had nothing to do with this video – that’s not me being coy; I didn’t expect to see it.

Yes, it’s jerky teaser vision, but I love the jam that gets going halfway through. (Curious about the drum machine sounds; no, the MeeBlip doesn’t make that bass drum sound – at least, not at the same time as it’s playing, since it’s monophonic.) I just hope this means we see MIDI out on the Lemur app, in addition to OSC – that’s be a big jump forward from what even the original Lemur hardware could do.

And yes, the secret’s out of the bag – Lemur for iPad will be announced by http://liine.net/en/ – though note that the MeeBlip is the creation of Gwydion from Konkreet Labs. Normally, I would refrain from posting this sort of video, but I rather enjoyed it.

Image-Line are quick to attach lots of disclaimers about when the work will be ready, but a teaser video demonstrates they have builds of their FL Studio Mobile software running on Android devices. It looks like a particularly good match for tablets, and is the latest indication that their may finally be a horse race in tablets for music. (Insert more disclaimers here.)

The phrase “low latency” is likely to make prick up some ears. No computer is “zero latency”; digital systems introduce some delay from recording to playback. The quality of the user experience, therefore, is having things happen without too much latency, whether it’s when sounds from a microphone or line input are processed or when a touch event or MIDI input results in a sound. iOS at least puts that latency in the acceptable range. Android devices, meanwhile, have earned complaints. Some of these issues appear to have to do with the way the platform itself works, in scheduling and the hardware abstraction layer, whereas other challenges arise from the variety (and, let’s face it, inconsistent quality) of Android’s various devices.

However, there are signs that developers might make this situation more manageable. We hear there are changes in Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich release that could impact both the way native access to the audio system and scheduling work; it’s too soon to evaluate those changes, because the OS isn’t done yet. But that leads to the other important development: Android developers are beginning to test performance across devices for some harder numbers. Those kinds of tests could benefit from easy software distribution and the (relatively) open source nature of the operating system — or at least, to be fair, from freely distributing genuinely free-software apps for testing. It’s also worth saying that not all applications require low latency, or, indeed, concern themselves with input-to-output latency. (Not all apps use an audio input.)

It’s not yet clear what Image-Line’s own “low latency” engine is about, but it’ll be interesting to watch. First promised in June, at least, it seems Image-Line is making some headway. More details:
http://www.image-line.com/documents/android.html

I’m still far, far from being able to recommend purchasing an Android device for use with music – iOS wins handily. But developers naturally want to look ahead, beyond the present situation to what might be possible in the near future, especially since they’re the ones making the apps. And there, the picture is worth examination.

Out of an explosion of terrifying industrial noise, through a murky haze of retro-tinged monochromatic texture, Sigur Rós emerge in an enigmatic teaser for a new project dubbed INNI.

In case that arresting grind of gears and aggressive cacophony don’t square you away, you’re treated to film of the band playing and more-characteristic, lullaby-like tunes.

It remains extraordinary to me what a phenomenon Sigur Rós and, via bandmates, Jónsi have become. These Icelandic maestros have made all manner of sonic experimentation wildly popular, bringing their moody, sometimes-cinematic, meandering compositional genius around the planet.

Some music I like, personally, is very unpopular. Some makes Stereogum – like Sigur Rós. And in this case, I’m excited for a new release. (Most readers are betting, and I agree, on a live concert video release. If it all looks like this, that’ll be just fine.) Strip away the visibility, the artiness of a particular band, and to me Sigur Rós’ members have represented some vitally important musical imagination in recent years. You?

Side note – thanks for using Topspin, and making things embeddable and not exclusive. Embed on.

AudioGL, a project teased in videos first in April and then again last week, is a new concept in designing a user interface for real-time music creation. Visuals and sound alike are generative, with the rotating, 3D-wireframe graphics and symbolic icons representing a kind of score for live synthesized music. The tracks in the video may sound like they’ve been pre-synthesized, polished, and sampled from elsewhere, but according to the creator, they’re all produced in the graphical interface you see – what you see is what you hear.

The newest video, released this week, reveals in detail the project’s notions of how to make a 3D, live music interface work. The UI itself is similar to other graphical patching metaphors, but here, like exploding a circuit diagram in space, routings and parameter envelopes are seen and edited in a freely-rotating view in three dimensions rather than on a flat plane.

There’s a reason interfaces like this have been few. Computer displays and pointing methods tend to be heavily biased to two-dimensional use, modeled as flat planes like pieces of paper. Working in two dimension is simply easier; there’s no reason you can’t take another layer of parameters and represent it on a two-dimensional interface. And rotating around in 3D space can make it difficult to keep your bearings.

Those challenges, though, don’t make this less interesting – they make it juicier and more delicious as design problem and stunning, futuristic musical model. Freed in three dimensions, a complex set of envelopes and parameters has room to spread out visually, making a kind of spatial score. This particular project strikes an interesting balance between traditional, iconic UI – operators are represented with graphic symbols – and more free-flowing geometry representing the sequencing and envelopes. To me, the latter is more compelling, but putting the two together may make the program more flexible and familiar to users of other music software.

What could knock you out of your chair, though, is the sheer depth of the software teased in the video. This is no simple tech demo: it’s an attempt to build an entirely new, live-synthesizing music tool from scratch in 3D. It’s like the International Space Station of music software, assembled in some void. I got a couple of tips on this today, and some are even wondering if it’s real.

It appears to be very real. Whether this particular tool is usable or not to me almost isn’t important: a spectacular failure in this arena would even be useful. Anyone waiting for some sort of “singularity” in music tech, I think it’s coming: it’s just going to be a singularity of human software ingenuity, explosive creativity and invention from independent developers. I can’t wait.

Stay tuned to find out more about this particular project.

See also the earlier video (not able to grab the embed code for some reason).

Thanks, Bodo Peeters, among others, for the tip.

Touch form factors make sense for music creation on the go: a mobile tablet with finger-based interface seems ideal for performance and travel. In the fast-evolving hardware, though, it’s tough to work out exactly what will be a hit and what will be a flop. Multitouch tablets have splintered in two – consumer-centric, inexpensive tablets like the iPad and Android tablets gravitate at one end, as higher-powered tablets are reserved for the business market. Worse, the entire computing industry is choosing battery life over all other factors, which doesn’t jive well with audio. (Almost everything you do to improve audio performance saps power. Doh.)

But that could leave opportunities for computer makers to cater to musicians. Here’s just one example, and it lies right at the convergence of next-generation, Linux-based operating systems, touch-centric design, and more efficient mobile computing.

Indamixx, who have previously done Linux-based laptops using tablets and netbooks, are now readying a multitouch tablet based around the current-generation, dual-core Intel Atom chipset. The Linux OS means you can run the terrific tracker-for-the-rest-of-us Renoise, as well as a variety of free software; that’s Renoise pictured as the Indamixx tablet hangs out by the rooftop pool of LA’s The Standard last weekend, for its public debut. (Indamixx hosted a Renoise-themed blowout party.)

Early specs: single core N450 Atom (prototype only; final model is planned to be dual-core), 2 GB RAM, 3 USB ports, 1 VGA port, 1 Ethernet port, analog audio I/O. That’s much like what you’d find on a netbook, and it’s a far cry from the computing power of a desktop or laptop. But with optimized software, it could be ideal for mobile production and performance. (Even with optimization, tablets, by contrast, can’t compete on computing horsepower – and they’re not really set up for terrific low-latency audio performance, either. Oh, and you get better hardware support from traditional Linux operating systems than things like iOS, Android, and Chrome OS.)

More details came out on the Renoise forum. The other surprise there: while Renoise is largely a QWERTY-centric experience to most of us, Indamixx tells us the touch approach works very well. I’ll believe it when I — uh, touch it — but I’m interested how that works.

The product will launch May 11, 2011, but we should have more info before then, and we’ll visit them at NAMM.

If you’re not in love with the hardware, you’ll be able to use the OS with your own rig, too, if you prefer to build or buy your own system. Dual-booting to Ubuntu will also be an (unsupported) option.

I got some further details on the direction they’re going from the source.

Whereas the Transmission custom distro Indamixx has used in the past was based on Ubuntu and Debian, the new OS is MeeGo, the distro with powerful backing from Intel and Nokia. It’s still Linux; it even uses RPM as its package manager. But it’s probably the most mobile-centric of the mainstream Linux distros. (By the way, Linux fans, don’t sweat those details too much – the development environment for MeeGo runs on Mac, Windows, and other Linux distros, and software ports pretty easily between them.)

I’m not thrilled about the touch digitizer on the development unit – the serviceable but unspectacular MosArt sensor used on Asus’ T91MT netbook – but it sounds as though that’ll change to something much better before this ships. (It should be just fine for development purposes.)

The choice of MeeGo, though, is certainly interesting. Indamixx lead developer Gabriel Beddingfield and founder Ronald Stewart are raving about how the OS feels and operates, and say they’re getting terrific performance out of the system. I’m eager to try it first-hand. Gabriel has more to say:

CDM: How does this differ from Transmission as we’ve seen it in the past?

Gabriel: It’s effectively a reboot of Transmission. All packages
currently in Transmission will be ported over. The end user-will reinstall this MeeGo-ized Transmission on their device.

Unlike Transmission 4, there will also be a Live CD / Live USB version that you can preview before installing.

Why MeeGo?

Unlike any Linux distro we’ve found so far, MeeGo is from the ground-up about multi-touch, portable devices that compete with iPad and Android. The main “desktop” user experience is sharp, fast, and finger-friendly.

Our departure from MeeGo is in tuning it for audio. Out of the box, Transmission will be more concerned with a high quality, low-latency audio rather than preserving battery life. However, our experience with the Atoms shows that battery life is pretty good, too.

Multi-touch support will come by way of Qt’s Multi-touch framework… which is expected to have a relatively smooth upgrade path to Xorg 1.10 or 1.11 when Xorg officially supports multi-touch (Q1/Q2 2011). [Note that this is a different solution than the one that Ubuntu is providing.]

How will users install their own software?

MeeGo is also working heavily for app-store integration. So, users will be able to install free and commercial apps from Intel, Ovi, or other app stores. MeeGo’s architecture will ensure that the apps will work on this device.

In addition, it’s still Linux… and so users are still able to hot-rod their systems.

What’s the multi-touch digitizer hardware?

Will be capacitive, and will at least be dual-touch.

Right now we’re developing on an eGalax dual-touch that appears to have some pressure-sensitive features (can differentiate between a mouse-over and a click), and we’re also using a Cando dual-touch that is a little more primitive.

Stay tuned for more — consider this a teaser for now. I’ll also have a look at a number of hardware options that take another approach to touch and performance, offering flashy multi-touch tables that make you look sexy onstage. Stay tuned here.

http://indamixx.com/

As they did with their previous Kontrol X1, Native Instruments is using a live appearance to tease new hardware before they make details public. (And believe me, I asked for more detail – this is all we’ve got.) In contrast to the diminutive Kontrol X1, though, this is a fully-integrated controller capable of providing tangible access to everything in Traktor. As is clearly visible in the video, that includes not only mixing and effects (and presumably looping and browsing) controls, but also two impressive-looking virtual turntable platters (jog wheels) – something that could perhaps finally threaten devices like the Pioneer CDJ.

This time, it’s Dubfire at Ibiza’s Space Lounge. (That’s right; you don’t have to be in Germany to see NI hardware early after all.)

Clarification – quadruple your enjoyment: There are two jog wheels, so two “decks” in the sense of platters you can control physically at once. There indeed appear to be mix controls for up to four decks, which makes perfect sense for Traktor’s up-to-four-deck controls. We’ll get official details from NI once they start talking. Thanks to readers for the feedback (and I can see that four decks matters to someone, at least here among CDM readers).

DJs have some choices when it comes to controller hardware for Traktor; NI themselves have pushed compatibility with a variety of hardware, and we’ve recently covered boutique options from Faderfox and Livid, to name just a couple of examples. But if NI has nailed the jog wheel component, this could be interesting. I’m hopeful, too, that like controllers like the integrated device for Maschine, NI will support MIDI, as that could open up fun applications well beyond just Traktor.

Stay tuned, and if you have questions, let us know now and I hope NI will answer them when they launch. NI promises more news next month. (NI PR in a note to me wondered if CDM covers DJ tech; I say it’s fair game and we’ve broken an occasional storiy over the years, largely thanks to tips from you readers. So bring on the tough questions.)

Touch performance control on devices like the iPhone and iPad has become increasingly popular, but the question remains: can developers push these interfaces further? Richie Hawtin has initiated a new touch control project and promises more “advanced” control of Ableton Live for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users.

Details remain murky – developers Liine say they’ll tease out features over the coming weeks. But the system, when fully revealed, will be modular, with a set of touch objects and gestures across a set of apps that provide touch control. The first application is Ableton Live-specific, and provides a new mechanism for controlling Live’s grid of clips. The developers say Griid makes it easier to find clips and see information about them, even when navigating large sets of clips. (You know who you are, those of you with enormous Live sets with a zillion colored clips.)

Different editions will scale to different screen sizes, with Griid Pro for iPad, and Griid for iPhone/iPod touch, plus a Lite version for free.

What all of this means or whether it lives up to these claims is, well, a complete unknown outside of the Plastikman stage. That is, unless you happen to be in Barcelona at SONAR this weekend. Tomorrow, Saturday, Richie will be demonstrating the app in person. Liine tells us:

“At the hands-on Richie will show how he uses the app in his Plastikman Live show. There will also be another laptop or two set up and hooked up with Griid so that they can give it a try themselves.”

If you can make it and want to report back to the rest of us, I’d love to hear it. And I expect to bring more info to CDM soon, if not. But it certainly works for Richie; check out the video below of him using the tool at Detroit’s Movement festival, for his new Plastikman Live show. (And yes, this is bringing back Plastikman and more of the live performance, rather than simply DJ, the side of Richie a lot of us love best.)

http://liine.net/griid/
http://liine.net/

If you’re at SONAR, check out http://ghost.m-nus.com/ (and if you’re not, that site has live streams and audio – warning, audio auto-plays!)

The video cuts fast, but in these still images, you can get a better view of the software and Richie’s setup, including the JazzMutant Lemur touch hardware and Behringer BCF-2000 motorized hardware faders alongside the iPad:

Surprise! Plug-in developer Ohm Force, known for their plug-ins (like effects Ohm Boys and Frohmage), today tease an upcoming collaborative host. It looks like the sort of thing Apple could have done, but hasn’t. There’s a GarageBand-style MIDI and audio editing pane, plus semi-modular routing of plug-ins on a pretty, graphical surface that resembles the “cheese grater” perforated aluminum of a Mac tower, and pop-up window palettes that resemble those we’ve seen on the “flattened UI” of the iPad.

The real feature here, though, is collaborative editing in the “cloud”: sessions are uploaded to a server, which in turn keeps track of versioning. (Actually, it’s quite unclear how that works collaboratively – this means you can “undo” from one version to another, but I can’t tell whether collaborators can try different “forks,” or if it’s all one set of linear changes.) The changes are “real-time,” though usually the trick to allowing international collaboration over the Internet is to make things delayed enough that everyone stays in sync.

There’s also an accompanying Web community for connecting with collaborators. Everything else about the product, however – more features, pricing, and specifics of how it all fits together – is as yet unknown. Mac and Windows are both supported, though – something Apple would not have done, most likely.

It’s an interesting idea, one I think we’ll see more frequently as connected applications grow in popularity. Among other options, Ableton had promised something like this with Share and then fell off the radar. Image-Line had a collaborative tool called Collab for its FL Studio, then abandoned it. The most significant competition comes from tools like Indaba. Indaba’s edge: by being powered by Web tech, you can do all your editing right in the browser; serious users can then keep using their host of choice and just bounce out audio. But while Indaba has an offline editor, too, the addition of plug-ins in Ohm Studio is a big change.

I do wonder with all of this, though: are we consigned to collaboration existing only in proprietary, integrated app-website combinations? Isn’t the whole lesson of the Web about open standards and platform-agnostic communication? Having said that, what would a more open tool look like – and what do people really want to do? (For instance, I wonder how hard it’d be to build a system that allowed open chat and transport control, with standards-based versioning and sharing, using the open-source DAW Ardour? See the post I’m … about to write … for the OSC end of this.) On the other hand, is the kind of integration Ohm Studio is offering necessary to make it all work together? (That last question we should be able to answer once this is in our hands and ready to try.)

I don’t wish to pre-judge Ohm Studio – on the contrary, I think this is a provocative product teaser that immediately raises some of these fundamental questions. So bravo, Ohm, for starting that conversation; I can’t wait to see what you’ve cooked up. And anything that gets artists collaborating is potentially a very good thing.

In the meantime, readers, it seems the most important question falls to you. Do you even want to collaborate with other artists? What would an ideal system look like for doing so? What features would you want? How would you want to work? Is real-time important, or do you prefer some time to sit back and think about how elements combine? When you collaborate now, how do you go about it?

Updated: Your closest bet at the moment is NINJAM, which is integrated with Reaper – a host various folks are using already – or on its own. Using compressed audio streams and latency compensation, it allows the exchange of any audio, and it works on Windows and Mac. But it doesn’t exchange MIDI data. (The site refers vaguely to this happening some time in the future, but I’m unsure of their progress.) And it doesn’t have integration with the Web community, though as readers note, you may want to work with people you get to know a bit first, anyway. Thanks to “PooPoo the Korruptah!” for the tip. (Hmm, no way for me to say that and not sound silly.)

More importantly – anyone out there using it? Or is it just easier to send files back and forth?

http://ninjam.com/