SONAR 8.5, I’m sure at some point, was to be SONAR 9. There’s an enormous amount of functionality in this release. But I think the surprise is some of the stuff that won’t necessarily appeal to the widest audio production audience. Here’s a DAW that’s adding unusual new features for arranging tracks, putting an integrated arpeggiator on every track, beefing up its step sequencer (really), and dumping a bunch of class LinnDrum samples into the package. Those are the kind of treats we like in these parts.

SONAR is really a “DAW” in the traditional sense. It does everything. It doesn’t hide features. Given a choice between taking something out and putting something in, it puts the thing in. It has a lot of knobs and buttons. There are positives and negatives to the approach – it’s the reason some readers of this site return to software on game machines that has more in common with early Amiga software. But if you like the feeling of a packed studio, a tool like SONAR can be terrific. As much as I love Ableton Live for sound design and live performance, I find myself returning to something like SONAR for arrangement.

Even with its competitors packing in features, SONAR 8.5 is a tool that really loves MIDI, just as other software focuses on audio. And it’s one of the best-performing tools around. Because it’s so well-tuned for Windows, that means you can drop it onto a wide variety of PC hardware without spending a lot of cash. Most importantly, it could be the first software on any platform that convinces you to try a 64-bit OS – just at about the time you may be doing a fresh install of Windows 7.

Here’s a first run-down of what’s new in 8.5 that I’m personally most interested in:

MIDI lovers, step sequence and arpeggiate away. Every single instrument loaded in SONAR now has a step sequencer, and every track an arpeggiator. The new step sequencer has a lovely pane for controllers, deep control over each step, and probability controls. It could be reason enough to give SONAR 8.5 a try on its own. And yes, this does indeed take SONAR into FL Studio territory – but with a more conventional DAW bringing those kind of features together. FL users probably won’t be impressed, but if you longed for FL-style pattern sequencing but wanted to maintain an existing DAW, this could be for you.

Drum sound goodies. Session Drummer 3 has long been a nice virtual drum tool, and now improves routing and mixing to come closer to what it feels like miking a new drum. But let’s skip the acoustic kits and get straight to the electronic ones: yes, there’s an 808 and 909, as you’d hope given Cakewalk is now “Cakewalk by Roland” but there’s also a 707, a 727, and a Sequential Circuits Drumtraks and Linn Electronics LinnDrum. Oddly, you still have to look at a picture of a photorealistic drum kit – I’d like to see a visual representation of that LinnDrum, please. But it’s nice to have these sounds, unless you have a really big budget for eBay. There’s 2.5 GB of content, but I’ll skip to these files if I can.

Easier-to-edit audio. I gave Apple deserved props, I think, for making Flex Time’s implementation in Logic 9 elegant and allowing squishing of audio materials around. But what frustrated me about their tool was that you couldn’t take your warped audio and do other stuff with it. AudioSnap 2 could blow it out of the water. SONAR had this going before, but I frankly found some of the selection tools and interface a little off-putting. The UI has now been cleaned up, the Transient Tool makes it easier to grab trasients in your audio, and selection looks better. You can do tempo detection, mapping, and syncing, so that this is useful not only for smooshing around your recorded audio but also mapping it to a tempo. And most interestingly, the transients you find in Audio Snap can be integrated with the new Step Sequencer. There are also audio fidelity improvements for working with vocal, reed, and brass instruments.

A Media Browser brings files together. MIDI patterns, audio loops, grooves, and such can now be dragged-and-dropped into one place. That’s not a new idea, of course, but having custom presets for different locations is a welcome improvement (and why is it so hard to get other browsers to do that)?

A new way of improvising arrangements, “Matrix View.” A cell-based interface for non-linear triggering of audio and MIDI clips sounds like Ableton Live. But think of this more as an alternative way of trying out arrangement ideas. Because it loads from RAM only and not from the hard disk, and because SONAR is built more as a studio tool than a live tool, I don’t expect it to be a Live killer. But if you’re happy with the SONAR workflow and want to try out ideas in its environment, it could still be useful. (Cakewalk’s Project5 went a similar route, with similar results.) It’s just about the only copy I’ve seen of Ableton’s Session View, and it really does feel like a copy, so for that reason it’s probably the change I’m least interested in in SONAR. I do think there are other features here that are far more original, though.

You get strips for working with vocals and drums. For vocals, the VX-64 is a combination tube-emulation mic pre + de-esser + compressor/expander + tube EQ + doubler + delay + output strip, which I already loved after seeing it bundled with the VS-100 hardware. For drums, the PX-64 is a combination pre + transient shaper + compressor + expander + contour EQ + delay + output strip – so, roughly the same thing, with some drum-specific tweaks. Cakewalk has done a lovely job with these strips, and they could be the sort of thing that justifies SONAR’s investment. I can’t imagine not liking the PX-64 having enjoyed the VX-64, both for its audio quality and the ease of drag-and-drop routings.

Why you may finally go 64-bit. The BitBridge XR plug-in not only lets your 32-bit plug-ins work on the 64-bit operating system, but gives each of them 4 GB of RAM for up to 128 GB of RAM. That’s possible on the Mac side with Apple’s Logic – but only with its sampler, not with third-party plug-ins. And SONAR ships with a lot of 64-bit plug-ins in the box, not to mention that major vendors like Native Instruments are providing support.

Improved performance, Windows 7 ready. You can now hotswap audio and MIDI interfaces without restarting, and audio and stability are improved. And when you do get the Windows 7 upgrade – which, based on my research so far, you will want to do from either XP or Vista – SONAR has been rigorously tested. I don’t want to just repeat that without supporting evidence, though, so stay tuned for a separate story.

I still don’t think SONAR is for everyone – though, of course, I don’t really think anything is for everyone. (That’s the marketing people’s job, to claim that one product solves everyone’s problems.) Sitting in front of SONAR’s interface can still feel like getting into a jumbo jet cockpit. The Matrix View is not – and is apparently not intended to be – a replacement for Ableton Live’s live performance features. Open as SONAR is, I think it has new competition from the extensible architecture of Reaper. And, of course, all of this is meaningless to Mac users – though I hasten to add, while the Mac faces a tough 64-bit transition ahead, Windows users can grab SONAR, clean install 64-bit Windows 7, and possibly barely notice anything at all aside from a whole bunch of gobs of memory.

But I’ll say this: it’s funny how a few subtle changes can change how you think, but the combination of brilliant effects, this ridiculously-powerful step sequencer, and the possibility that AudioSnap really nails audio manipulation has me taking a second look at SONAR. Expect more details later this fall. (I’ll be writing this up for CDM and not Macworld for obvious reasons.)

Upgrades for existing SONAR 8 users are US$79 (Studio) – US$99 (Producer). If you purchased SONAR after July 1, the upgrade is free. For new users, SONAR is $499 for the Producer edition with the extra effects and instruments, or $299 for Studio without them. (But, really, I think you want the Z3TA+ synth; you’ll just have to trust me on that.)

“Fruity Loops” has long proven that not all music making apps have to look the same way. FL is quirky and different. Its editing interface is built as much around step sequencers and pattern sequencing as the conventional, mixer and audio-tape-derived views. But perhaps some of its real draw is that it packs, in its mid-level-and-higher packages, it’s packed with fascinating and unusual sonic toys. FL 9 looks to continue that tradition.

And because it’s FL, if you’ve ever bought FL, you get a free lifetime upgrade to this version. (Seriously, if you’re pirating FL, stop. You have absolutely no excuse.)

New toys in this version:

• Autogun Derived from the excellent sounds of the Ogun synth, this instrument has “more than four billion presets.” (Wait… what?) I do agree with Image-Line’s description of “rich metallic and shimmering timbres” in Ogun; that’s exactly what it sounds like.
• Vocodex vocoder, the “last word in Vocoders.” (I thought the last word was, “No one needs a vocoder,” but I could be wrong.) Automatic speech enhancement plus up to 100 “variable-width, multi-parameter” bands does give this some interesting twists.
• Stereo Shaper.

I think that improved performance and editing may be bigger news, however:

• Multi-core CPU support, multithreaded generator, and multithreaded effects processing. This is the one that I expect most excites you crazy, synth-and-effects-routing mad scientists who have been pegging your CPU.
• Improved effects: sidechaining in the limiter, mid-side processing in the reverb, export and noise reduction in the awesome Edison and Slicex audio-editing instruments.
• Improved Playlists with “Clip Track” features
• A “Riff Machine” for automatically generating sequences in the Piano Roll
• Multiple controller support for defining different instrument channels. (Okay, FL experts – did I miss something? That wasn’t present before?)

What comes in the box has been expanded, too. In all the editions, you get the new stereo shaper and Autogun. In “Fruity Edition” and higher, you get SimSynth Live, DrumSynth Live, the DX-10 FM synth, and cool-sounding WASP and WASP-XT. In Producer Edition, you get the Vocodex vocoder.

Unfortunately, Image-Line still continues some confusing a la carte options, and actually eliminates its XXL edition that gave you everything. So, there’s a new Gross Beat that manipulates pitch, position, and volume in real-time, but you only get the demo with FL 9. I can’t really complain about this because FL has so much in it, but it can all get a little hard to follow sometimes.

On the other hand, if you’re an FL fan, I think you could do some serious damage with the vocoder and new sequence generating features.

I’ve always wanted to do a better job of covering FL on this site, so FL users, get in touch!

FL Studio product page
Download the demo

Here’s a switcher story of a different color: from the Mac, to Linux. It’s one thing to talk about operating systems and free software in theory, or to hear from died-in-the-wool advocates of their platform of choice. In this case, we turn to Kim Cascone, an experienced and gifted musician and composer with an impressive resume of releases and a rich sens of sound. This isn’t someone advocating any platform over another: it’s an on-the-ground, in-the-trenches, real-world example of how Kim made this set of tools work in his music, in the studio and on tour. A particular thanks, as he’s given me some new ideas for how to work with Audacity and Baudline. Kim puts his current setup in the context of decades of computer work. Even if you’re not ready to leave Mac (or Windows) just yet, Kim’s workflow here could help if you’re looking to make a Linux netbook or laptop more productive in your existing rig.

Stay tuned, as I’ll have some other stories on how to make your Linux music workflow effective creatively, particularly in regards to leaping over some of the setup hurdles Kim describes. -PK

Historical Evolution

I’ve been working with computers since the 1970s. Inspired by the work of composer David Behrman, I taught myself assembly language and programmed a simple digital sequencer on a KIM-1, single-board microcomputer, controlling an Aries modular synthesizer I had built. I discovered a then-new magazine called Computer Music Journal at the local computer shop and bought every copy I could get my hands on. (I still have them, too.) Later, I helped a friend’s father, an executive at IBM, unpack and set up the first personal computer IBM made. The manuals alone took up two or three feet of bookshelf space.

Fast-forward through a couple of decades of owning Commodore 64s, Apple computers, and PCs. In 1997, I purchased my first laptop: a woefully-underpowered Compaq Presario. It wasn’t fast enough for real-time audio, so I had to render sound files to hard disk using the audio programming language Csound. I created many of the sounds this way for my CD ‘blueCube( )’. But the capacity to work anywhere was enough for me to give up ever owning another desktop computer.

Frustrated with the ‘code-compile-listen’ process of working with Csound and wanting to work in real-time, I switched to the graphical multi-media programming language Max/MSP, which necessitated a move back to Apple hardware, so I bought a PowerBook. Having Max/MSP running on a laptop was the perfect environment for me. I could build the tools I needed whenever an idea presented itself. The computer functioned as both sound design studio and stage instrument. I worked this way for ten years, faithfully following the upgrade path set forth by Apple and the various developers of the software I used. Continually upgrading required a substantial financial commitment on my part.

Apple Seeds of Discontent

When I’m on the road, I use my laptop as a music studio, performance instrument, and administration office. I don’t like surprises on the road. Having a computer fail means a loss of income, and makes for an embarrassing moment if the failure happens during a performance. If watching laptop music bores some people, watching a musician reboot is even worse. So to be safe, I stress-test all new hardware or software in my studio for at least a month before I take it on the road. Max/MSP patches run for hours, software is used for weeks, and hardware is left on for days at a time to help induce failure before I leave home. But as fate would have it, an iBook I was touring with died a few years ago. I brought the laptop into an Apple repair shop in Berlin, where a technician diagnosed the problem as a faulty logic board. The failure rate on logic boards was high for that model of iBook, and in response to public pressure, Apple instituted a logic board replacement program. Luckily, my laptop qualified and the logic board was replaced for free. But the failure and ongoing buggy behavior impacted my work schedule and added to the stress of touring.

I’ve now replaced logic boards on three computers; the other two I paid for out of pocket. The out-of-warranty cost of replacing a logic board on an Apple laptop is around six hundred dollars — cheaper than buying a brand new laptop, but still significant.

If you make your living with applications that run on OS X, there are no options if a laptop fails. You either repair expensive Apple hardware or buy new expensive Apple hardware. This is called ‘vendor lock-in.’

Then, during my 2009 spring tour, my PowerBook G4 exhibited signs of age, with missing keystrokes, intermittent backlighting, the failure of a RAM slot, and reduced performance. As an alternative to repairing the PowerBook, I investigated what a new MacBook Pro and upgrades for all my software would cost. A quick back-of-a-napkin estimate came to approximately $3,000, not including the time it would take tweaking and testing to make it work for the tour. If the netbook revolution hadn’t come along and spawn a price-wars on laptops, I might have proceeded to increase my credit card debt. But as a wise uncle once advised, “you invest either your time or your money; never both.”

Meeting Ubuntu

I had tried Linux in 2005 on PowerPC-based Mac laptops, though at the time I couldn’t get audio working, even after extensive tweaking. But I had kept an eye on Ubuntu ever since. After considering MacBook Pro prices, I checked out the new netbooks coming to market and picked up a refurbished Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with Ubuntu pre-installed.

I loaded up my Dell with all a selection of Linux audio applications and brought it with me on tour as an emergency backup to my tottering PowerBook. The Mini 9 could play back four tracks of 24-bit/96 kHz audio with effects – not bad for a netbook. The solution to my financial constraint became clear, and I bought a refurbished Dell Studio 15, installed Ubuntu on it, and set it up for sound production and business administration. The total cost was around $600 for the laptop plus a donation to a software developer — a far cry from the $3000.00 price tag and weeks of my time it would have cost me to stay locked-in to Apple. After a couple of months of solid use, I have had no problems with my laptop or Ubuntu. Both have performed flawlessly, remaining stable and reliable.

Getting Past Ubuntu Audio Complexities

There are a few differences between how audio works on Mac OS X and how it works on Ubuntu Linux. OS X uses the Core Audio and Core MIDI frameworks for audio and MIDI services, respectively. All applications requiring audio services on OS X talk to Core Audio, which mixes and routes multiple audio streams to the desired locations. Core Audio is simple, monolithic, and easy to set up, and all the end-user controls are accessible from one panel. You can even create a single aggregate device from multiple sound cards if you need more inputs or outputs than one sound card can supply. To Apple’s credit, Core Audio and the applications that make use of it are the reason why you see so many laptop musicians seated behind glowing Apple logos on stage.

On Ubuntu, audio is a rather different story. Apple’s slogan ‘Think Different’ would be good advice for musicians encountering Ubuntu’s audio setup for the first time. Audio in Ubuntu can appear at first to be a confusing jumble of servers, layers, services, and terminology. Go to System->Preferences->Sound, click on the Devices tab, and check out the pulldown menu next to ‘Sound Events’ at the top of the panel. You will see various acronyms, possibly including cryptic-looking technologies like OSS, ESD, ALSA, JACK, and Pulse Audio. These acronyms represent a byzantine tangle of conflicting technologies that over time, and due to political reasons or backwards compatibility, have ended up cohabiting with one another. ‘Frankenstein’ might be an accurate metaphor here.

Thankfully, there is a simpler way, which is the combination of ALSA [a high-performance, kernel-level audio and MIDI system] and JACK [a system for creating low-latency audio, MIDI, and sync connections between applications and computers]. The battle-scarred among us have learned to ignore all the other audio cruft bolted on to Ubuntu and just use ALSA and JACK. One can think of the ALSA/JACK stack, the heart of most pro Linux studios, as the Core Audio of Linux and in my opinion Jack should be the first thing installed on any musicians laptop. I’d go so far as to suggest placing it in the Startup Applications so it’s always running.

The ALSA/JACK combination is a little more complex to set up and tweak than Apple’s Core Audio, but there’s a lot of good information online. [Ed.: ALSA, JACK, and the real-time Linux kernel also have some advantages over Mac OS X that can be worth the effort. While JACK has been ported to Mac, Linux has more JACK-aware tools, which is necessary for transport sync. Just as importantly, once configured, you can build rigs with Linux that have greater low-latency performance than may be practical on Mac or Windows. In other words, while it may require an investment of time, it can be both free and better! -PK]

Workflow

Over the past ten years, I’ve developed a workflow that has worked well in the studio and on the road. Since I created most of my tools in Max/MSP, they could shape-shift to fit any musical task I encountered. A sound mangling tool I’d written for studio use, for instance, I could then adapt for a performance with Tony Conrad. I modified parts of my performance patch for sound installations. This environment served me well over the years – until recently, when my aesthetic focus changed from using randomness in my work to taking a more deterministic approach. This happened to coincide with my change of operating systems.

I do a lot of location recording while on tour. My rig consists of an Olympus LS-10 digital recorder and an Audio Technica AT-822 single-point stereo microphone. I record at 96kHz/24-bit to a 16GB SDHC card in the LS-10. When I want to audition sound files in the field, I use my netbook’s SDHC reader, renaming sound files directly on the card. I can look at some of the files in Baudline if I need to check for low-frequency rumble or technical anomalies. I have come to use Baudline on a daily basis.

Back in the studio, using the sound editing program Audacity, I remove voice slates, trim heads and tails, adjust gain and EQ as needed, then save them to a project folder. And because I don’t like surprises in the studio, either, this folder gets backed up onto a remote network drive as well as a local USB drive.

Building my sound library takes weeks or months. During this time, I start filling a notebook with ideas, drawings, plans and marginalia, from which a score emerges. I import all my project sound files into the open-source Digital Audio Workstation Ardour, arranging them to loosely resemble the score in my notebook. Once my Ardour session is set up, I move sounds around, try different effects, create new textures by layering, then render and re-import sub-mixes until the piece starts to take shape. I use a KORG nanoKONTROL as a mixing surface. I assign faders, pans and switches assigned to the DAW allowing me to quickly play around with different mix ideas.

Once the piece sounds finished, I mix down to a stereo .WAV file at 24-bit/44.1kHz, without using compression or EQ on the mix bus. Tip: mastering engineers really appreciate getting a raw 24-bit master that hasn’t been fiddled around with by the musician. For performances, I also use Ardour and the nanoKONTROL to do an acousmatic presentation. This version of the Ardour session will have compression and/or EQ on the mix bus, since I want the material to sound more polished. As a side note: I am looking into using the mastering tool JAMin [JACK Audio Mastering Interface] for this purpose in the future.

Sayonara, Apple

After ten years of working on Apple laptops, I’ve left the fold. Not only was the expense of owning and maintaining Apple hardware a key factor in my switch, but the operating system had become a frustration to me. Details like not having a tree-view in the right hand panel of the Finder window slowed me down. Ubuntu, on the other hand, feels more like an operating system made for grown-ups. And what’s especially nice is that Ubuntu scales nicely to the expertise of the user. Your cousin the computer geek or your Grandma can install and use Ubuntu and get as deep as they like. Combine this with the recent rash of cheap, powerful laptops, and Ubuntu’s market share is bound to grow.

A Request

It’s important that kernel and audio application developers (1) ensure all audio creation software has support for JACK, (2) improve and update tools for JACK to make it easy for musicians to install, configure, and use, (3) ship distros with the realtime kernel already tested and configured for use, (4) to integrate the real-time kernel patches into the mainline kernel. [Ed.: On each of these points, distributions and kernel builds are steadily improving, partly thanks to feedback from communities like the music production community. The realtime kernel likely won't be the default, mainline kernel, but it's important to have well-maintained optional packages at the very least. That doesn't mean you have to wait for improvements to happen, though, and in future articles I'll talk a bit about how you can configure your system now to take advantage of this functionality. -PK]

Most importantly, consider paying a subscription to support developers of JACK and your favorite Linux audio software, or, if you can write code, proofread text, write a manual, do a translation, contribute graphic design, or create content; please help by contributing something to the development of the software you use.

I would like to thank Ken Restivo, Mike Rooke, Paul Davis, Philip DeTullio, Jörn Nettingsmeier and Matt Griffen at Canonical Ltd. for advice and inspiration in the writing of this article.

Kim Cascone is a composer, sound artist, touring musician, lecturer and writer. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Kathleen and son Cage.

Links:
http://www.osnews.com/story/6720/Introduction_to_Linux_Audio
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page
http://ardour.org/node
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio/
http://www.baudline.com/
http://jackaudio.org/
http://drobilla.net/software/patchage/
http://www.ladspa.org/
http://lv2plug.in/
http://dssi.sourceforge.net/
http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/about.html
http://linuxaudio.org/
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://code.goto10.org/projects/puredyne/
http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html
http://rt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.pulseaudio.org/
http://developer.apple.com/audio/overview.html

Corrections / clarifications:

Ed.: I originally claimed that JACK Transport sync is not possible on the Mac OS X port of JACK. As kindly pointed out by a reader, this is not correct. JACK Transport-aware applications on the Mac will work.

Secondly, Kim argued that you could pull out a drive without having to go to a lot of trouble unmounting it first. At least one commenter argues that risks data loss, and given that users may be using something like FUSE to access foreign file systems like NTFS or the Mac’s own HFS+, I don’t yet know what the exact details will be. As I said in comments, however, Nautilus and the command line eject function for me are quicker and more effective than similar unmounting on Windows and Mac, so I still notch this one for Linux. -PK

It’s the little things that keep you happy sometimes. The Sunday Soundtrack blog has an interesting idea for tracking work on the MPC — write it down. (I have to say, I miss having paper notes as I did when I was making hard-copy patch diagrams of my Moog and Buchla modular creations in college.) This fellow has a printable template you can use yourself if so inclined – and, of course, it’d work with any 4×4 grid, not just the MPC.

Post:
Music Production on the MPC
Full-sized image for use as a template

Keep anything on paper in the studio yourself – music notation? Lyrics? To-do lists? MIDI maps? Doodles of made-up creatures to keep you company? I’d love to hear how you work.

Previously: A Brief History of the MPC

Renoise has already earned a passionate following among lovers of trackers. The once-forgotten alternative to conventional sequencers, these music editors were beloved for their quick workflow and vertical, atomic approach to assembling beats and patterns. But Renoise is increasingly poised to appeal to other kinds of music makers, too, not just tracker purists.

2.1 you can sum up pretty easily: now you can integrate Renoise with other stuff easily. There’s ReWire support (appropriately enough for a tool beginning with “Re” in the title). And if you’re on Linux, you can pipe control and audio through the ultra-elegant, ultra-powerful JACK. (If you’re not on Linux, you may have just gotten a good reason to give it a try.)

http://www.renoise.com/

This is on top of a rapidly-growing set of features like multi-core balancing, automatic delay compensation, audio recording (cough, Reason), and MIDI inputs and outputs. In other words, this is a tracker you can use without giving up modern luxuries. Maybe it’s like the difference between having a tent in gorgeous mountainous wilderness, and having a mansion with a hot tub and a T1 Internet line.

ReWire is the headline, but some of the live performance tools may make an even bigger difference. Live control tools and live pattern sequencing could make Renoise a lot more useful in performance, even without just ReWiring into Live and recording clips. The pattern triggering looks especially nice, because it brings a feature Game Boy trackers have often used live. (Add JACK on Linux, and you could add your own custom instruments.)

And, oh yeah, the whole program runs on every OS, has an incredibly responsive and involved community that impacts the direction of the tool, and is distributed on a shareware model rather than with painful copy protection.

Full disclosure: I’m slightly biased by enjoying a couple of beers with Renoise’s Dac, and by the fact that I think this looks completely delicious.

Here’s the full changelog.

Full ReWire Slave & Master support (on Windows & OSX)

ReWire allows you to connect and synchronize multiple software applications, so that you can run them side by side while passing Audio/MIDI information between them.

For example, you could connect Renoise to Logic, program your drums in Renoise, while arranging the bulk of your song in Logic. Or you could connect both Reason and Ableton Live to Renoise, arrange your track in Renoise, control Reason’s built-in synthesizers, and play around with loops in Live. All it takes is some ReWire enabled software and you are good to go.

ReWire has two modes, both of which are fully supported by Renoise: *ReWire Master* (ReWire Mixer) and *ReWire Slave* (ReWire Synth)

Jack Transport Support (Linux only)

Similar to ReWire, Renoise now supports the Jack transport protocol. Jack transport allows Linux users to start, stop and reposition multiple audio programs, all connected/running through Jack. 

New Pattern Sequencer Features:

Decoupled Sequencer Playback Now Possible: This new feature allows the user to detach the current playback position from the edit position. This lets you edit a pattern while other patterns are playing.

Live Pattern Triggering:

Patterns can now be "scheduled" for playback via a new column in the Pattern Sequencer. Without stopping playback you can now trigger new sequences in the song "in real time". 

New meta devices (Modulation / Automation Device fun)

• Hydra Device: Automate/change/broadcast multiple FX parameters with a single parameter. Think of this as a magic slider, which connects itself to up to 9 other parameters – allowing you to change multiple settings with just one slider or automation.
• Keytracking Device: Modulates parameters depending on an instruments key (note) value. Like what the "*Velocity Device" does with Velocities, the Keytracking device does with Keys/Notes.  
• MIDI Control Device: This device replaces the old "MIDI-CC Device", finally offering Pitchbend, Channel Pressure, Program Change & regular controller (CC) in a single device.

I hope to check this out in June when I can sit down and get back to production.

The name gives it away: Record is a product based on a feature Reason users have long requested — audio recording. The surprise is, that need has led to an entirely new tool. Instead of just adding a requested feature, the company has revealed that they built a new application, re-examining in the process what recording really means. Internet rumors have been predicting something along these lines. The problem is, rumors can sometimes create distorted expectations. In this case, I think it’s worth taking a closer look, which we’ll be doing over the coming days.

Today, the first audiences of Reason users learned of the tool’s existence at the Producers Conferences events staged around the world. We’ll be able to talk about the details on Monday, but having spoken to Propellerhead co-founder Ernst Nathorst-Böös, I want to at least say that this really is shaping up to be something different.

Record is an audio recording program, says Ernst, but "This program has nothing to do with audio. It’s all about music… We wanted this to be about music making." Record is a piece of software designed around the musical possibilities of recording audio, he explains, emphasizing the actual act of recording and working with sound in ways that are always connected to musical time, beats and bars, and a fluid approach to tempo and tempo changes. It focuses on a single task rather than bundling together lots of tasks.

Most importantly, I am already convinced that Record is not intended to be a DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation – that is, a tool defined by bundling together different functionalities. This sometimes-muddled product category has been created after the fact to describe a certain breed of software, applications like Pro Tools and Logic. DAWs are defined by the way in which they combine a lot of different features, from audio and MIDI to plug-in hosting, mixing, and even video and notation. They’re useful and powerful for many tasks, which accounts for their popularity and staying power. But regular readers of this site are always up for new ideas, and attempts – in all varying degrees of success – to try new directions.

There are many new ideas in musical instruments and effects, but you don’t get entirely new ideas about how to put together a commercial music application very often. Actually changing the mold is a big challenge. Propellerhead’s own Reason and ReBirth, Ableton Live, Image-Line’s Fruity Loops (now FL Studio), and Sonic Foundry (now Sony) Acid all had a big impact on a wide group of computer music makers by effectively changing the mold. (And, of course, with or without big user bases, readers of this site are fans of many lesser-known tools that have done the same.)
We’ll have a number of months to begin to see what Record’s contribution might be. But whether it’s successful or not, the good news today was that, after all this time, Propellerhead isn’t using anyone else’s mold. Tune in Monday for our first look at some of those results, and then be sure to let us know what you think and what you’d like to know down the road.

Note that this is my own personal take. I did run it by Propellerhead, however, so this is not a rumor or leak. Embargo is lifted on the details on Monday, when we’ll be able to actually show images of the software.

Mac users luck out when it comes to managing audio files, with exceptional choices like Snapper from AudioEase and the all-powerful AudioFinder, not to mention – if your needs are light – features like Leopard’s QuickLook. Windows users, by contrast, have been mostly left out. But good news: we’ve got a lovely solution for you.

TaggedFrog is a free/donationware utility for Windows XP and Vista that brings some powerful file management facilities. And what’s great here is that it looks dead-simple to use.

Lunar Frog TaggedFrog [Publisher Site, Free Download]

As the name implies, the tool is built around tagging files. Drag and drop files to the iTunes-style Library, then tag them with identifying keywords. That’s it: now the files you need just show up automagically, and you can navigate them by tag. You can also tag directly from a context menu in the Windows Explorer file manager, and if there is keyword metadata in the file itself, TaggedFrog can import those keywords. (For tips on cleaning up that menu, see my previous how-to piece below.)

That’s all nice, but the one essential feature that had been missing is audio file preview. You can thank our friend Brad of Brad Sucks for nagging the developer until it got added:

TaggedFrog adds audio previewing [Brad Sucks Blog]

Important: don’t forget as I did (doh!) that you need an extension to make audio preview work. Look for Croak on the download page. Drag the Croak folder to your [install]/TaggedFrog/extensions, and you’re good to go. An extra “extended information” pane will appear with a play button, optional auto-play, and loop options.

With audio preview, this already-lovely interface is now the perfect tool for managing your audio projects.

Also, what I really like about this approach is that you add only what you need to the library, in ad-hoc fashion. The problem with even the more elegant tools on the Mac OS Finder is that they all tend to assume you want to index huge chunks of your drive, or manage everything from the file system. TaggedFrog by contrast lets you cherry-pick that handful of files you actually need and store metadata about them, while ignoring everything else. You can even move the files when you tag them, so that you actually store them in a logical place instead of … ahem … a random folder in which you happened to leave something.

Of course, if you want actual sample editing and other fancy features in your file utility, you’ll want options like the aforementioned Mac tools. But if you do your editing in other tools anyway and just need to stop losing files, this seems about perfect.

If you start using this and come up with a useful workflow, do let us know. And if you like it, do donate to keep it free.

I know I’ve literally started using this today on my Windows box.

Previously:

Tips: Fix Windows Explorer, Be Happy

A real highlight for me at the Game Developer Conference was getting to hear Satoru Iwata deliver the keynote. Aside from being CEO of Nintendo as they have launched their most successful console ever, Iwata-san has left a sizable development legacy as a veteran of HAL Laboratory (Balloon Fight, Kirby). In the game community, I think the reception to his keynote was mixed – mostly, it introduced long-overdue storage solutions for Wiiware titles, along with some relatively minor game titles. But as a person interested in design and development – and what innovative interfaces could do for music and not just games – I found the rare insight into Nintendo’s development process inspiring.

The surprise: despite their enormous resources, Nintendo is moving to ever-smaller development teams. And they’re taking dance classes to work on their musical rhythm.

Any developer with limited resources is familiar with what Iwata described as the “development death spiral”: financial pressure means rushed titles with poorer quality, resulting in fewer sales, resulting in greater financial pressure. Oddly, Iwata didn’t quite explain how do navigate out of the death spiral, explicitly. “Once you enter the death spiral, it is difficult to escape,” Iwata acknowledged. But the implication of his presentation was that you could do more with less, by focusing on process – not necessarily adding resources, but focusing on humans and fun. (The analog for music, perhaps, would be as much “expressivity” as fun.)

To illustrate, Iwata spoke mainly of Nintendo’s chief designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of … um, nearly everything, in fact. Now, some of Miyamoto’s habits have been widely published, like his tendency to turn hobbies (gardening and puppies) into games. But to hear a normally-secretive Japanese company talking frankly about its process is something special.

Miyamoto’s Way is what Iwata called an “Upward Spiral.”

He observes people everywhere having fun. He thinks about how the core of that fun might come into games. But even as one project starts, he is still observing other people having fun – more ideas are born. Most developers prepare a thick design document to explain their intension to their teams. Mr. Miyamoto almost never writes one.

His first goal is always the same – a [prototype,] very limited and very clear. The amount of time being spent on the game’s appearance is zero.

Mr Miyamoto always has multiple projects in this stage at the same time.

What I find most important is how in each phase of overall development, he can clearly distinguish which details must be perfectly finished in that phase, and separate them from the parts that can be tentatively prepared.

You can see just how primitive some of these prototypes are in the example below from Punch Out. I think this is actually an important issue, as many beginning developers of games and audiovisual works don’t get primitive when doing early drafts, thus making it harder to make changes later.

Miyamoto is also notorious for randomly kidnapping employees for playtesting – playtesting without focus groups or statistics collection, but more qualitative evaluations of how people like a creation. Again, this isn’t unheard of in the industry, but it seems not to happen enough. And Miyamoto looks very fetching in his Cowboy / Outlaw getup.

Now, prototyping is nothing unique to Nintendo. But remarkably, Miyamoto’s prototype phase can last “more than two years.” And while no other developer has Miyamoto working for them, I expect that this is unusual:

I make it a point not to ask how [the project]’s doing. I believe this could make the team cut corners, or settle for less than their desired outcome.

This is not very good for my mental health. This is because of Mr. Miyamoto’s tendency to … upend the tea table.

“Upending the tea table” – also known as the “Miyamoto Test” – is a signature Miyamoto move by which the designer scraps a development process in mid-stream in order to make corrections. Again, this happens in the game industry, though perhaps not as often as it should – and certainly, no one has the leeway Miyamoto does.

Mr. Miyamoto is never an … angry man. He resets the dishes he had scattered, explaining just how they should be arranged on the tray.

I know many developers and critics are increasingly becoming frustrated with the dogma of fun, believing it forces the industry into a narrow range of expression. But, then, I enjoy depressing movies. Defined as enjoyment, Nintendo’s philosophy of fun is more a kind of commitment to its users. As Iwata puts it:

We create entertainment, and entertainment is meant to be enjoyed. If it can’t be enjoyed, it’s not the consumer’s fault – the fault belongs to us.

(At this moment in the presentation, in fact, Iwata bent forward slightly and halted, as if to consider the shame of such a potential situation.)

The musical connection to all of this is the rhythm game, “Rhythm Heaven.” We were lucky enough to get a copy for DS as we left the presentation; more on how it works soon. The game has already had a life as a Japanese-only Game Boy Advance title, but is now a worldwide release on DS. Several revelations were interesting to me in this presentation:

• Nintendo is turning to increasingly-smaller teams – as few as five on the GBA game and three on the DS. That says a lot about the way the videogame titan views effective development, and should give hope to penny-pinching indie developers and publishers, as well as us musical / visual experimenters toying with developing new interfaces.
• Rhythmic theory: The impetus for the game was designer/developer Tsunku’s new “rhythmic theories,” and ideas about how to teach and play with rhythm.
• Dance instruction: To help developers learn better rhythm themselves, Nintendo turned not to music lessons but dance movements – Tsunku bet that movement would help hone the programmers’ rhythmic skills. 

As Iwata explained:

How can a good rhythm game be created if the developers’ themselves don’t have much rhythm?

The quickest way to learn rhythm, [Tsunku] believes, is to dance. So the developers danced. Maybe they’re like winners of the Japanese ‘Dancing with the Stars.’

This was the first time as a game producer that I had to approve a budget for dance lessons.

For those of you wondering what the future of platforms for gaming or music are, Iwata had other juicy stats, as well. In 2008, female usage of the DS was up sharply to 47%. That brings hope for less male dominance of music technology. And anyone betting the iPhone would obliterate the DS as a gaming platform ought to think again. The DSi – the latest DS model with downloadable titles and a built-in camera – set a new advance-order record on Amazon for game systems. Some 90% of WiiWare titles are independent, so that makes me imagine that we could see creative new music and visual creations on both WiiWare and the DSi download service soon – a nice change from the current situation, which requires you to hack your system just to get real music apps. It’s nowhere near as open as the iPhone, though, so installed base aside, I think the iPhone / iPod touch remains a friendlier development platform.

Iwata closed with a nice sentiment for all of us:

Remember, in the Great Depression American inventors invented the jet engine, television, and even the chocolate chip cookie. As a developer, I believe anything is possible. The future of video games is in your hands.

I’m always a fan of “off-the-fovea” thinking, which was part of why I went to GDC. Hearing game developers tackle these problems I think has a lot of lessons for development of other creative projects – and I certainly believe a lot of these lessons are applicable to audiovisual makers, even if you don’t intend to release an iPhone – erm, DS — music game. Prototyping, testing and observation, small teams, using movement to make music and rhythm more powerful – all of these have great lessons not only relative to the game industry’s norms but for everyone else, too. I’m curious to hear what you think. But, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a DS break.

Quick – you’ve got a music file that someone (a collaborator, a client, a friend) needs to hear. How do you send it to them?

It seems countless Web entrepreneurs have new ways for sharing media – there are online Flash-based music editing applications, social networks, elaborate MySpace and Facebook killers. We’ve been impressed with some, like the rich player and commenting and fans on Soundcloud or the ability to create artist/band pages that really work on Bandcamp. (The latter, I do really want to spend more time with.)

But sometimes, these services are overkill. This week, I had to get some revised sound scores to a choreographer so he could have them in a rehearsal. I didn’t want to share them with my network of friends or let people remix them in Flash – I just needed to get them to him in the easiest way possible.

That’s where drop.io is just absolutely gorgeous and lovable. Using something else? This is probably better.

1. There’s not even a login. Click a button, upload a file, done. You can add your email address and password if you need to be updated, but even that isn’t necessary.
2. You get an instant short URL – either automatically generated or customizable.
3. Drop any media you want – images, music, etc.
4. You get instant in-browser playing / viewing, and embeddable links and downloads.
5. Control: non-public if you like, expire whenever you want, let others add files.
6. It’s free for basic usage, and the free account isn’t crippled. You get 100MB of space per drop. Need more than that, and you can upgrade, but I think a lot of folks will be pleased with the free plan. Fortunately, the premium plan is powerful enough (branding, bigger drops) that premium users may be able to subsidize the occasional, casual user.
7. Integration: Firefox add-in, Twitter, etc.

In other words, this kicks YouSendIt’s sorry, badly-designed, clunky and non-functional a**.

drop.io
playlist.io, announced this week, allows easy, playable playlists, so ideal if you have a set of tracks – all with the same features of drop.io

It’s probably not how you want to share video or whole projects. But for a quick audio bounce of your current track, photos of the venue you’ll be gigging at, and the like, it’s about perfect. There’s a place for more complex tools that allow you to collaborate on, say, custom designs for music software or hardware or elaborate session sets. But that makes it even nicer to have a quick tool that solves a simple problem.

And speaking of “tools that get things done up against tight deadlines,” drop.io has added a whole new dimension:

Real-time functionality

The folks at drop.io (who work just over the river from me in DUMBO Brooklyn, that “other” Silicon Alley) have been hard at work on new real-time functionality.

What this means is, you can instantly add media, notes, and chat message, even via a mobile device, and everything is there instantly. So, someone calls on the phone and wants a file. It’s up there instantly, and you can even comment on it, make changes, and get it done.

Speaking as someone who is constantly missing deadlines, um, I mean regularly procrastinating things until the last minute, uh, erm …. uh, always overbooked and dealing with crises … uh, I mean, “moving at the speed of innovation,” this sounds like a lifesaver / problem solver.

There’s no question this is of use to music pros and the ilk. I know the people doing music and sound design for South Park have regularly emailed MP3 files in order to get them on the air on Comedy Central the same day. We’re a “just-in-time” — or, perhaps, “barely on time” crowd, the digital creatives.

I’ll be really curious to hear how you use this, and what other tools are out there you like. And because drop.io is a relatively simple tool, I’m equally interested to see what might be possible with their open API. Let us know what you think.

Updated: Via comments, Kyran notes that Dropbox is also a really strong option. What I like about Dropbox: desktop clients, sync capabilities, easy sharing of whole folders, revisions, and most of the chat features. What I like about Drop.io: stupidly-simple quick file uploading one file + url. Drop.io is to me sort of Twitter-style file uploading. Dropbox is also a really terrific solution. I could actually see using a little of both, which is why lightweight solutions are nice.

You know the stereotype. “Synths” are expressive. “Samplers” are those things relegated to playing fake instruments.

But what makes synths fun to play as an instrument is the power they have over your sound, and the interactivity they provide. Peter Dines did a series for our Kore+CDM minisite at the end of last year that I think really illustrated how Native Instruments’ sampler Kontakt can be made a powerful performance tool – something that’s really fun to play. In doing so, he gets into the “s word” – scripting. When you hear “scripting,” I expect a lot of you run and hide, or wonder why the heck you’d want to write scripts when working on your music. The answer is, thanks to content that’s out there, you can make use of scripts for Kontakt without ever having to muck with code yourself. And if you do want to create your own scripts, a lot of the things you might like to do turn out to be quite simple.

What might a musical workflow look like with Kontakt? Peter answers that question with a beautiful, delicate-sounding music box patch. In this example, working directly in Kontakt allows him to start with a recorded sound and get into the manipulation phase very quickly. I know many folks use Ableton Live for the purpose, and Live is itself essentially a sampler turned into a host. But if you’re comfortable with that method, you may find the addition of something like Kontakt is all the more useful.

In the music box example, Peter looks at:

• Turning a recording into a sample
• Slicing and dicing with the Wave Editor
• Making use of presets in the Script Editor to get powerful features, then making quick modifications – no need to script from scratch

Slicing, Dicing, and Scripting a Music Box with Kontakt; Free Download

That’s a specific example. With Performance View, you can turn your sampled sounds into something that could work really well live – again, using scripts without scripting:

Learning Kontakt: Performance View and Scripting Power, Hidden in Presets

Finally, when you are ready for the power of scripts, Peter can get you started with that. With a couple of lines, you can retune, resequence, constrain to scale, pan, and randomize. That makes Kontakt a powerful compositional and performance tool.
Dive into Kontakt Scripting: A Gentle Introduction, plus Script Downloads

I hope we see scripting show up in more tools. (I’d lose my mind – in a good way – to see it in a future version of Maschine.) In the meantime, this gets you rolling.

And really, you don’t have to be an advanced sampler / sound designer / Kontakt user. I think you’ll find these tutorials to be exceedingly beginner-friendly. In fact, samplers have often gotten underused by us mere mortals. Sure, you probably don’t have time to do a massive, multisampled grand piano patch – and someone else has already done it for you. But to take a quick field recording and mangle it, samplers can be fantastic.

If you come up with anything based on these tutorials, we’d love to hear it.

Previously: Kontakt Creative Abuse and Scripting, Modular Reaktor Goodness, More On Kore@CDM

(Side note: yes, the Kore+CDM site has sprung back to life, on a new server. Enjoy!)