What’s this new Max about, and why was it such a big deal at the AES trade show? To really understand, let’s turn to gaming for a moment. When Nintendo described their vision for the Wii, they talked about appealing to three groups of customers:

• The “hard-core” gamer; that is, their existing audience, of course
• “Lapsed” gamers: people who had done some gaming at some point but lost interest
• Entirely new gamers, across a variety of demographics

History will have to be the judge of Nintendo’s slim white box and controller-wagging interface, but I heard some similar development goals at the AES audio show this weekend. Nowhere was this more apparent than Cycling ’74’s upcoming Max 5. Substitute the word “patcher” for the word “gamer”, and you’ve got a snapshot of the new Max.

After all, whether you’ve touched Max before or not, you’ve likely got some needs in at least one of these categories. Beginners are easily intimidated by the “visual programming” metaphors of a blank-slate, modular tool like Max. Many others get through a couple of patches, often in a school course, but wind up having difficulty getting beyond that first work later on. And even advanced users (maybe especially advanced users) are always looking for ways of working faster.

The build I saw of Max wasn’t entirely complete, but I will say it’s tremendously promising. I talked to many for whom the chance to see Max 5 was the highlight of the entire AES show. It’s a tool you really need to see in action, so be sure to check out Cycling’s just-posted videos of the program:

A First Look at Max 5 [Cycling '74]

This is not the all-words, no-pictures manifesto we saw recently: now you actually get to see the tool in action. Highlights:

Technology and music have always had dynamic, changing, intertwined histories. It’s easy to forget that we’re in the middle of that history, both in terms of the now ubiquitous practices of DJs and the mind-numbing progression of software updates.

I recently got to chat with Ableton’s David Cross about the new crossfader curves in Live 6, and we wound up talking more generally and philosophically about crossfaders, how they’re designed, and how they evolved. Crossfaders are wonderful things. We take finely-tuned crossfade curves for granted in video and motion work, but when it comes to music and sound, you rarely see crossfaders outside DJ hardware and software.

Cross, himself a DJ, recently revealed to me that he had been researching mixer history before coming to Ableton’s US staff, and even wrote a thesis paper on the topic. DJ history might not yet have been embraced by the average music historian, but Cross recommends Last Night a Dj Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton (Grove Press):

Last Night a Dj Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey

Bill and Frank have their own website with more resources:
DJ History

… and they’ve also built “the DJ Centenary”, 100 Years of the DJ, an interactive timeline of DJing for Yahoo! Music UK/Ireland. 100 years, you say? Absolutely, as long as you count the broadcast of a contralto singing Handel’s ‘Largo’ from Xerxes to shipboard telegraph operators in 1906. (Now I feel like I have to do a Xerxes remix!)

Of course, this foray into 100 years of history all began because I asked about a software feature that cropped up just a few years ago. So back to that: David explains how Live 6 wound up with crossfader curves at the eleventh hour of development.

Johan Larsby points us to a developer contest at the mind-bogglingly comprehensive audio plug-in site, KVR Audio:

KVR Audio Developer Challenge

Developers are competing for a prize fund donated by readers and users, currently up to US$1770 (probably more than you’d make from a small plug). Developer entries are currently closed, but that means voting is on. There are 31 entries; the contest is pretty Windows-biased with only 5 Mac-compatible entries, which makes me suspect that cross-platform developers will have a major edge in voting.

Of course, the upshot of all of this is that you get to take advantage of lots of free software — just leave a few dollars in the hat to keep the thing going. Here are a few of the more unusual contributions:

Yes, now not only will Jessica Simpson be able to sing in tune, she’ll be able to be tuned to an Indonesian pelog scale!

AutoTune, the ubiquitous and now pretty ridiculously powerful tuning software, has some major new improvements in AutoTune 5. Central to the upgrade is a graphical mode that lets you draw pitch envelopes over a representation of the detected pitch. Here’s where things start to get interesting: the developers at AutoTune have added pen tablet input, so you can hook up your Wacom tablet, polish off your drawing skills, and perform either subtle tweaks or expressive, experimental pitch changes to an audio source.

Microtonal and alternative guru Carl Lumma, a veteran of Keyboard Magazine, writes to point out that the upgrade now no longer limits you to conventional major and minor modes: 26 historical and microtonal scales are included in the new release. That’s great, but they don’t seem to support Scala tuning files, which would be even better. There’s also new sync-to-host support, so you could do some crazy beat-synced pitch distortion with this.

It’s too bad AutoTune isn’t a little more affordable, because it sounds like just the kind of software a lot of us would love to abuse. The adjustment speed and vibrato controls are all designed to be expressive and closely controlled, so I think there’s likely a wide range of sonic effects you could coax out of this very powerful software. Go find a friend with a plug-in-laden Pro Tools setup and ask if you can borrow it late at night.

Antares AutoTune 5 Preview [Antares, via]

Separated at birth — or fresh off the photocopier?

In the case of Lemur touchscreen versus Mono Touch, it’s pretty obvious the creator of the Mono Touch software just worked on cloning the exact layout of the Ableton Live template on the Lemur. David Cross points us to this comparison from the Ableton forums, as created by axou:

And speaking of copying, some readers were confused when I said a leaked shot of the “Prologue” synth from Cubase SX4 was … inspired … by Logic Pro’s Sculpture. But, then, I’ve spent a lot of time staring at Sculpture programming sounds. Maybe it’ll help if you see them on the same screen. Note the unique curvature of the raised background, the faux-silver knobs, and the exactly-copied effects switches. The knobs alone I’d say were both copying hardware, but the particulars of the switches and the background are just too specific to be accidental. Then again, after seeing the Mono Touch, I have to give Steinberg credit: at least Prologue is just ripping off individual elements, and admittedly on an entirely different synth, though it’s still … uncanny, shall we say?

Ever thought music software would inspire developer tools? Only Apple would try something like this: they’ve copied the interface of their own GarageBand software, almost button for button, in the new Xray developer tool in Xcode 3.0 (part of Mac OS X 10.5). The developer’s work process will be much like someone mixing music in GarageBand.

Xray is designed for visualizing performance and debugging code, which is a linear, time-based process. That means that some kind of timeline interface makes perfect sense. Apple didn’t just stop there, though: the track view, transport controls (including record button), volume, channel controls, ruler, and loop display elements are all there. It’s so close that you wind up with sentences like this:

Add different instruments so you can instantly see the results of code analyzers.

Instruments turn out to be exactly the same word in development; see comments for more details of what this means for real programmers as opposed to weekend coders like me. :)

I’m just waiting for Apple to add an Apple Loop Browser so you can lay down a groovin’ trance or house beat while you figure out why your application is sucking so many CPU cycles.

Mac OS X Leopard Sneak Peak: Xcode 3.0 [Apple.com]

And in a non sequitur at the end, Apple reverts to their usual marketing hyperbole: “Xray. Because it’s 2006.” So we should have a developer tool with the interface from Sonic Foundry’s ACID in 1998? Hey, if it saves developers time and makes the dev tools more intuitive, I’m for it! Developers who want to chime in on this and let us know what you think, please do.

Apple has been making a big push to get its developers into OS X’s eye candy, including Quartz 2D and OpenGL 3D graphics. Here are two Mac applications that take advantage of gorgeous UI elements for audio analysis.

Old, but worth mentioning . . . if for no other reason that you’re thinking about color in new ways as you stare into your green beer for St. Patrick’s Day. (Or even a green river, a la Chicago.)

The Music Animation Machine renders familiar music as series of colored bars, in still image or animated video, reminiscent of a piano roll editor in a sequencing application. Color represents harmonic area, so as you look at the piece you see form, structure, shape, and harmony in new ways.

It certainly raises some interesting questions: with new tools at our disposal, what might be a more useful (or visually exciting) way of looking at music? With interactive tools, you could even play with the resulting renderings in real-time. I’m sure I can come up with a really compelling idea if I drink enough green ale. Or, at least, I’ll start to think it’s really compelling.

Pictured: Bach Brandenberg No. 6, mvmt. 3.

Who said all soft synths have to look, work, and sound the same? For better or worse, Gaugear’s interface is like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Gaugear is one of the gems that appeared along with the 5.1 update to Native Instruments Reaktor. (”5.1″ to most developers means a bug fix or two, but Native Instruments crammed a surprising number of new and updated instruments and effects into this minor, free update. Go download it now if you haven’t yet.) Believe it or not, there’s a playable monophonic synth behind the glitchy, indecipherable interface. This isn’t just eye candy atop a typical synth (with the exception of the ADSR envelope at left): the sound generation facility involves eight parallel FM/AM pulse oscillators fed through delays and lowpass filters.

We’re all for interface innovation and TC Electronic does fantastic audio processors. But their new “MINT” interface technology not only wins for silliest meaningless acronym since synth maker Kurzweil’s “V.A.S.T.”, it also looks like the interface panels from a Klingon warship in Star Trek III. What’s going on here? (Hint: it might actually be cool and, unlike Klingon user interfaces, usable.)