Preparing for battle: it’s all in the mind. Photo: Aaron Landry.
Two modular patching software packages for programming multimedia software visually, Pure Data (Pd) and Max/MSP/Jitter have long had a friendly relationship. The tools share code, are reasonably compatible in patches and external objects (sometimes with some adjustment), and are basically open source (Pd) and commercial (Max) cousins of one another. The user bases are likewise friendly with one another. But a certain rivalry hid behind the surface – until now.
Now, it’s personal.
Enough of the diplomacy. A group of dedicated patchers in Toronto have decided to dispense with this “we’re all winners” nonsense and decide which tool is superior. I’ll let them the organizers describe it in their own colorful way:
vvvv, the free-for-non-commercial-use patching environment on Windows, already has a cult following among visualists. Now, it’s looking more interesting for music, too, with the 4.0 beta 17 release.
VST plug-in support for adding audio/music instruments and effects
Multichannel waveplayer
eCue Lighting Control Support
In case you haven’t worked this out yet, what this means is that you can now add powerful visual interaction with a VST plug-in. That could be a huge boon to audiovisual shows. Max and Pd (among others) have had this ability for some time, so it’s not revolutionary as an idea – but it is nice to get this feature in this powerful, eye-candylicious app. (Thanks to Bjorn from vvvv for the heads-up.)
I may have to try out Kore, since Kore runs easily as a VST and hosts other instruments / effects in a way that can work live. FL Studio could be interesting, too, for the same reason – and, like vvvv, has a solid following as a Windows exclusive.
vvvv also recently added the ability to develop your own objects (“nodes” in vvvv speak). Development looks unusually easy, with baked-in C# support, so there’s good stuff happening in vvvv-land in general.
You’ve heard the Theremin as a sound-making instrument. But it can be a MIDI controller, as well – an extremely sensitive and expressive one. Continuing our DIY round-up, here are the details in case you’d like to try it yourself.
When we last heard from Sarah Angliss and Spacedog, we were introduced to their creepy Theremin-playing doll Clara 2.0. Now, they’re using the Theremin as an audiovisual controller, triggering audio and video samples from the 1968 film The Devil Rides Out and my personal favorite, a parakeet training record. The result is a new version of the ballad “Willow’s Song” cult classic The Wicker Man (1973). (Wikipedia understands if you don’t.) Here’s a live performance of the result:
I figured readers might want to know more about how to use the Theremin as a controller, so I asked Sarah for more details.
Let’s cut straight to the reason we use this stuff: we want crazy-sounding delays we can play with. Reaktor guru Peter Dines shows just how you’d build such a thing in Reaktor from the ground up for CDM’s Kore site. He also takes it one step further by creating not only the Reaktor ensemble, but also a Kore performance preset to match. The advantage of going this route: Kore provides a way of organizing parameters for control, performance, and automation.
This is another all-free download, so have at it. Now I feel like I’m in a patching race with Peter, because I’ve got some ideas of my own for how you might modify this basic idea; let’s see if I can actually make that happen.
Making sense of Kore
The other side of the minisite is we’re further exploring what Kore is for and how to make it work. We asked readers of the minisite to tell us their thoughts on how Kore is going and how they use it, which has yielded an interesting comment thread:
Our main focus, of course, is simply teaching people how to use the tool effectively – from there, you can decide whether it’s for you and how you want to use it. To that end, I’ve got the first half of a tutorial up that explains what for me was the biggest draw and the most initially confusing, which is the control pages Kore uses to assign automation and physical control. I walk through why you’d want this, how it works, and how you manage different levels of the control pages:
Coming soon: I’m planning some short features on each of NI’s instruments. We’ll have to call it the “get it out of the shrinkwrap” series, especially for people who got the overwhelming set of instruments that comes with Komplete.
We live and die by hard drives for music. There’s no substitute for redundancy and backups (hey, you could be Matthew Dear and have a drive stolen during your set). But it is helpful to know whether a drive is healthy or not. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring features built into drives can help.
Lifehacker today points to a free Windows utility for the job called CrystalDiskInfo:
But that got me thinking about other tools. There’s quite a range of choices for Mac, Windows, Linux, and even some obscure operating systems. The only bad news: generally you’ll only be able to monitor internal drives, unless your external drive is eSATA rather than USB or FireWire. (eSATA is where I’d like to go generally – it’s quite a lot faster, and frees up your USB and FireWire buses for other things — but that’s a discussion for another day.)
XP passed into the shadows yesterday, officially — so how’s Vista for music? Some of the answers may surprise you. Photo: coda.
Yesterday marked the official phase-out of Windows XP. That in itself isn’t terribly big news; it’s easy enough to get XP systems for the foreseeable future, and custom builders can even put together an XP machine for you. Heck, you can even boot XP on an Intel Mac. But it seems like the perfect time to talk again about Vista. As with any OS, the branding (“we’ve got a new thing called Vista”) masks the more complex reality evolution of software and drivers. In other words, Vista today isn’t what it was the day it shipped. (That’s a relief.) And personally, I’d like to start talking about real-world performance and dispense with the kind of schoolyard rivalry the platforms have had over the years. I think it’s a safe bet to say none of us is excited about operating systems. We’re excited about actually making music. The good news is, Vista is finally looking like an OS on which you can do that.
It’s a funny time for operating systems and music applications, in that the most recent generational changes in Windows and Mac were unusually significant. On Windows, XP and Windows 2000 improved both audio and hardware support, and finally saw Windows NT really mature for music. On the Mac side, albeit slightly later, the bumpy transition to Mac OS X finally paid off as Tiger and Panther brought major audio improvements and reliability and performance enhancements. And Tiger got musicians onto Intel x86 CPUs, which helped unleash the live use of laptops we see today. Each of these updates came with compatibility hurdles, but there was a clear payoff. They’re must-have upgrades for music. Many music and audio apps won’t even work with earlier versions.
Process Explorer is the essential portal to seeing what’s going on with CPU and memory activity on Windows. It was good enough that Microsoft bought the tool.
Any computer – Mac, Windows, and Linux – can experience degraded audio experience pretty fast if a background task starts stealing CPU or a driver is misbehaving. In contrast, a fully-tweaked Windows machine, equipped with a set of tools to diagnose potential problems, can be rock-solid for audio performance. That’s an especially big deal for those of us using computers for live music.
I think a lot of people’s Windows experience is especially colored by bad drivers, overzealous antivirus and security software they don’t actually need, and the crapware installed by many PC vendors. I know I had that experience when I came back to Windows a few years ago, following a long hiatus. (I’m now cross-platform.) I did what many people do: installed some ridiculous, bloated security suite from Symantec. I was blown away by how fast Windows was when I just turned the darned thing off. Linux and Mac OS are happily not cursed by these beasts, but any computer music setup, regardless of platform, can benefit from tuning what’s running and making sure music software comes first.
I recently put together a list of essential Windows tools for Rain Recording, one of a handful of custom PC builders that focus on music and audio customers. The first part of the list doesn’t include any music software per se – these are just essential parts of my PC tool belt to keep things running smoothly.
All of these tools are free, so they’re well worth a download.
Can $130 buy you more versatile digital musical studio hardware than (bizarrely) a Nintendo DS loaded with homebrew software? The software keeps rolling in.
The wonderful cellular automation synth glitchDS has just gotten its 1.3 update, with per-sound volume, a tap-able “pad play” page for triggering samples, quick snapshot saving, and other improvements.
Better still, the author has created a new tool, demoed in the video above. repeaterDS lets you draw on the DS screen to play a looped sample, with the Y axis impacting repeat length and X axis controlling playback offset.
dsmcu is an in-progress wireless mix controller, focused on wireless control of the mixer in the affordable Windows production app Reaper. (Eventually Pro Tools, Logic, and other DAW support is planned.) Right now, it works with the mcu protocol to support two-way fader control, VU meters (handily displayed on the top screen), track controls, banks, and scrubbing. Dan warns it’s a little tricky going getting it set up, but it looks well worth it for the brave:
Author Dan has also created a drum machine, synth, and sequencer program called bliptracker
If you’re having keeping track of all this goodness, Dan has put together a little list of the best music tools for DS: DS music apps
And if you like wireless MIDI, be sure to check out DSMI, on which the other wireless implementations are generally based.
Finally, the Korg DS-10 DS cartridge got its launch in the UK last week, although there’s not really any news to report from the launch event and we’re mostly still waiting to get one. In the meantime, though, the 1UP Show has picked up the DS-10 in this video:
Hope to have CDM’s DS-10 hands-on soon, once I can get my hands on a DS-10!
Plug-in crafter daz disley writes to alert us to his Windows VST plug-in collection. The beta-grade plug-ins are all available as donationware. There are various warnings about “try at your own risk,” which reads to me as an invitation. Three effects have been polished into finished versions; you can get all three for EUR25 if you want to use them beyond 28 days. But the betas are free to try.
There’s some nice-looking stuff in the beta-level collection, including:
granulOSO: a granular “sample masher,” a bit like some of the Reaktor ensembles out there — and delicious as a result. Note that “granulOSO uses a mono trigger with polyphonic pitch so each new note’s samples join in rather than start again so it can be used as a gnarly harmonizer. “
voldeLAY: a delay chain that uses volume to determine delay (that is, it integrates a side-chained compressor). Similar: freqDELAY uses multiple bands for delay, and deeeeeLAY, a “stoopidly” long delay. You could route something similar depending on the capabilities of your host, but nice to have it in one virtual box.
wavePLAY: a “wave-explorer” synthesizer from a sound artist.
sidePRESS, a hard knee compressor with virtual sidechain inputs — meaning you don’t need a host capable of sidechaining to use it (nice!)
… just for starters; you’ll find plenty of others. And they all have quite lovely interfaces, true to their name.
We’ve been busy at kore.noisepages.com hacking away on Native Instruments’ software to share more playable tools and tips. Peter Dines has built a really fantastic tool called Frankenloop. It’s a "step sequencer with a twist" — probability settings for each step so that it sounds different each time. Peter has released it under a ShareAlike Creative Commons license, so we actually hope you’ll take this and customize it to do whatever you want, and release it under the same license.
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