Ed.: Deckadance DJ software has been on our radar for some time on the DJ software front: lots of MIDI control (with one caveat; see below), agnostic support for multiple vinyl timecode systems, and most interestingly the ability to run the whole app as a VST plug-in. Dreams of loading Deckadance into Ableton Live danced through DJs heads. The app even added built-in support for Nintendo Wii remotes. But the software, from the development house that brought us FL Studio (”Fruity Loops”) was Windows only. No more:

Image-Line has just released the latest beta of Deckadance, 1.20RC3. This version is the first version to include support for OS X. The developers have written on the Deckadance forums that the port to OS X required almost a complete rewrite. Early reports are mostly positive, with a few bugs (mostly on the Windows side reported here and there). Other notable changes include:

• Redesign of the Digital Vinyl System panel. It includes now a real-time signal spectroscope and an easy-to-use interface
• Vinyl timecode control of decks inside Live and Live LE
• Native support for Numark Total Control console

However, there’s no reports of a fix to allow pitch bend messages for deck pitch control, a personal obsession of mine. [Ed.: Wally, fairly sure you're not alone on that! -PK] Still, though, kudos to the Deckadance team for getting the OS X version out the door before the end of the year. Let’s hope 2008 holds great things in store for Deckadance!

1.20RC3 Beta Announcement [Image-Line Forums]
Windows beta download; Mac beta download

(You must be logged into the free Image-Line forums to use the download links.)

Image-Line has also posted a video showing Deckadance running on both Mac and Windows:

Wormhole2 is a powerful, cross-platform (Windows + Mac) VST plug-in capable of transmitting audio between computers over networks. It allows effects chain routing between networked computers, boasts low-latency performance on LANs, and even works over WiFi or Firewire. But Wormhole2’s niche audience kept it from catching on more widely, and we hadn’t heard much from it lately, leaving some users worried Wormhole had fallen into a black hole.

plasq, the wonderful people who brought us Skitch and Comic Life, have been giving their audio tools new lives rather than orphaning them. We’ve already seen plasq’s live performance-savvy instrument and effects host Rax show up as an Audiofile Engineering product, and AE in turn recently promised in comments that great things were coming for Rax.

Now, we have some great news for Wormhole2: it’s gone open source:

Wormhole2 @ Google Code

Product Page and Features (still up at press time)

Discussion at plasq.com Forum

End users can just download AU (Mac) and VST (Windows) binaries, plus a PDF manual. It’s even a Universal Binary for Intel Macs.

Developers: because VST isn’t an open-source format, you have to download Steinberg’s VST SDK to use it, but plasq will actually go the trouble of sending you the files once you agree to Steinberg’s license agreement. (AU isn’t either, but Apple ships all the developer tools you need with the OS.)

I’m really hopeful someone will build something cool with this. You’ll need something else to route MIDI (though the Mac does that over networks out of the box, cough, Windows). But there are powerful audio-over-network options here which would be hard to work out on your own. It’s unclear how useful Wormhole2 will be to the existing, open source JACK audio project, which is also capable of routing audio between apps and (via netjack) networked computers. JACK uses a client/server model as opposed to Wormhole’s plug-in approach. But for end users, having both tools available free is a very good thing, and the price tag is an extra incentive to be brave and see if these tools can help power up your rig.

Universal CEO Doug Morris makes an easy target for the blogosphere. This is the old-school record industry executive who called iPod owners thieves and wanted broad legal enforcement against piracy — enforcement that, in the end, seems to pale in comparison to the revenue generated by actually offering online sales. So, now that Morris has gone up against Wired, the blogosphere can easily see him as a dinosaur.

Universal’s CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He’s Giving Songs Away. [Wired News]

But as artists, all of us face a fundamental problem: how do you put value on something that’s ephemeral? It’s an age-old issue that has faced musicians explaining to their parents why they don’t want a real job, and artists to their patrons when affixing a price tag. (And as we’ve seen from veteran software developers and the BanPiracy debate, software “artists” face the same challenge.) Sure, people love to talk piracy, because it’s easier to talk in those terms. Piracy is theft, theft is crime, and crime is bad — including making a mix tape for a friend. Or all music should be free, and never mind that artists need health insurance and rent money. They’re black and white extremes, entirely couched in moral/philosophical terms, neither of which contend with how to solve the actual real-world problem (at least, not if you stop there).

And then I came across this quote from Morris in the interview:

“Really, an album that someone worked on for two years — is that worth only $9, $10, when people pay two bucks for coffee in Starbucks?” Morris sighs. “People never really understand what’s happening to the artists … If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go,” he says. “That’s what happened to the record business.”

Wait a minute… a liquid that comes out of your faucet for free, but is also sold, in bottles, at retail. How much would you be willing to pay? Hmmm… this sounds familiar.

It’s called water.

And how much are people willing to pay for the privilege of packaging, control over subtle variations of taste, and mobility? Quite a lot, as it happens. More than Coke.

Native Instruments remains the unchallenged heavyweight of instruments and effects. Apple’s Logic Studio 8 recently got a formidable upgrade and a big price drop (US$499), but its bundled instruments and effects, behind cosmetic improvements, are largely unchanged from previous versions. Cakewalk, Digidesign and others have also gotten in the ring, but no one can match up to the insanely massive collection of sound production and mangling in NI’s software. So, when NI offers an upgrade, we notice. I’ll be meeting up with NI next week at the AES show for a full preview of the new KOMPLETE kitchen-sink bundle and updated individual apps (plus KORE 2, due in November), but here’s a quick look.

• New Sampler: KONTAKT 3 is the latest version of NI’s flagship sampler, and in terms of raw breadth and depth of features, Kontakt appears to remain at the top of the heap. New in this version: a 1000-instrument, 33 GB sample library, a new looping/slicing/syncing Wave Editor, new envelopes, new amp and cabinet emulations, better browsing, and more. I’m curious to see how the Performance View and the updated KORE stack up to OnStage in Logic 8 (or even what it’s like using both together).
• New Guitar Effects: GUITAR RIG 3 adds new amp models, new matched cabinets, new effects (tape echo and ring mod!), and more. Guitar effects competition is brisk, but Guitar Rig’s edge to me has been its range of sound possibilities, straight out to the bizarre/experimental.
• Addition of Massive: MASSIVE is NI’s latest soft synth, especially geared for “sonic impact” (read, great basses and leads), with drag-and-drop, semi-modular sound creation.
• Lots of updates: Refreshed versions of previous synths include Absynth 4, Akoustik Piano, Battery 3, B4 II, Elektrik Piano, FM8, PRO-53, and Reaktor 5. With the exception of Reaktor, most of these have gotten feature improvements lately, and all have been updated for Vista and Intel Macs.

Rax, the clever audio effect and instrument host for Mac, got a major update last year with performance rigs, custom visualizer support, and a slick UI designed by plasq. It’s an ideal tool for loading up some instruments and effects and playing on your Mac, especially if you want software that gets out of your way while you play another instrument or sing and don’t need a full app like Logic or Live onstage. But it never caught on with Mac users, even after I wrote a glowing review in Macworld. And it has certainly been overshadowed by more popular plasq products for the general Mac market, like Comic Life and the upcoming Skitch. So it was clear this unknown gem needed a new home.

Happily, Rax has now changed hands to another of our favorite small developers, Audiofile Engineering. Their Wave Editor has won over CDM’s game composer / contributor Brent, so we’ll be curious to see how they handle Rax. They’ll be supporting existing customers (few of them as there are out there, I expect there’s a good chance they’re reading this). Their 2.1.0 update is a minor release to bring Rax into the AE fold:

Ed.: Our friend Wallace wanders in search of truly transcendent software use, and he’s taking the leap to GURU. Expect a review soon, but here’s why we’re interested — especially with a welcome update arriving free. -PK.

FXpansion has released the long-awaited Guru 1.5 update, which fixes numerous outstanding bugs and incorporates almost 100 new features. What’s amazing is that they’re offering this update for free to existing users. Again, this is another case of a company that could have slapped a major new version number on it and charged at least a modest fee for the update to existing users, and it’s evidence of FXpansion’s generosity and commitment to their customers that this update is being offered for free.

Among the new features:

• Expanded audio export options, with options to render pads, tracks, engines or full mixes, with drag n drop to the host application or even back inside Guru for further mangling. I can see this being seriously useful for loop slicing and mangling
• Expanded slicer functionality with greater precision and a new velocity implementation
• Adjustable randomizer with options to control the amount and depth of randomization
• New sample options for reversing samples, new layer modes and pre delays for fine tuning
• Improved file browser functionality
• Expanded sample library
• Windows Vista & multi-core support
• Expanded keyboard support so every function in Guru can be almost completely controlled without the mouse
• Widely expanded MIDI implementation, with much more control over UI elements
• Drop-out free audio engine, allowing for seamless transitions between kits while previewing

In short, not a whole lot of radically new functionality, but the workflow enhancements and expansion of existing functionality make this update a must-have for existing users, and will likely be enough to tip the fence sitters. I’ve used Guru on a friends machine, and while I really dug it, it just seemed to be missing a few things here and there. With this update, they’ve addressed all those problems by listening to their users on what could (and needed to be) improved. Consider me officially off the fence. When Guru was first announced, it held the promise of becoming the ultimate software beatbox. With the 1.5 update, Guru has officially arrived.

New in 1.5

Apple’s latest GarageBand 08 is nothing if not pretty. It remains a fun way for Mac users to get their feet wet in music making, and hopefully, simple as it is, something like Magic GarageBand will include users to brave the GarageBand icon that comes factory-installed on their Macs.

But what about serious music making? There are still reasons to keep the latest GarageBand around. A streamlined interface makes applying effects much easier than before. Multi-take recording could make this version ideal as a sketchpad for recording ideas, even if you do the rest of your work in another tool. And finally, you can print notation.

Here’s a visual tour of the new software (click the thumbnails to open an interactive gallery):

So, what about serious “pro” users? (I never liked the term “pro” in that I think it vastly oversimplifies the market, but you get the idea.) A Wikipedia article has been compiling examples of celebrity users, at least, which tend to fit in basic categories:

• Loop users: This is probably the worst possible way to be recognized using GarageBand — having someone hear a loop they know comes with the program. Examples: the movie Constantine, and the fifth season of 24.
• GarageBand for demos: Here’s a better way to use GarageBand — as a quick and dirty demo / sketch maker. Artists in this category: Courtney Love, Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit, Panic! At The Disco.
• GarageBand for fan remixes: Erasure and Nine Inch Nails have both let fans remix tunes with GarageBand. Interestingly, there have been more “fan remix” projects in Acid and Pro Tools, among others. Ableton Live would still be my choice for fan remixing, personally, but mostly we’ll have to see how this trend pans out.

I expect there are many more — I see Mac hardware almost every time I’m hanging around big-name musicians — though I also know many use other tools, like Live and Reason. GarageBand has perhaps gotten extra hype because it comes from Apple and it’s free. But it does have its uses: there are some nice instruments and effects there, and it works well as a linear sketchpad along other tools (including Logic, via Logic export).

Do you use GarageBand? Or did you dump the multi-gig GarageBand install to save hard drive space and leave you to focus on other tools?

Apple’s GarageBand 08, unveiled today, focuses on addressing two major areas: for beginners, making entry into the program easier, and for experienced users, fixing some holes in previous versions. Despite its user-friendly interface and the fact that it comes free with new Apple computers, many average Mac users just didn’t dig into previous versions of this music creation tool. A new “Magic GarageBand” mode is clearly aimed at getting better saturation of this tool. The remaining features, while not necessarily earth-shaking, appear to seek to make GarageBand more well-rounded for music making by inheriting tools from Soundtrack Pro (multi-take editing, visual EQ), and fixing existing complaints (automation).

This is just a preview of what’s new, not a review. I’m curious to hear what you think, though, because it seems these two directions are very different, and sum up the challenge “beginner” programs face — who, exactly, is a beginner, and what do they want? GarageBand 08 represents very different ends of the spectrum, as you’ll see.

Here’s what Apple says is new (actual hands-on with the program still to come):

Magic GarageBand: (That’s really what it’s called.) Select a genre, and GarageBand will walk you through adding an ensemble of virtual instruments. The eye candy is slick, and this should definitely take away any excuse a total newcomer might have for not getting into music making right away. But do you really need a wizard to tell you what should go in a country ensemble? (What’s that thing called? That thing you bang on? With sticks? Oh, yeah, drums! Now what about that other thing … that thing that’s like a board. A board covered with keys.)

The tireless developers behind the modern tracker Renoise announced a new beta on Tuesday. While the devs themselves are calling this a “maintenance and improvements release”, they’ve introduced enough bug fixes, new features and workflow improvements, along with multiprocessor support, that any other company would have slapped a new major version number on the top and called it a day.

Here’s a short list of the changes:

The day the iPhone was announced at Macworld, some of us immediately wanted to use it as a simple multi-touch controller for music. It’s no substitute for a dedicated, large, expressive multi-touch controller like the JazzMutant Lemur. But it’s also far less expensive, useful as a phone/Internet device/media player, and could easily be a simple, multi-touch controller. Basic multi-touch gestures could be a powerful tool for controlling music. Then, the sad news came that development wasn’t going to be open. Hearts sank.

Good news: Masayuki Akamatsu, the brilliant Max/MSP developer who first bridged the popular modular audio and multimedia environment to the Wii remote (see aka.wiiremote), is on the case. It’s still early in development, and for now is an extremely simple implementation: it only routes buttons and text on a Safari webpage to a Max/MSP patch. What’s cool is that it uses the OpenSoundControl (OSC) protocol to do it (with PHP on the Web end), and it works (you can even use it now if you’ve got an iPhone):

aka.iphone Preview
Discussion on the Cycling ‘74 Forums

Let’s talk about what this is not: it’s not multi-touch.