Segue – Reset (Live at Big Day Out 2008 Two-up Edit) from Jaymis on Vimeo.

How do you make live performance documentation that doesn’t suck? You’ve been there: you’re trying to shoot footage, you’re trying to edit footage someone else shot, or you’re trying to tell someone shooting footage how to take material you can actually use. Jaymis from Create Digital Motion talks a bit about a recent experience working on footage of Segue – or skip to the end for some tips, either for you or to give that young, eager videographer you hope can make you look cool. Got more thoughts? We’d love to hear them. -Ed.

Look out, Akai APC40. There’s another contender in the emerging Controller With Lots of Buttons And Also Faders and Knobs and Crossfader product category. Livid’s Ohm64 combines the light-up button grid with faders, knobs, trigger buttons, and most importantly, unique customization options and a lovely wooden case. What’s unique about this one:

• High-end materials: anodized aluminum faceplate, “immersion gold-platted circuit boards” (guess that’s circuit bling), an optional wooden body (aluminum is available, as well, but wood is more fun).
• Not mass-market: hand-assembled, small-production Austin creation.
• Fully class-compliant, no drivers (also true of the APC as far as I know, but nice – and ideal for Linux, too, in case you want to run this with a netbook or a Pd-running souped-up *nix laptop)
• Open-source, customizable MIDI talkback: when you’re ready to customize just how those LEDs light up, there are included open source tools and fully programmable MIDI mapping

Bonus: it comes with a powerful, full-featured VJ app in the box, Cell DNA, though of course you can use it with anything you like.

The real story to me is the customization. Whereas the APC40 is entirely proprietary in design, has evidently limited MIDI mappings, and a mysterious mechanism for programming two-way communication, the Ohm64 is open, open source, and software-agnostic. If the open source thing catches on, that could mean a community of friendly folk thinking of smart ways to reprogram this thing for different apps. Ironically, that means that in the long run, the Ohm64 could wind up with better Ableton Live integration than the hardware Ableton chose to back – though all bets are off until we get these devices in our hands.

I would say the APC is probably more direct competition for the Ohm64 than the Monome, despite the 8×8 light-up buttons. The Monome is much lighter and slimmer, it takes a minimalist approach (no big knobs or faders), and uses OpenSoundControl in place of MIDI. The Ohm64 seems likely to appeal to those who weren’t Monome fans, and visa versa. And some lucky bastards are naturally going to own both.

But the important thing is that the Ohm64 joins the Monome in its crusade for open-source customization of a commercial product. Whatever the Ohm64 is when it ships, it’s that question of what people can do with it that may determine its real value. I have no doubt people will be reverse engineering the APC40, too — starting with figuring out how to fake the hardware “handshake” it uses so other devices can emulate it in Live. But it’ll be interesting to see how these different philosophies pan out, so to speak.

I hope to sit down with the Ohm64 as soon as they ship to Hoboken, New Jersey, across the river from me in Livid’s NYC-area offices. Stay tuned.

No pricing yet; the existing Ohm with fewer buttons is priced at US$599-699 on sale.

Ohm64 Product Page

Akai was one of the music manufacturers that stole the show at this year’s NAMM trade conference. The simple reason: the APC is a rare combination of a whole mess of colored buttons with a whole bunch of faders and knobs. Now, the APC’s big selling point is its out-of-box experience with Ableton Live. Contrary to what you may have heard, there are people who don’t exclusively use Ableton Live – including some Live users who use other software (drum machines, VJ apps) on the side. Looking at the APC’s layout, you see a combination of stuff that would work for lots of other tools.

The only question: would the APC actually work with other software, or would it be hard-wired only to work with Live? Aaron Liven writes with evidence from Akai technical support that suggests you can use any app you want:

The APC40 is designed to be a dedicated controller for Ableton with specific midi cc’s that are hardwired for Ableton. There would not be a way to remap this on the ACP40. However if you can manually map your sequencing software or plugin to other midi cc values, then you can match this up to what the APC40 is set to in order to have control.

The one catch is that, as this email notes, it doesn’t sound as though you’ll get a template mapping app to choose other templates for other apps. That’s too bad: the Novation ReMOTE line, for instance, also works out-of-the-box with Ableton Live, but if you decide you want to reconfigure it for something like, say, a Native Instruments B4 organ emulation, you can. (In the case of the B4, a template is included, or you can use the powerful Novation template editor.)

On the other hand, very often people do their mapping in software anyway – particularly with VJ apps – so this will mostly be fine. And if the APC does become popular as a music controller, you can count on some template maps elsewhere, too.

The more significant catch is that the APC has only a USB jack — no physical MIDI jacks for controlling outboard gear. And I suspect that some of the features of the APC work via System Exclusive messages, meaning it’ll be substantially less cool when away from Live. (You may have to hack a way of getting those lights to light up the way you want, for instance – though that may not stop anyone.)

CDM has a pre-release date with the APC, so stay tuned. And there are other button- and pad-strewn goodies to look forward to this year, as well (NI Maschine, monome, and new DIY projects we haven’t even heard of yet).

This time tomorrow (6PM AEST, 8AM GMT, 3AM New York), I’ll be streaming live with AV turntablist Sampology from the Game Over party at the State Library of Queensland.

Following on from our previous Game On Set. Sam will be kitted out with Serato’s Video-SL (review on CDMo), and I’ll be bringing a brace of live camera feeds with the Vixid VJX16-4 video mixer (minisite | on CDMo).

Last time it went down something like this:

Sampology at Game On – AV Turntablist Set (Part 1) and (Part 2) from Herovision on Vimeo.

Video-SL is fantastic fun, and as a visualist it’s somewhat humbling to discover what a turntable worrier can do when their spinning plastic discs suddenly have power over vision as well as sound. Tune in tomorrow to see.

To sweeten the deal, we’ll be preceeded on stage by Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation) and Matt and Yug (of Australian Gamer), who will have a screening of their show Game Damage, and then talk about games rather a lot.

Using web production studio Mogulus, the stream will be viewable on the CDMedia channel, and there’s a countdown and embedded player at Herovision.

In addition to Halloween-themed music mixes to entertain you this weekend, sounds and images from experimental to trance are echoing through the Internets this week. We’ve got the details on Create Digital Motion.

For visualists and a range of out-there-leaning audiovisual and sonic acts, France and the rest of Europe have a festival streaming online:

Festival Stream: French and European Visualists at Cinesthesy 1.0 Today and Saturday

And 11:30p US Eastern is SWiY, with more gear than we have (as pictured above):
Halloween Stream Tonight: SWiY Live Trance and Gearlust

Scare your cat and your significant other and keep the sounds going all weekend, I say. That is, if you’re not roaming America scaring up votes (that’s important, too).