A young, aspiring musician walks into a consumer electronics store. (Let’s call it Big Buy, and imagine people wearing… red polo shirts.) They wander into the game aisle and muse at the latest music games in the video game section – $60-100 in price. But there’s an endcap with something else: a box of Pro Tools that’ll run on their computer, plus a ready-to-use audio interface, for $99-129. Instead of Guitar Hero, they leave with Pro Tools – a name they already knew.

See full details of the new lineup, with photos.

This idea is nothing new – for many years, it’s been possible to do great stuff with $100 on a computer. But the most powerful brand in music production (Pro Tools) has remained notably absent. Instead, that hypothetical consumer would find a smattering of consumer-only choices with names they likely wouldn’t recognize. Meanwhile, the name “Pro Tools,” and the software interface that made it popular, have been limited to more complex offerings sold through specialists.

Today changes all of that. Gone is the idea that “Pro Tools” is only for the high end. Gone is the iLok hardware dongle. (You still need either the Micro or Fast Track interface plugged in, but the target market for this product may not care.)

There are three offerings:

A vocal studio, bundled with a USB mic (similar to M-Audio’s Luna).

A “recording” studio, bundled with a simple USB bus-powered audio interface (the previously-available Fast Track.

The “KeyStudio”, bundled with a 49-key USB keyboard. The software comes with 60+ virtual instruments, says Avid, so you’ve got quite a lot to play.

The software included in each has some limitations – it has 32 tracks (16 audio, 8 instrument, and 8 MIDI), and more basic routing options (3 inserts per track, 2 audio inputs, and 2 outputs). The absence of multitrack recording is probably the biggest restriction. But you nonetheless get a range of virtual instrument sounds and effects, plus a full complement of editing and mixing features.

On the same day that people are rediscovering The Beatles through a video game, and video games are causing people to rediscover music making, you can buy a studio for about the same price.

Now, if you’re reading this site, that’s probably not news. But it could be news to quite a lot of people who haven’t discovered computer music making. And it represents a tectonic shift in how the titan of music making software treats its flagship.

“Studio” for many of us means packing musical production tools into a corner of our desk, then being able to fit the whole thing into a backpack and take it with us. It’s bringing along your entire production to a cramped rehearsal room and adjusting tracks in a hotel room. It’s putting together an assortment of unusual pieces of DIY hardware, mobile game systems and an iPod touch, and composing and performing a live PA set. So packing in functionality means a lot.

That makes it worth considering a hardware solution like Cakewalk’s V-Studio 100 in obsessive detail. Combining an interface with mixing, control, recording, and software functions makes the VS especially relevant to the computer musician.

I was one of the first people outside Cakewalk to lay eyes on the V-Studio 100. Part of the initial appeal to me was that it seemed to combine a lot of the tools I wanted into a single package.

Sure, its big brother, the V-Studio 700, is an impressive unit with loads of onboard options. But the V-Studio 100 was more my speed: it has that apartment studio, backpack-friendly attitude. And don’t let the “SONAR” in “SONAR V-Studio 100” fool you, either. While it’s great having a free copy of a special edition of SONAR on Windows you can use the VS hardware and even the plug-in bundle that comes with it on any host on either Windows or Mac. And — oh, yeah – you can also make use of all that audio I/O and mixing to do some crazy stuff with your plugged-in portable game  consoles and iPhones and homebrewed electronics.

The real test is whether this one unit can perform the tasks you need. The V-Studio 100 tries to be a number of different things:

• An audio interface (up to 24-bit/96 kHz)
• A mixer
• A control surface
• A wave recorder
• A software bundle

Correction: The street price of the whole package is US$699. (I had incorrectly put the street at $800 instead of $700!)

Anything that does that much will naturally have to make some compromises. Some of those compromises I think are rather well-conceived on the VS, while others I hope will evolve over time.

This will be partially a review, but partially a description of what it’s like using the VS, so if you do have one of these, I can hopefully give you a sense of how to begin using it.

Osmos Trailer from hemisphere games on Vimeo.

Osmos is a glorious glimpse of the fusion of electronic sound and game design many of us anticipate. It is built around a (challenging!) physics-based gameplay style – in the same vein as float-around-the-world games like flOw (and long before that, Asteroids) with procedural design and a perfect, liquid electronic soundtrack. Osmos became available DRM-free yesterday on Valve’s terrific Steam service for US$10 (on sale for a little less this week), and you can buy worldwide from the developer on Direct2Drive. (The developer has temporarily suspended direct sales from their site. Updated: the game is available again direct from the developer. It’s worth buying direct if you want to get a free coupon for the Mac and Linux licenses when they become available. Steam and D2D are great stores that support indie developers, though, and in the case of Osmos you don’t get any DRM with either one.) There’s also a free demo available. Versions for Mac and Linux are coming soon.

The roster of artists working on the music is simply a dream, including Loscil, Gas/High Skies, Julien Neto, and Biosphere.

I’ve already lost myself in the opening levels, and can’t wait to get deeper. CDM will have an interview with the creators by next week, once they recover from the launch.

And yes, indie gaming looks like a very fertile ground for digital artists and musicians, indeed.

Now, I’m not going to say anything else, because I want some time to play the game.

http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/

So, you’ve seen lots of interesting looking iPhone apps, but most of them strike you as gimmicky. Others have interesting workflows, but limit you to working on the mobile device, not switching back to a computer. And maybe you’re perfectly happy with a phone running Windows Mobile or Palm OS.

Enter SunVox. This is not a mobile music making app for the timid. It’s a powerful suite of soundmakers and sequencers, baked together into a modular environment that lets power users tweak to their heart’s delight. It’s small, it’s fast, and it looks – and sounds – a lot like early computer music programs. It’ll run on iPhone now, but also on Palm, Windows Mobile, Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’ll run on your netbook, your MacBook, and your ThinkPad.

Incredibly, all this goodness is yours on all those platforms for ten bucks and on iPhone for $5, easily making SunVox the biggest steal in music software I think I’ve ever seen:

• Flexible architecture that adapts to slow and fast CPUs
• Synths and generators: FM, virtual analog, FFT-based “SpectraVoice”, Kicker
• Effects: Delay, distortion, filters, LFOs, reverb
• Sampler with WAV support
• WAV export when you’re done

http://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

And for fans of computer music in the 90s, it’s a chance to get back to some of the no-nonsense, powerful creation of that era, without some of the distractions you may find in modern apps.

Given the passion of the debate, it’s easy to forget that Propellerheads’ Record has been firing up discussion from many people who haven’t actually seen it. Record is to audio recording, mixing, and mastering what Reason is to synthesized sound, and for Reason lovers, it finally delivers that holy grail – multiple racks. Record is a bit like Reason Studio, taking those instruments and giving them a full production context.

Since its release, Propellerhead has amplified polarized opinions about this tool. It doesn’t support plug-ins (though you can use other ReWire clients), it doesn’t do things like film scoring, and thus its singular focus on recording means I think it’s fair for Propellerhead to say it’s not a DAW. Of course, going so far as tell blogs they can’t label it as such is going a bit far, and it only made some people protest more. And the focus on those features hasn’t pleased users who want everything and a kitchen sink on their feature list. Users were divided over the Ignition Key and online authorization scheme (see full explanation), of course.

But it is something about which everyone seems to have an opinion, and for that alone, I love it. That’d be a little more fair if you’ve actually gotten to use it, however. So, now’s your chance to try Record for yourself:

http://www.propellerheads.se/products/record/

The beta is a full-featured, open-and-save-capable version, through its expiration date on September 9.

If you’re impatient, we can get you the beta key right now. Just leave a comment, say something intelligent, say “+1 beta,” and be sure to leave your real email address. (Emails are not published on the site; I’ll just see them in my inbox.) If you’d like to be on the CDM Notes mailing list (no other marketing or spam), say “+1 email.”

All out! Thanks to everyone; hopefully we’ve gotten everyone a code who wanted one. Follow comments for some little glitches with their Website…

Once you’ve got a reply from me, download Record by entering your code at http://recordyou.com. You’ll also get two codes to pass along to friends.

Update on registration: I talked to Propellerhead’s web developer – when you get the confirmation email for recordyou.com, go ahead and log in! You’ll be confirmed automatically. Some people saw this login page following the confirmation email and thought something was wrong. Don’t worry, log in, and everything will be fine.