2011 has seen sweeping changes in technology and music, alongside the loss of titans Max Mathews and Tsutomu Katoh, two pioneers of our world. Some of these stories passed quietly; some with great fanfare. Here, we reveal those stories that attracted the greatest number of Internet eyeballs, a metric not necessarily of importance but certainly of what reached the widest audience on this site. And there are definite trends: a hunger for mobile, both the explosive growth of iOS and tablets, but also a resurgent interest in MIDI (not to give away the end) and a desire by owners of devices powered by Apple’s rival Android to find tools themselves. Traditional tools, too, make a strong showing – people still care about DAWs, about production. And affordable, do-everything tools fare well.

Hidden from this list are many other stories significant to me, though remembering just which occurred between January the first of last year and now strains my brain. (CDM is external memory.) If you recall a story that was significant to you on this site – or even one we missed – let us know.

In the meantime, here’s what the eyes of the Internet watched – ranked by page views in our analytics tool:

30.

The Handheld Studio Evolves: Beatmaker 2 Developers Explain their iPhone Workflow

29.

Touchable Music: At Last, Lemur’s Interactive Touch Controls Make it to iPad (Videos)

28.

Music Patchwork: Ableton Makes Max for Live Cheaper, Showcases Creations by Henke, Hawtin, More

27.

Spectral Layers Audio Editor Focuses on Editing Sound Visually, a la Photoshop

26.

Mixing and Audio Interface, in the $450 MOTU Audio Express

25.

Euclidean Rhythms in Ableton MIDI Clips for Polyrhythmic Good Times; Microtonal Operator

24.

Tsutomu Katoh, Korg Founder and Chairman, Has Passed Away

23.

Rumors Mounting for Imminent Logic Pro X, a la Final Cut Pro X; No-Brainer Speculation

Yup, those no-brainer predictions were … no-brainer predictions. Spoiler alert: Logic 9 and Updated MainStage on App Store, at Cut-Rate Prices

22.

Mobile Korg Fun: Monotribe Adds Patterns and Sync, Wavedrum Mini is On-the-go Drum; Impressions

21.

FL Studio Mobile, Now Available on iPhone, iPad; Sampling, Android Support to Come

20.

Modeling Analog in a Digital Age: A Conversation with Universal Audio’s Chief Scientist; Gallery

19.

Playing the City: An Eindhoven Pianola Makes Urban Landscape into Music

18.

Expanding Touch and MIDI, Mobile iOS Control Gets More Mature in New and Updated Apps; Round-Up

17.

Akai Turns an iPad Into a Full-Sized Music Keyboard: Akai SynthStation49

16.

FL Studio “Fruity Loops” 10 Adds 64-bit Savvy, Smarter Editing, New Pitch, Time, and Harmony Add-ons

15.

Apple Gets Into iPad Music with $5 GarageBand

14.

Cubase 6: Amidst Familiar Leapfrog Features, A New Approach to Note-by-note Expression Editing

13.

KORG monotron DUO, monotron DELAY Bring Fun Back, via Mono/Poly, MS Circuits and Pocket Size

12.

Tempest, Roger Linn + Dave Smith Analog Drum Machine, is Official

11.

Virtual DJ Controllers: New Hardware for Serato, Traktor from Pioneer, Numark

10.

Useful Music Tools for Your Android Phone, and a New Sketchpad Joins Groovebox

9.

Making Music with Free and Open Source Software: Top Picks from Red Hat, Dave Phillips

8.

Learn Mastering Technique in Free Videos: Limiting, M/S, Dubstep Bass

7.

Reason 6 Combines Record Features, Adds Effects; New Bundles and First Props Hardware Interface

6.

First Look at Roland Jupiter-80, Images, and Reflections on the Jupiter Legacy

5.

Native Instruments’ Razor Synth: Dubstep to Ambience, Free Tutorial and Loops

4.

Android Adds USB Host + Audio, Open Hardware ADK with Arduino; Good News for Mobile Music

3.

A Flute Made on a 3D Printer, and the Possibilities to Come

2.

A Few Good TouchOSC Layouts, from Waldorf to Traktor to Ableton, and a Brief Rant

1.

How to Use MIDI to Make an iPad More Musically Connected, Productive: Video, Resources

Gibson Guitar has announced in a press release they’re acquiring the Stanton Group, which includes, aside from the well-known Stanton DJ brand, KRK monitoring products and Cerwin-Vega loudspeakers.

It’d be easy to see this as a guitar company buying a DJ company, but it’s more than that. KRK and Cerwin-Vega are speaker/monitoring brands. Stanton and Cerwin-Vega each have footholds in the larger consumer arena, not just the pro world, a detail Gibson is quick to emphasize. And Gibson themselves have quietly, steadily grown beyond just guitars. The new “Gibson Pro Audio” banner is added to a list of brands that Gibson reels off: “Epiphone, Dobro, Kramer, Steinberger, Tobias, Echoplex, Electar, Flatiron, Slingerland, Valley Arts, Maestro, Oberheim, Baldwin, Sunshine Piano, Take Anywhere Technology, J&C Fischer, Chickering, Hamilton, Wurlitzer.” But it would seem dropping the “Guitar” from the name would be realistic.

There are two interesting details to the way the press release is worded. First, the lead is that Gibson’s move is “part of its continued expansion as a lifestyle brand.” That’s perhaps going to send a chill down the spine of anyone who prefers to focus explicitly on “musicians.” Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz even says the move “allows us access to 20 in 20 consumers instead of the one in 20 we currently hit.” That contrasts with the emphasis of, say, organizations like NAMM who talk about the general market of “musicians,” not only “lifestyle,” whatever you take that to mean. On the other hand, this is really nomenclature we’re talking here; the question I have is how “lifestyle” actually translates into a strategy, and how well it works for Gibson.

The other detail is more interesting. Gibson and Stanton Group reps each stress the potential for overlapping R&D. Juszkiewicz has touted R&D projects in the past, though largely centered around new guitar tech. We’ll see if the two companies can deliver on that R&D promise and do something really innovative. I have no idea what that’d mean in this case, so if anyone cares to speculate, I’m all ears.

Anyone?

Gibson Guitar Acquires Market-Leading Pro Audio Companies KRK, Cerwin-Vega!, and Stanton [PR Newswire]

Online chatter has in past not been very kind to Gibson on its past acquisition record, so I expect some people will raise the spectre of at least one acquisition again. Let’s see… comments…

I don’t personally view this as flame-bait; Gibson’s a perfectly-respectable guitar maker and I imagine there could be some smart business opportunity here, especially with Stanton together with Gibson in Nashville. However, let’s consider: the names Gibson and Stanton, guitars and DJing. I imagine some flame-broiled comment thread on the Internet somewhere.

And yes, reasons to be skeptical:

Promises of this sort of R&D synergy could easily fail to materialize. And whether Gibson can manage these essentially unrelated businesses is an enormous question mark. There aren’t a whole lot of acquisition success stories in this business.

The tenth anniversary of the iPod debut means you’ll find plenty of commentaries on Apple’s iPod and how it has changed music. It’s an issue that’s been talked to death enough, continuously, in the past ten years that I’m literally uncertain there’s more I can say about it. Here’s one good, compact commentary from Daring Fireball, inspired by Macworld’s sharp review from the 2001 debut of the hardware.

Instead, let’s consider what hasn’t happened: Apple hasn’t discontinued the standalone iPod, as distinct from the iPad and iPhone and other general devices. For music lovers, that’s a big deal. The sad news is, the category itself has all but entirely imploded.

The last ten years has been in almost every category a kind of battle between dedicated devices and convergence devices. Anecdotally and statistically, you’ve seen people abandon dedicated video cameras, still cameras, audio recording gadgets, and audio players for something like their iPhone. Little wonder: unless you have enormous pockets, if the integrated device does the job – and its battery doesn’t give out – it means something that’s always at the ready.

Apple’s legacy in music players is curious: they both defined the category, and wiped out all the competition. And that’s true even before Apple changed the category again with the iPhone. That’s not the normal pattern: typically, in electronics or any other tech, the pioneer defines a space in which other competitors come and play. Not so with the iPod: a combination of shifting consumer trends, the profound success of the iTunes “ecosystem,” and the general ineptness of competitors to make quality, differentiated alternatives has led to the iPod standing more or less alone. The iTunes issue shouldn’t be overlooked: recall that when the iPod launched, record labels were still concerned about copy protection. The result was an iTunes-iPod relationship that ultimately kept consumers from working out the complexities of moving their music library to another, rival player. (The fact that most of the rival players weren’t any good didn’t help, so we can’t ever really know how much of a factor this was.)

Two things have happened this fall. Microsoft did discontinue the Zune, in what seems the final death knell for any major dedicated music player that isn’t made by Apple:
Microsoft confirms Zune HD is dead

But, secondly, even as various analysts predicted Apple would kill the dedicated iPod players or even the iPhone-with-no-phone iPod touch, Apple didn’t discontinue anything.

My favorite player remains Apple’s iPod Classic. It’s beautifully designed, holds an absurd amount of music no phone can match (160 GB), and has a simple, clean interface for getting to your music. It’s sad to me only that it’s the only choice, particularly because the one thing rivals did have going for them was easier, more open sync rather than iTunes-only solutions. In fact, even the original iPod had as a major selling point the ability to work as a dedicated hard drive. As a purchaser of the first iPod, one of my favorite features was the ability to easily tote around a big file or two atop the music library.

Oh, yeah, and it’ll still run when your phone battery is dying, and it costs just US$249 – no phone contract required. Ahem.

http://www.apple.com/ipodclassic/

Phones as playback devices are pretty great. But remember that the original dream of the iPod was something different: it was the ability to put your whole music library on one device and take it anywhere. My main question is how that legacy will pan out. Dedicated music devices give you distraction-free access to nothing but music, and ongoing storage innovations mean that something that’s just a music device may long exceed what the convergence devices can do, surviving for the reason SLR cameras do.

Apple’s iPod series will last so long as people keep buying them; Apple seems in no hurry to walk away from extra revenue. (It’s part of the reason why they’ve got all that cash, folks.) But I wonder in the long term what will happen to the category. To me, the major gaping hole is something a lot of us wanted even when we saw the first iPod: a dedicated, pro-quality music player, a kind of audiophile iPod. It doesn’t need any fancy features or silly gold-plated jacks, just something dedicated to playing music and nothing else. I wonder if we’ll ever see that, or if it’ll be another casualty of the explosion in consumer gadgets. In the meantime, long live the iPod Classic.

And for the record, if you do have an original iPod from ten years ago, you can still make it sing: install Linux and it’ll even run Pd.

DJ Magazine’s Top 100 list of DJs is irrelevant and broken, based on a flawed methodology, prone to manipulation, and out of touch with what actually makes someone a top DJ.

That’s the conclusion you’d probably reach after reading the latest critique of the poll, and the conclusion is that the list needs to get out of its print past and embrace new tech. It hardly seems like a surprising opinion. But here’s where this becomes news: the analysis comes from London-based Terry Church, formerly a News & Web Editor at DJ Magazine as well as a PR guru and former Beatportal editor.

Terry doesn’t just rant about the top 100. Insetad, he offers a detailed history of how the list came to be, and how at its inception in 1997 no one really saw the potential problems (or had today’s more intelligent survey tech). He also goes, step by step, through the gradual downfall of the survey among artists and listeners. Some good signs: intelligent bookers and audiences are simply well-educated enough that a top list isn’t as necessary. But the bottom line for the top 100 just isn’t good; as Terry writes:

So DJ Magazine’s Top 100 will A) never be secure, and B) will always be plagued by unscrupulous marketing practices. As such, the poll’s popularity has fallen in recent years, even amongst trance fans, who traditionally were the most ardent supporters of the poll’s results due to the large numbers of high ranking DJs from their scene.

However, even among the aspiring candidates themselves there seems to be a general feeling of apathy.

Terry also has some suggestions for how technology might make the list more interesting. Google Trends doesn’t come up with much that’d be too surprising — though, really, a top five probably shouldn’t be surprising in the first place, or it wouldn’t be “top.”

Well worth a full read, particularly to see how an idea in journalism can evolve (or devolve) over time:
Opinion: Should technology replace DJ Magazine’s Top 100 DJs Poll? [terrychurch pr; not sure why that headline ends as a question mark given his thesis]

But for me, this all raises an interesting question. Google Trends is a fairly primitive metric. How might we get some more compelling data visualization and analytics on musical practice? Maybe the next top list will come out of a Music Hack Day, not a suspect print magazine survey. And that sounds very interesting, indeed.

Polling ends tonight. For their part:
http://www.djmag.com/top100

Artist Tricil sung the praises of Topspin in April. Since then, I did my own LP release on Bandcamp, about which I hope to share experiences soon.

But how do the two compare? And how might they even be combined? Recording/mastering engineer and artist Jimmy Ether recently posted some thoughts to his Google+ account, shared here by permission:

Topspin vs Bandcamp mixed with other options
I was pretty sold on going with Topspin for the back end store and promo features for the Headphone Treats site I’m rebuilding. Until today. I’ve always been a big Bandcamp supporter, but they were just missing a few features I felt we needed for the more full-scale assault I’m hoping to make:

1) An integrated store across artists – actually, both services sucked at this (until today). It was possible in Topspin, but you had to get hacky with tags to have multiple bands in one account. Which I never really wanted anyway. Now Bandcamp lets you span any artist on their cart system, which is brilliant. Lets the bands manage their stores and I can just tie them into our site. Exactly what I wanted.

2) High-Resolution, 24-bit FLAC – Again, Topspin was going to be hacky, but doable. But wait! Bandcamp is now allowing 24bit files up to 192kHz??! How did I miss this? I’ll have to see how the download options work, but this is awesome if all pans out acceptable. With what I’m doing, it’s literally two different masterings per album (fully dynamic 24bit/88.2k… slightly more compressed 16 bit for regular lossless down to MP3), so I need to see how that’s going to work. Hopefully I can select formats to be made available for each album and just offer two versions.

3) Campaigns – this is a pretty cool aspect of Topspin which may or may not have been beneficial. Kinda nice to be able to offer a free download of an album for an email signup or Facebook like. But there are other services I could use for that… or I can just roll my own using Bandcamp download codes. And now we have G+ possibly stealing some thunder from Facebook, so it’s reminding me of all that time I spent on MySpace building followings for all the artists. Yeah, that panned out. Social media is wonderful, but you have to keep things centralized and in your control.

4) Mailing list – ummm… Mailchimp? Emma? I’d much rather integrate either of those into my site than use Topspin’s more limited interface. Mailchimp is especially interesting with their killer API, which I’ve used a little bit. I’m a reseller for Emma, so I can send mail way cheaper through them but their integration is a tad clunky and requires more coding on my end (done it before though). I’ll have to weigh that.

So, that’s my current thinking on all the music tech offerings. Speak up if you think I’m missing something though. Discussion is good. Or if your curious what I’m on about with any of the above. Happy to clarify.

That seems a good conversation starter to me, and a jumping-off point for a more in-depth discussion. The competition is certainly heating up: Bandcamp just unveiled a merchandise store, and Topspin is enhancing their features, as well. (Correction: I originally claimed that email capture at Bandcamp was a recent addition, but a reader points out it was unveiled in 2008. I could say time flies, but I will instead just admit I was mistaken. And in fairness, while competition drives enhancement, arguably user requests are the prime motivator.)

So, other users, we’d love to hear what you think, or if you have other questions about either service we can investigate or direct to the sites themselves.

And while we’re at it, Jimmy’s own site has a growing archive of information, including some recording tips – and, oh yeah, some music to hear:
http://jimmyether.com/about/

You’ve heard the gripes, and heard and seen the somewhat unscientific demos. Now it’s time to examine the over-compression of music with – science! Earl Vickers of STMicroelectronics examines the Loudness Wars in an academic paper, as noted to us by reader photohounds.

The Loudness War: Background,
Speculation and Recommendations [PDF Link, sfxmachine.com]

The paper comes from last November, but it’s as relevant as ever. It’s not just the usual take, either. Its history begins with Phil Spector and vinyl, considering the impact of broadcast TV and not just the music industry. It notes the evolution of compression technologies, particularly multiband technologies.

Most importantly, though – and I’ve spoken regularly to mastering engineers about this – the paper turns to the issue of listening fatigue. Here’s one whithering criticism of the industry on that: some engineers even believe that thoughtless over-compression could be to blame for the decline of the entire industry.

Mastering engineer Bob Ludwig stated, “People talk about downloads hurting record sales. I and some other people would submit that another thing that is hurting record sales these days is the fact that they are so compressed that the ear just gets tired of it. When you’re through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued. You may have enjoyed the music but you don’t really feel like going back and listening to it again.”

You’ve seen much of this before, but rarely in such well-annotated, comprehensive form.

Best of all? The conclusion applies lessons from Game Theory to work on making the loudness wars come to a conclusion.

Here’s another thought, too: with artists increasingly self-releasing or releasing through more specialized labels, greater access to music online, direct-to-consumer distribution, and online replacements for conventional terrestrial radio, many of the factors that produced some of the oddest hyper-compression at the top of the charts are fading into the background.

Pax Musica for the loudness wars, anyone?

Industry titans Google, Amazon, and now Apple have each launched “cloud” music services. Yet, despite being connected via the Internet by design, these services are primarily concerned with solo listening. Even with Google’s various social efforts (+1 and the like), or Apple’s fledgling if not-exactly-blockbuster service Ping, there’s little to suggest that sharing with friends online was even a consideration. All of this raises the question: what should listening look like now that we’re connecting to music through the Internet, instead of through the headphone jack of our Walkman? Against that background, writer Primus Luta (David Dodson) offers a guest editorial on the potential of social music and new means of listening.

I’d like to start this off with a proposal. Despite the incredible innovations that have developed in music in the past few decades, none can match the impact of the one pictured above: the Sony Walkman.  To understand my rationale, separate the music from the business.  Though the Walkman had a clear impact on the music industry, what it did for the listener’s experience was the seed for most of the innovations that followed.

When I was growing up, the whole idea of personal listening was limited to one’s ability to find a closed room with a stereo system.  When you played something, everyone within earshot heard it, be it my mom rocking Olatunji while she cleaned house, my sister bumping David Bowie, or my aunt throwing back to Etta James.  I did have a small radio I used to listen to Casey Kasem count down the top 40 in my room, but for the most part, when someone listened to music, everyone did.  Outside, boom boxes reigned supreme: you’d hear what someone was blasting as they walked down the block then hit the record store to track it down.

Then came the Walkman, which allowed for private music listening in any environment.  There were a lot of benefits to this, not the least of which was my mom not having to hear the 2 Live Crew I was nodding my head to (or even knowing I was listening to it, shhhhh).  Over the years, however, this privatization of music listening has led to a decrease in spaces for social listening or even recognizing that listening to music is a social experience.

This piece began with a simple tweet from CDM editor Peter Kirn, in which he made a tongue in cheek reference to music being his favorite anti-social experience.  The comment stuck out for me because I’d recently been using two services which sought to restore the meaning of social listening.  Both services move away from the networking aspect of the social movement, assuming you already have the network of friends you’d like to listen to music with, and jumping straight into the practical by providing a virtual space where you and those friends can listen to music together.

“As a teenager,” Abe Fettig, the developer behind The Listening Room shares,  ”it seemed like any time I was with friends, shooting baskets, playing videogames or riding around in someone’s car, there was music playing. So even though I listened to commercial radio a lot back then, I think most of the music I fell in love with came to me via having a friend who owned the album play it for me.

“I had been thinking about how listening to music with other people, and talking about what you’re listening to, is a fun thing to do, and something I wished I could do more,” he shares on the inspiration for The Listening Room. “There’s something about the conversation that makes it more fun than just hearing the song.”  Inspired by NPR podcasts of a similar format, Abe and his friend Luke began a blog.  ”We both listened to a song at the same time, talked about it in real time, and published our chat to the blog.”

For better or for worse the blog wasn’t the biggest success, but the idea behind it stuck with Abe.  ”Reading about HTML5 audio, and I thought it would be a fun experiment to build an app that would stream an mp3 file from one person’s web browser so another person could hear it in their browser. So I started with that, and immediately felt like I was onto something good.”

Similar thoughts were at play in Denmark, as Esben Milan, one of the developers behind MuMu Player, explains: “I thought about making a live whiteboard where creative people could meet in a online space and draw, write and create projects together. My good friend had a similar idea for an office player where everybody in the office could control the physical speakers.”  From this, MuMu Player was born.

Five users share a playlist, love of music and laughs in MuMu Player

While there are parallels between the two services, the executions and experiences do differ.  With MuMu Player, a central playlist layout manages social interaction.  ”Everybody in the player can upload music and re-arrange the playlist – and the music plays in sync. That’s it. It’s the virtual way of when friends listen to music together in real life.”  MuMu Player’s simplicity makes it quite intuitive.  The shared playlist shows everyone’s uploads in the order in which they will be played and a side bar area is set aside for chatting while the music plays.  One of the biggest differences between the two services is that MuMu is limited to five listeners per room.  There are advantages to this, especially when managing the playlist and following conversations in the chat window.  Overall, it makes the experience feel very intimate.

The Listening Room abandons the centralized playlist and has no user limit, but because of that, operates a little differently. “Any registered user can create a room and add songs. When a song plays everyone in the room hears it, and sees the record spinning with album art. Any user — even those who haven’t registered — can drop in on a room to listen and chat. The chat is in sync with the music, so as you scroll down the page you can see what people said next to what was playing at the time.”  What plays isn’t as immediately intuitive as with MuMu.  The shared playlist is replaced with a personal queue of songs which only you can see and rearrange.  When multiple users have songs in their queue, the room will alternate between user queues to pull selections.  As there are no user limits on an individual room, it takes away the hassle of having to worry about playlist management, though without being able to see what someone has in their queue until it plays it makes the song selection a little less interactive.

Ultimately, though, the thing that makes both services is the ability to converse about music in real time.  Not only can you play your friend that song, you can key them in on a specific part of it.  Discover the six degrees that separate your interest in shoegaze from your friend’s death metal collection.  And how are you supposed to know what minimal witch house is until someone you trust plays it for you?

I wish I could end this piece right here: try them both and see what works for you.  Either way, you’ll surely discover the joy true social listening inspires.  Unfortunately, though, both of these involve a hot topic of discussion in the IP world — streaming rights.  Both services do everything they can to adhere the rules as they exist today, but there’s reason for concern.

“Its a very complex area,” Esben explains. “We believe MuMu is legal, like it is legal for groups of people to listen to music together in real life. Everything in MuMu is also made with that in mind. By example, when a user exits a player his or her’s songs automatically is removed from playlist.”

“The United States has what’s called statutory licensing  for ‘non-interactive’ broadcasters,” Abe says. “The statutory license means that you don’t have to negotiate your own deal with the music labels – there are predefined terms available to anyone, as long as your service meets the definition of non-interactive, which basically means the listener doesn’t get to choose exactly what they want to hear on demand (Pandora is non-interactive, for example). So I designed The Listening Room to meet the qualifications for a non-interactive service. And my company pays SoundExchange [an entity that represents labels and artists] as well as BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC [which represent songwriters and publishers] fees for all the music that gets played.”

So far, there have been no legal actions against the services, but considering they are breaking into a new realm of streaming service, how that will hold up is uncertain.  That both are aware of the issues bodes for their ability to adjust should things change.

The Listening Room
MuMu Player

Ed.: Do let us know if you try these services, and what you think of the challenges social listening faces, and potential it holds – technological, legal, and personal. I noticed a headline the other day claiming people were using smart phones as quasi-boomboxes, albeit via the internal speaker, but that still seems a poor substitute. Can social listening translate online? -PK

Let’s get this out of the way first: if you’re looking for a tool for composing and editing scores on your iPad, Avid Scorch isn’t it — not yet, at least. But as a score reader, Scorch could be a glimpse of a future in which tablets create a new marketplace and exchange for notated music.

Scorch is, first and foremost, a score reader. It shares the mature notational display engine of Sibelius, and makes use of Sibelius’ (and now Pro Tools’) scores. That includes Sibelius’ broad library of musical symbols, guitar tab features, and handwritten fonts, among other features. (It even includes the somewhat silly, but potentially-comforting, textures that have long been a feature of the desktop product.)

The role of tablets in digital music is still evolving. But it’s not hard to make a case for the form factor here: unlike a MacBook Pro or a PC tower, you can put a tablet on a music stand. As such, a tiny device can have dynamic access to a near-limitless collection of music. We’ve already seen impressive takes on the classic jazz fake book on the iPad, and they handily beat the older form when it comes to weight or bulk.

That leaves the question of what reading a score on what remains essentially a computer, in place of on paper, actually means. Scorch shows off some advantages here. For instance, you can transpose scores – say, for a singer, or a different reed instrument – in realtime. (That grumbling noise you hear is people complaining about the loss of musicianship and the ability to sight-transpose. I agree, to a point – but I’ve also known some musicians who could do that who also used the transposition button on a digital piano.)

Other features could broaden the appeal of notation in general. With one tap, you can convert a line to guitar tab, dynamically, as seen in the image below. You can change fonts, or pull out a single part, in order to improve readability. These are things that would normally require a copyist to go back to the drawing board and make new parts, even in the computer age. The very notion of what a score is is changing: that score becomes dynamic, electronic, and live, open to instantaneous shared revisions.

I’m following up with Avid’s developers and testing the application myself, as some questions remain. Turning pages electronically could theoretically be easier … or not. There’s an interactive “Music Stand” mode, but that’ll require an actual test. (Stay tuned for results of that shortly.) Depending on your instrument, you may not have a hand free, and on the iPad, there’s no way to tape multiple pages together to increase the size of the paper. My bet is that we’ll badly need a footswitch. (See this week’s discussion of augmenting tablets with foot pedals.)

While I investigate that, though, it’s just as interesting to ponder that Scorch is not just an application, but a marketplace. Using Apple’s in-app payments (the rules for which this week were loosened), you can purchase scores or download free scores. The display even looks like e-reader apps from Apple, Amazon, and others. With brick-and-mortar music stores few and far between, and the record store long gone, this is huge news. Demand for notation has been on the uptick, as popular music, reality TV, and shows like Glee continue to feed on – and feed – appetite for musical expression. (I need to pull some solid numbers on that, but I do know there are some positive signs; that’s probably a topic for another story.)

Scorch could be the start of something big – and with electronics makers around the world, not just Apple, betting on the tablet, it could be a sign of other tools to come.

I still imagine many people want to use tablets to make scores, not just consume them, and I expect that to be a growth area, too. But Scorch is notable as the first big-league entry into what could be a transformative arena. And it could be transformative in ways that are more profound than even digital distribution of music. Notation has evolved the way it has on a paper medium, designed to be fixed, still influenced by the conventions of the pen and engraving. The next question: will scores, from creation to display, need to change, too?

Avid Scorch

The gaming industry has made their bet, and it’s that touchscreens go better with tactile controls. Might digital musicians reach the same conclusion?

A funny thing has happened on the way to the touch era. The vision of a device like the iPad is minimalist to the extreme: an uninterrupted, impossibly-slim metal slate, as impenetrable as some sort of found alien scifi object. The notion is that by reducing physical controls, the software itself comes to the fore. It’s beautiful conceptually … and then you find yourself tapping and stroking a piece of undifferentiated glass. For navigating interfaces – and even, I’d argue, exploring sound design and composition – it works brilliantly. But for live digital performance (what to game lovers is called “gaming”), for anything that wants tactile feedback, it can be imprecise or unsatisfying, or both.

Watching this shake out as a design problem is fascinating, especially coming from the perspective of music. Digital musicians were exploring alternative interfaces since before it was cool. Given the ability to make any sound we can possibly imagine, the question of how you design an interface around sound is compositional, philosophical, essential.

Whatever winds up working in the marketplace, there are some fascinating ideas for combining touch with tactile. Since both are good at certain tasks, why not do both?

We’ve seen several examples among musicians and researchers exploring how to augment the touchscreen with physical input:

Mike Kneupfel’s research at NYU’s ITP program, in the video at top, investigates adding additional inputs. See: Extending the Touchscreen.

We saw that kind of extensibility in an iPad dock concept by Livid Instruments.

While it lacks additional tangible controls, I/O extensibility is featured in a still-as-yet-unreleased “pro” dock by Alesis, and most recently in a DIY dock by circuit bending pioneer Reed Ghazala.

Now, game vendors are moving in the same direction – even with prototypes that look quite a lot like the research project above. (Sometimes, arriving at the obvious conclusion is necessary for a great design.)

Sony’s PlayStation Vita, successor to the PSP mobile game platform, augments touch input with tactile controls in much the same way as Michael Knuepfel’s work does. Notably, it also proposes how these inputs can coexist in a form factor that’s larger than a phone, but smaller than a tablet – scaled roughly to a comfortable holding distance between your two hands. (Microsoft and Apple each unveiled standard split keyboards on Windows 8 and iOS 5, respectively. The era of thumb ergonomics is now fully underway.)

Nintendo’s Wii U controller combines a lot of sensing capabilities into one device. Like Sony’s effort, the centerpiece is the combination of the interactive touch display with analog controls. But true to its Wii heritage, Nintendo is packing other sensing technology, too. While its evolution has been more piecemeal, the same is true of the Xbox 360 in the Kinect era. The Kinect camera is really a bundle of mic and stereoscopic camera sensing with software intelligence for motion analysis and even speech analysis via a variety of methods. While Kinect is touchless, the conventional gamepad still plays a role.

What’s the relevance of all of this evolution to music? Digital music’s demands parallel gaming, requiring precision, accessibility, scalability from beginners to hardcore experts, and real-time interaction. Also, music research has often been at the forefront of experimentation with a variety of means of translating sensory data to expression. And since musical practice itself is roughly as old in human evolution as language, if not older, it’s a key way of glimpsing how ubiquitous interfaces can become meaningful.

Let me put that another way: the stuff game companies are doing now looks a heck of a lot like what computer musicians have been doing for years.

While much of the acclaim for platforms like the iPad has been for their transparency and unadorned interfaces – and while I believe those are valuable concepts – bundles of capabilities for interacting with the world can become powerful. That means efforts like Apple’s addition of USB MIDI connectivity to the iPad, or Google’s nascent work to standardize USB host mode and open hardware development (based on Arduino), take on new meaning. Add to this additional connectivity via Bluetooth and wifi, and it may be that we only really see what these platforms do when, like the PC, they start geting sociable with a range of other gear.

This could also mean that communities like the music community have a chance to prove that the “post-PC era” is a little different than it’s been described in the mainstream press – and maybe a little less a radical departure. The “post PC era,” we’re told, is less about being a hub for a lot of hardware. But as people look for tactile feedback, some of the coolest applications of these platforms may not be in the mainstream use as “consumption” devices, but at the fringe.

I’ve just come from the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in New York. You’re not missing much; there were a handful of people snapping up the tablets. (I think the 10.1, and a few other Honeycomb-based tablets, do have a bright future, though their growth may be a bit slow at first as developers get their hands on them and give people a reason to buy them.)

What was most compelling to people at the launch, though, was a planned appearance by pop star Ne-Yo (at least according to some staffers to whom I spoke).

But the connection was, at best, tenuous. It may be when devices like these tablets are made more viable for musicians onstage that that connection starts to make sense. And that may mean that Apple and Google/Android vendors alike need to start to think more aggressively about the larger ecosystem and hardware applications. Remember all those futuristic promises from Apple about hardware accessories? Right now, the most significant hardware is the Square payment add-on, and it uses a hack to make it work through the audio jack. Both Apple and Google can do more work to open up hardware development.

It’s all well and good for the tablet to be a “post PC” device, to be different from PCs, to be better. But they may simultaneously need some of the openness to other gadgets that made the PC age so revolutionary.

Jeff Price, writing for TuneCore, has a different take on Apple’s iCloud. He thinks it will both transform the industry and shift consumer listening from downloaded files to streams. That would mean I’d have to substantially revise my knee-jerk take following Apple’s announcement – and his line of thinking would raise questions about whether dividing up a $25-a-year fee will leave much of a revenue stream for artists.

Updated: Apple responded to NPR’s request for clarification. iCloud is not a streaming service. That invalidates a lot of the arguments on the TuneCore blog. My analysis earlier was based on the assumption that Apple was making iCloud music and iTunes match download-only.)

iCloud: A Music Industry Game-Changing Product

You can read Apple’s description of the product on their site. Correction: while TuneCore claims iCloud’s music functionality is streaming, Apple has only confirmed file sync capability – you play music from local storage. Indeed, Apple touts the ability to download and to listen to music matched on iTunes Match as 256k AAC files.
http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/

There are several observations in his piece worth highlighting:

• Apple’s library sync, once you pay the fee, is automatic, says Price. (This much is correct.)
• It’s a legal coup for Apple. Price notes that the same concept on MP3.com, back in 2000, earned RIAA lawsuits that shuttered the service in 2008. (This is also likely accurate, though we don’t know yet the terms of Apple’s negotiations. Removing streaming would simplify licensing greatly, but since iTunes Match can associate content that isn’t purchased with a file download, it’s safe to assume some sort of revenue sharing for that media. If that’s the case, it’s a huge step forward.)
• Re-downloading uploaded files is possible only with Apple — and yes, that includes files you pirated. Price believes that this “provides the feeling of owning what you are streaming.” But that could be bad news for artists who depend on the “ownership” feeling coming from buying from stores like Bandcamp. Confirmed: Price is at least partially mistaken. Amazon allows re-downloading files, though it’s worth noting those are files you’ve purchased from the Amazon MP3 store — Apple’s functionality is indeed different. What’s entirely incorrect, based on the service in its present state, is the assumption that you stream files. While that’s true of Google and Amazon stores – and while those services might assist the kind of streaming preferences Price describes – Apple isn’t streaming, or at least isn’t doing so yet.
• Price suggests that licensing fees could be a “pot of gold at the end of the digital music rainbow,” by creating revenue streams for plays of music, regardless of source. (That’s an interesting theory, but without specifics of how revenue sharing takes place, it’s unclear how big that pot is.)

Why would this transform the landscape? Two things: one being increased lock-in to Apple’s products, Price argues. While there’s no new DRM, the automatic download as AAC renders files incompatible with some non-Apple players. (I disagree here – AAC compatibility could simply become more widespread, and even now, it’s not limited to Apple.) I think sheer iCloud compatibility could increase Apple dependency, however – and to the iTunes store, too, which is essential to TuneCore’s business as a gatekeeper for unsigned artists.

The other half of the argument is more interesting an interesting description of a hypothetical service that is not iCloud in the state described by Apple:

Just as the original Napster trained people to download music and listen to it on their computers, Apple, due to its vast hardware proliferation (iPhones in particular) is in a position to shift consumer behavior yet again–this time from downloading music to listening to it via streams. And with this consumer shift, the music industry will reset itself once again until the next revolution…

The bottom line here is whether consumers buy in and adjust their listening habits. If they do, Price could be right – we could see a shift from downloads to streams, an income shift from purchases to royalties, and even greater dominance of Apple over how people consume music. Notably, because of the lack of licensing deals, Apple might be without competition. My big fear: those shifts could ultimately mean that only artists with lots of plays get revenues, which again would tilt the scales to big artists. The charts would simply be on your iTunes players, not on the radio. We’ll have to wait and see; stay tuned as I hear from more people close to the iCloud deals and product.

Updated – one last thought for the day. If you’re wondering how you can split up a $25-a-year fee and provide streaming, a simple answer may be, you can’t. It’s possible TuneCore is simply dead wrong, because it doesn’t seem that the math for licensing fees would add up. Apple, for their part, never mentions streaming.

But I am at least partly comforted in my fears about streaming becoming the norm at this absurdly-low price by the evidence that this isn’t a streaming service to begin with. Ahem.

Again, confirmed: Price is making an argument that appears to be divorced from the present facts, though it certainly remains possible a future version of the service will stream. (Given the service isn’t due out until the fall, it’s even possible the final version will ship with that functionality.) In his defense, the question of whether Apple’s service provided streaming seemed to confuse everyone. While it was the single most-anticipated portion of the WWDC keynote, Apple left demos and description to the end of a marathon set of demos of Mac OS and iOS features, and then showed a service that wasn’t complete. That has surprised some onlookers (see our comments), given that many people expect Apple to keep functionality under wraps until it’s fully baked. (Contrast: Google, who regularly release experimental and “beta” products.) Since Apple never specifically debunked rumors their service streamed, some people conflated rumors (and features of rival services) with what Apple showed. While TuneCore hasn’t posted an update to their blog, we’re blessed with the ability to post updates online. For now, the iCloud doesn’t stream. Price’s arguments remain a perspective worth considering because a future iteration might stream, and rival services make it a cornerstone feature.