What happens when you mix technical chatter on the Cakewalk forum, Samuel Beckett, and The Matrix? I’d wager you get something like the surreal video above. Prompted by the posting of technical details for a new update to Cakewalk’s SONAR production software for Windows, and empowered by a strange, new tool that generates eerie virtual reality from typed text, we get banter like this:

The arpeggiator is now on every track, so you are supposed to use it. It is one of the new rules of recording.

Yes, I came from the days of one-finger piano playing. This is a total blessing to me.

I’m going to take that as a challenge and base my review of SONAR 8.5 on using an arpeggiator and step sequencer on every track. And I’ll have to pronounce all those hard g’s in the voice over, clearly.

And no, this is not some twisted viral campaign on the part of the folks of Cakewalk; I’ve been assured that this came from a user.

Okay, what was this post originally about? Oh, yeah – the actual technical details of the SONAR 8.5 release. Noel Borthwick talks about all the details of the new SONAR release on the Cakewalk forums. Apparently, some people care deeply about whether this is SONAR 9 or 8.5 or some conspiracy theory there, but what interests me is the technical details of the software itself.

SONAR 8.5 Fine Print

Noel goes down to a code level. Interesting tidbits: working with Intel, Cakewalk was able to do a demo of SONAR running an absurd number of tracks, instruments, effects, and live video without pegging the CPU, with a tiny 2 ms of latency. The Cakewalk engineering effort also has put together what may be the most highly-optimized VST support and richest 32-to-64-bit bridging on any platform, anywhere.

Whatever the opposite of “marketing speak” may be, I think that’s what Noel has achieved, getting into a sort of developer-to-developer level discussion. It is still readable, and worth digging through.

See also: Intel Developer Forum details and video on the Cakewalk blog

I could talk more about that, but let’s just leave it at step sequencers and arpeggiators on every track, okay?

The Music Bore – Video 2 from Nicholas Humfrey on Vimeo.

“I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t allow you to listen to Coldplay.”

What would radio be like if playlists were not only robotic, but had robot DJs pulling information from the Interwebs dynamically? That’s the question asked by the winning team at London’s Music Hackday last weekend, which created an epic mashup of data sources to produce a voice-synthesized IRC chatbot that researches and plays music for you.

Music Bore

Music Bore was just one of a number of projects developed in the weekend of musical hacking, some for listening, and at least one (a fantastic and free synth plug-in) for what we really like – production. With some of the world’s top musical coders in attendance, the results were amazing, even if not all projects were entirely finished. (Hey, that’s why they call it hacking.)

You can check out the full list on the wiki, but here are some favorites — and if you were there, do shout out to us as you put more documentation up of the event and projects.

Automap on other devices – and an iPhone as a remote control for your Live set? Our friend Ben Rogerson at MusicRadar have caught up with the chaps at Novation at a London trade show to have a look at Automap for iPhone. This app hasn’t yet hit the App Store yet – Hispasonic and the Ableton Forums got the jump on the story last month. But it looks appealing.

It seems to auto-detect the computer to which it’s connecting – as it should, folks, look up Zeroconf. (implemented on iPhone as “Bonjour”) And you can learn in both directions – so you can interactively choose parameters on the iPhone and decide what you want to control. It also sends MIDI to Live for clip triggering, though you’ll notice that some features on the APC40, like clip status and the ability to move through blocks of clips, aren’t possible here. Because Automap wraps around VST and AU automation parameters, you also get high-resolution control of plug-in parameters.

This should also open up possibilities for other Automap-supported apps, not just Live; I’ll be able to test this once the app comes out. No official word on availability or pricing other than soon and cheap. Before people start complaining about the tiny iPhone screen — yes, absolutely. But there’s a nice blank spot on the Novation controllers on which you could put your iPhone or iPod touch. Think about it: you can add an intelligent multi-touchscreen to your existing hardware, use your conventional gear for physical control, but keep the Apple gadgetry as an additional remote (now fairly cheap with no contract for iPod touch). You can even wander around the room during sound check while still controlling your set.

Update: I should note, as I just got asked on Twitter, most Wi-Fi adapters allow you to create your own Wi-Fi network. So you don’t need Wi-Fi in a venue. You’d just create your own network on your PC or Mac laptop, and connect via that – the iPhone and iPod touch both support connecting to these networks. (Note that not all devices do: the Android-powered TMobile G1, for instance, has a chip that apparently doesn’t support them, and I have an 802.11b/g USB adapter that won’t create them. But mostly, this is an easy matter.)

Cool as this is, and elegant as the work Novation appears to have done, I can’t help but notice this is still something of a kludge. The iPhone communicates natively over TCP/IP with the computer. That’s what this app is using – but then it needs a Rosetta Stone and another set of software on the computer just to untangle the archaic protocols music software uses (plug-in automation, MIDI, and more oddness heaped atop of MIDI). There’s absolutely no reason that music software couldn’t be intelligent enough to support networking protocols so that all software and devices can easily communicate. That wouldn’t put Novation out of business, either – on the contrary, it would allow them to do their jobs and this very app could be more productive. Instead of MIDI CC numbers, imagine if you could refer to clips by scene and position number, or even by clip name. Imagine if the iPhone displayed clip parameters and changed when clips were launched. Imagine no more drivers or software to install: someone who bought Novation hardware with OSC support could bring it to a friend’s place and work on a session without that friend installing Automap software.

(singing) You may say I’m a dreamer, but … (sorry, cough) actually this is all possible right now.

I’m all for solutions that work, and Automap (and M-Audio’s HyperControl) both have great capabilities now. But OpenSoundControl is also something you can implement now (provided hosts like Live will support it), and we’ll be talking more about what it can do over the summer to make it more practical and less abstract.

The mda-vst collection of effects has been a long-time favorite for me. It’s a set of no-nonsense, unique, simple effects, just useful stuff that doesn’t have any unnecessary bells and whistles. Oh, yeah – and it’s free, making an easy way to fill out your effect arsenal. But until recently, the collection was proprietary freeware. Now, it’s GPL-licensed open source for Mac and Windows.

Included: multi-band distortion, drum replacement, amp and speaker simulators, de-essing, degrading, delay, detune, dither, dub delay, compressor/limiter/gate, envelope following stereo imaging and simulation, a Leslie simulator, multi-band compression, an overdrive, a really insane pitch changer, a 3D panner, a sub-bass synth, a couple of vocoders with different numbers of bands, test tone creator, flanger, pitch tracker, and more.

I imagine the access to code for these things could help people launch their own effects projects. And as Windows VSTs, it can run easily in Linux hosts that support that format, too.

http://mda.smartelectronix.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mda-vst/

Thanks to Marc Resibois for the tip. And you budding C coders out there, if you dig into the code, let us know.

Live-triggered video inside your music host is about to get a lot more popular. Daniel “Herb” Herbert writes to let us know that his Mabuse Software, an “experimental audiovisual software company,” has developed a new AV plug-in for mashing up video. It’s a VST plug-in based on the now-defunct Pluggo, with a Max for Live port coming later this year as that is released. Of course, that does reveal some of the trouble with Cycling ’74’s decision to dump Pluggo. You’ll be limited to running this kind of cool software in Live, and from what they’ve said so far, you’ll also have to pay for Max for Live to do it – no free run-time is planned. But I can tell you that all of Jitter’s video and 3D output capabilities work from inside Max, including in full-screen mode, so there’s no question you’ll get some power out of the combination. I just hope people find some creative stuff to do and not just more of the same YouTube mash-ups.

Herb describes the software and promises more AV tools to come:

The beta version won’t save, but is otherwise fully functional.
A full screen add-on will be available soon, as well as a number of other plugins to expand the Mabuse AV range.
Features include:
Run video within a VST plugin
Automatic Tempo matching
MIDI controllable video fx
Easy to use browser
Record to Quicktime Movie

A PC version will be available if there’s enough interest through the forum and you could be in with a chance of winning a copy by joining the mailing list before the full version is released.

Short 1 min demo video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9TGDrkJh6A

5 min tutorial video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ_xDptp-ws