VJ Heaven

Pianoteq is an effort to model, rather than sample, acoustic pianos and other instruments on the computer. Now in its third major release, its interface and sound generation have each matured. Using mathematical models in place of recorded sounds, an entire grand piano fits in just a few megs of space, rather than requiring several DVDs, and the software maker claims the results can be more natural and playable.

Pianoteq, which runs as do its rivals on Mac and Windows, is also unusual in providing support for the Linux operating system – something some developers have claimed isn’t practical with commercial music software. And a new “Player” addition, announced this month, makes it more affordable. In addition to software development, the team has even launched an extensive piano restoration effort:
http://www.pianoteq.com/kivir

I’ve been impressed with my time playing with Pianoteq’s software. That’s especially meaningful to me, as my background in music has been on acoustic pianos, back to when I was literally old enough to reach the keys for the first time. But I also wanted to know more about how this software developed. Its rigorous approach to modeling has attracted a lot of attention in the virtual instrument world, and the fact that it targets Linux alongside Mac and Windows challenges notions that commercial software can’t make it on the free operating system.

Pianoteq sent along some extensive answers, which I’m pleased to be able to share. Naturally, they’re proud of their software, so there is a bit of expected boasting here. (I’ll discuss more of the experience of using the tool, and the new Player version, shortly). But they also have some fascinating commentary on sound design, modeling, and the development process. In the “geeky as we want to be” spirit of this site, here’s the full scoop.

CDM: Can you talk about the background of the company? How does one make a shift from dealing with the physical instruments and tuning to thinking about mathematical models, let alone translate that into actual software?

Philippe: the Pianoteq history is strongly connected to my first job as a piano tuner. Then at the age of 31, I started a new life with basic studies in mathematics at the University of Toulouse, France. After what I prepared my PhD thesis on the parametrization of vibrating phenomena, without imagining that it would be the basis of my third life with Pianoteq. Thanks to these two skills and to an exceptional scientific environment in Toulouse, I succeeded in identifying important phenomena responsible for the generation of the piano sound and proposed a model which describes the whole interaction of the soundboard, strings, bridge and air.

Julien: I was working as an engineer at Institute of Mathematics of Toulouse, with Philippe (who was also my teacher when I was a student). My focus was on an open-source finite element package ( http://home.gna.org/getfem ) when Philippe told me about his project of piano sound synthesis. I took charge of the development of the real-time engine, and we quickly decided that we wanted to turn this research project into a commercial product. Thanks to the French law on innovation and research (1999), the support of INSA Toulouse, and the Institute of Mathematics, the start-up MODARTT was created in 2006 to sell Pianoteq, which was at that time the first fully modeled piano instrument.

Niclas: I represented many of Pianoteq’s customers of today, being a part time piano composer with a love for the piano instrument. I was updating an extensive article on digital piano technology in 2004 when someone advised me to have a look at Philippe’s research. I immediately understood its potential, which is why I suggested Philippe to assist in marketing and product development. Since then, I have participated in the product development and testing and am also in charge of sales and customer service.

Modeling the Piano with Math

I remember trying previous attempts at piano modeling and finding them interesting but ultimately unsatisfying. I think people who pick up Pianoteq have, immediately, a different experience. What’s different about this modeling approach than those that have come before – and, for that matter, why did it take until now?

Philippe: The idea of modeling musical instruments is very old and has always faced great difficulties: the complexity of physical phenomena, the sensitivity of the human ear to the slightest imperfection, and the difficulty of running a complex model in real-time. The latency needs to be so small that it gives to the musician the impression of playing a real acoustic instrument. Until now, attempts have only confirmed that the task was not easy. The state of the art of digital pianos is based on sampling technology. Each note is a recording of how it sounded at a specific moment, without taking into account the complexity of the instrument. The huge data generated by sampling can reach 40 Gbytes for a single piano. The flow rate of data transmitted from the hard drive to the sound device is too high for the current hardware capacity and it can happen that one hears crackles. [Ed.: I would say fast hard drives, optimized software streaming, and other intelligent configuration can certainly avoid crackles, but the fact that, say, a low-end hard drive might choke means that Philippe's point about data intensity here is nonetheless well taken. -PK]

Moreover, the reproduced sound lacks vividness. Hence, creating a piano model which takes into account the interaction between hammer and strings, the interaction between strings and soundboard via the bridge and the interaction of the soundboard with the air is of great interest. Based on mathematical models, Pianoteq allows parameters to be stretched as long as the model permits, resulting not only in new performance styles but also in new piano sounds. Pianoteq is thus also an innovating tool for music creation and can be useful not only to musicians but also to piano manufacturers and piano tuners for simulation and training purposes. Pianoteq makes excellence in piano available to all. Among Pianoteq users, composers and professionals in music creation are certainly the most excited with our innovation. Pianoteq offers what acoustic and sampled pianos cannot offer: new opportunities for music creation and a pure piano sound that is not altered by its environment (reverberation) or by recording devices.

Can you talk more about the model itself? I can see the components that are modeled, but – realizing we have fairly technical people among our audience – what are the basic modeling techniques?

Philippe: the modeling technique is based on various standard techniques issued from mechanics theory including modal analysis (calculation of vibration frequencies and the corresponding modes) and parametrization techniques that we developed at the university, as well as from a precise knowledge issued from my previous job as piano tuner/restorer of what is going on in a piano and what is important.

How did that approach to modeling evolve? Obviously, there’s this strong mathematical research background. But what’s the process like of translating that theory into something that’s usable? Were there mistakes or adjustments along the way?

Philippe: I don’t think there were mistakes along our model evolution, but more a constant improvement in the details taken into account by the model, looking closer to the physics of the piano and finding suddenly some simplification in the algorithms that allow to take include more details for the same computational cost or being more precise in the simulation.

Developing for Linux

How did you make the decision to support Linux in addition to Windows and Mac?

Julien: The initial prototypes for pianoteq were developed on Linux, using [audio system] JACK, with no GUI. Later, when we added a graphical interface and turned it into a VST plugin, we used VSTGUI for its interface, which is not available on Linux. However we had quite a few requests from Linux users, and we did make sure that pianoteq was running fine in WINE [an open-source implementation of Windows' APIs, allowing Windows programs to run in Linux]. During the development of Pianoteq 3, we switched to the JUCE toolkit, which is a great piece of cross-platform software. Thanks to JUCE, the Linux port was really easy to do, so we decided to give it a try and see what happens.

One complaint I hear from developers about Linux is that it’s “impossible” to do commercial development, because you “can’t” distribute binaries. Obviously, that didn’t stop you. I’ve tried Pianoteq on Fedora and Ubuntu, though, under both the real-time and default kernels, and had immediate success. Now, I imagine there’s a good bit of work that goes into making that happen. What was your experience like as a developer? Do you feel that the result is successful, that it is a usable solution for users?

Julien: This was in fact something that we also feared, that the Linux port would turn into a support nightmare. However a good example of a successful application that is distributed in binary form is Renoise. That showed us that it was possible to do. In fact Renoise also uses JUCE, but I was not aware of that fact at that time. What helps here for binary portability is that we have very few dependencies. JUCE is statically linked, so pianoteq depends on very few dynamic libraries: ALSA, X11, libc (even old versions), and basically that’s all. We had to hack some sort of weak linking for JACK in order to allow pianoteq to run even when libjack.so is not available. Of course, if you want better integration in the desktop, things get much more complicated.

What’s your own Linux testing setup like? (distro? kernel?)

Julien: Pianoteq is built on a Debian Sarge box, otherwise we generally use Ubuntu for the desktop, with the default kernel. [Ed.: The distribution Ubuntu is itself built on packages from Debian; 10.04 LTS uses Debian Testing.]

I’ve likewise been impressed with the vanilla kernel (as opposed to the “real-time” branch), which can save some setup time and configuration work. (My audio interface is a Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1). Any thoughts on what setups may be most advisable? (You document some of this in the readme.)

Julien: I’ve never been lucky with the kernels labelled “rt” , and I really hate when the computer randomly hangs so I prefer to stick with default kernels. We don’t have issues with them, as long as your user account has been granted real-time priviledges. I believe that for now, the most overlooked setting for realtime audio is the CPU frequency throttling, which is a real audio performance killer, especially on the less powerful machines such as netbooks. You really need to have your cpu running at full speed 100% of the time, especially with a software like Pianoteq which needs quite a bit of CPU power.

Ed.: Before we give the realtime kernel a bad name, some of those “random hangs” were not necessarily the kernel’s fault – a bug in Ubuntu’s implementation caused the system to crash when combining the RT kernel with proprietary NVIDIA drivers, for instance. But if this sort of thing scares you, the vanilla kernel remains a strong option – it’s the default for a reason. The larger discussion is best saved for another article, but suffic,e to say, if latency-sensitive piano instrument developers are okay with the vanilla kernel, you shouldn’t feel you have to install a realtime kernel just to make music. If you want to test it, projects like Fedora’s Planet CCRMA can make it easier to use.

Are you finding that there is some positive response to the Linux version?

Julien: Yes, very positive response. In fact, a bit more than what we expected at the beginning. Approximately 4% of our customers are using the Linux version.

I could even imagine it working on netbooks. Based on load, it appears perfectly workable, which means a really cheap ultra-portable piano you can take anywhere.

We spent some time to make sure that the latest versions could run on netbooks, altough with very high CPU load (80% or more). However I’d recommend to use a more powerful laptop in order to have more room for the cpu. Ed.: Given the range of Atom netbooks out there now, I may have to test some of the newer models on this.]

There’s not currently a Linux plug-in version, correct? I’ve been just as happy using JACK [a standard for routing audio between applications], but what went into that decision?

Julien: Right, no plug-in version on Linux for now. The problem is that “plug-in” may mean any combination of VST, DSSI, and LV2. VST would be the easiest for us, but very few hosts support it ( basically only proprietary hosts such as renoise and energyxt, and also jost). DSSI is said to be obsolete, while being not to hard to support (except the GUI has to run in a separate process..). LV2 is said to be the future, but
it seems to be quite complicated to fit a “vst-like” plugin into an lv2 plug-in. We have not yet taken a decision. It is already enough of a pain to support the numerous plug-in formats on Mac and Windows. We will probably add support for JACK sessions quite soon.

In Use

Initially, having so much power over sound could be overwhelming – looking at the number of parameters you can adjust in the real-time mathematical model. Aside from the presets (which themselves sound pretty terrific), how would you suggest someone go about beginning to explore the options? Is there a workflow that makes sense for approaching adjusting the sound?

Answer from Pianoteq:
http://www.pianoteq.com/faq?category=pianoteq_working

Ed.: So I should have read the *** manual! Here’s their advice:

If you need to adapt the piano sound you could for example try adjusting the hammer hardness (2) to achieve a different brightness of the hammer strokes. Increasing unison width (3) makes it a bit out of tune (resembling certain acoustic pianos). The new powerful sound recording feature (4) lets you place up to 5 virtual microphones anywhere around the piano to achieve ultimate ambience and tone colour. The dynamics and velocity curve (5) will most likely need to be adjusted to the keyboard used in a MIDI file performance.

Indeed, this commentary makes sense. Hammer hardness is something that could be adjusted in the maintenance of an actual piano. Since you listen to a software piano model as though it is amplified, adjusting mic placement (as on a number of piano software emulations) is a no-brainer. And dynamics and velocity curve are essential not only for MIDI files, but if your keyboard controller lacks these controls onboard.

As my friend Jim Aikin noted in his review of Pianoteq – why would you adjust the speed of sound? (I suppose you could account for different altitudes; I could replicate the Aspen Music Festival!)

Julien: Well, why not ! Being in a virtual world gives you access to some parameters that cannot be easily modified in the real world, if they give interesting variations of the sound, then they are worth being adjusted!

One small note – it seems the metronome is not connected to the playback and recording, which means that MIDI sequences won’t export to SMF correctly? (Or is this a Linux bug?)

Julien: Yes, it’s not a bug, the MIDI recording and playback abilities of the standalone application are very minimalistic. It is best to use a real sequencer for serious work.

Where can people read more about the featured historical instruments?

http://www.pianoteq.com/cimbalom
http://www.pianoteq.com/grimaldi
http://www.pianoteq.com/blanchet
http://www.pianoteq.com/schmidt
http://www.pianoteq.com/graf
http://www.pianoteq.com/cp-80

There are some fascinating add-ons that aren’t pianos. Is it possible at some point that other sound designers might be able to use the sound engine to design their own instruments?

Julien: We believe that Pianoteq PRO is already a first step in that direction, with its ability to edit each parameter note by note.

How are users using this onstage and in the studio? What sorts of users have you found using the product?

Niclas: There are many composers and keyboardists that use Pianoteq, from amateurs to professionals, on stage as well as in the recording studios. We have presented a few reference users here: http://www.pianoteq.com/references

Thanks to the Pianoteq guys for being thorough in the answers. I know not everyone responds in the same way in regards to the perceived quality of the model, but my own feeling is that the effort makes the instrument terrifically playable and responsive. The best way to see for yourself is to give the demo a go, and listen to the results. I’ll follow up more on this instrument, and how it’s become a central part of my Linux music workstation, soon. Let us know if you have questions for the developers I missed.

View full post on Create Digital Music

The new released Mac OS X Snow Leopard improve its running speed and iMovie/ photo editing ability. At the same time, it also faces a series of compatibility issue.

At present, in order to ensure ripping DVD on Mac OS X Snow Leopard successfully, iSkysoft improve its product. The new version iSkysoft DVD Ripper for Mac perfectly compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

iSkysoft DVD Ripper for Mac is a professional DVD ripper for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which rip both encrypted and unencrypted DVDs on Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

It is able to rip DVD to various video and audio formats, like WMV, AVI, MOV, M4V, 3GP, MPG, MPEG, FLV, MP3, WMA, M4A, AAC, AC3, etc. for many portable devices, e.g. iPod, iPhone, PSP, cell phone etc. on Mac OS X Snow Leopard..

For Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users, iSkysoft DVD Ripper for Mac perfectly supports ripping DVD to iPod Touch, Nano, classic etc. and iPhone, PSP etc. players. You can rip DVD to your iPod Touch on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard with fast speed and output quality.

Guide: How to rip DVD to iPod Touch on Mac OS X Snow Leopard?

iSkysoft DVD Ripper for Mac has been improved as supporting newly Mac OS X Snow Leopard. You need not worry about any compatibility issue any more, iSkysoft DVD Ripper for Mac can rip DVD on your Mac OS X Snow Leopard perfectly for you.

Free download and install DVD to iPod Touch Converter for mac on your computer

Intel Version and PowerPC Version

Step1. Add DVD Movie

Click “Load DVD” button, or “Load IFO” button to browse your computer, find the DVD folder or the VIDEO_TS folder you want to convert from your hard disc or DVD-ROM and click OK.

Tip: Select a video file in the file list, click Play button in the video preview window. When the video jumps to the image you like, click Snapshot button, to store the image in the snapshot folder.

Step2. Edit DVD

1. Trim DVD Title or Chapter

If you want to capture a clip from the current title/chapter, you can click the Trim button to open the Trim window and trim the current title or chapter by dragging the Start Time slider to set the start time, and dragging the End Time slider to set the finish time. Then you can only rip segments from DVD on mac.

2. Crop DVD Video

If you want to remove the black edges or just convert an area from your movie video, you can click the Crop button to crop the video of the current title or chapter. You can specify an area either by dragging the frame around the video or setting the crop values: Top, Button, Left and Right. Above the crop pane, you can select an output aspect ratio and the available options are: Keep Original, full screen, 16:9 and 4:3. You can preview the video in the select aspect ratio on the main interface and during the conversion process.

Step3. Output Settings

Filename: Name the output file for the current title/chapter.

Subtitle: Regular DVD movies usually have several subtitles such as English, French, German, etc.

Audio: Select an audio track from the available audio tracks of your DVD movie.
Select an output format: Here you need to select one of video formats which you want to convert, such as iPod Touch Video MPEG-4 (*.mp4).

Set Video and audio solutions: If you want to customize the output video quality, you can click the “Settings” button to open the Settings window and set video resolution, frame rate, bit rate, encoder, etc. You can set audio resolution, frame rate, bit rate and encoder on the “Settings” interface.

Tips: Merge into one file: If you want to join the selected titles or chapters into one file, check “merge into one file” option. Set an output directory to save the output files.

Step4. Start Conversion

After setting the output settings, you can just click the Convert button to start converting your Movie. You can choose to shut down your computer or open the output folder after conversion so you don’t have to sit before your computer waiting for the conversion to finish.

Come 2009, the Google Android will be seen on all major mobile phones. It was unveiled on November 5, 2008 but will come into use next year. Google will release the Android platform available under the Apache free-software and open-source license. That means abosloutely free to use.

What is Google Android ?
No, android is not a mobile phone which most people have assumed. But it is a operating system and software platform for mobile devices. It will based on the Linux operating system. Developrs can write applications using Java Programing languages. The Android will be jointly developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance.

In simple terms, it will be like Symbian and Windows Operating system found in mobile phones.

Features of Google Android

1. Android will supports all common media formats for videos, songs and pictures. Such as MPEG-4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPEG, PNG, GIF.

2. Network Capabilities – It will support all the present cell phone network providers namely GSM/EDGE, CDMA, EV-DO, UMTS. It will also feature Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity.

3. Unlimited and diverse applications – Since its a freeware software, anyone can make applications using the java programming language and share it with others. This is the main and will be the most important selling point of google android.

4. Messaging features – Supports text and picture SMS, MMS and the new XMPP(directly contact with other people without any softwares like yahoo messanger or skype)

5. Google Android will provide enhanced utilization of GPS services combined with google maps. Very helpful in finding your way.

6. Display – The platform will be adaptable to all mobile phones display layouts. Provided it has a color screen and GPRS enabled.

View full post on Inside The Vault

Wish you could make any track swing? Tristan Jehan, grad of the MIT Hyperinstruments Group and c0-founder of The Echo Nest, made that happen at San Francisco’s Music Hack Day. The Python code uses the Echo Nest’s sound-processing magic, available to the world via open Web APIs, in order to analyze tracks and re-synthesize them in swing form. The results are — well, somewhat terrifying, though in a cool way.

Paul Lamere of Music Machinery points this our way and has a ton of examples on his terrific, sound geek-friendly blog. (The post must have captured people’s imagination, as it’s spread virally online, but I know this is the only site you read — right?)

The swing is definitely of the consistent/mechanical variety, but … well, it does serve to prove that not everything should swing, but anything can.

My picks for the trippiest examples:

Enter Sandman- the Swing Version by plamere

Around the World – the swing version by plamere

View full post on Create Digital Music

In July, Google Inc. had announced that it was working on an operating system for netbooks called Chrome operating system (OS) and it is reported that it is set to have a publicly available “stable release” by the second half of 2010. The new browser based operating system can be a competitive product for the software giant, Microsoft Corp, who needs to respond.

Recently, the company has demonstrated an early version of Chrome OS that features tabs for frequently used web-based apps and a 7 second boot up time. Further, Google has released the source code under open source licensing as Chromium OS. Now, various analysts suggest that the new Chrome OS will start a race to develop browser based operating systems like Internet Explorer OS, Firefox OS or even Opera OS.

Google Chrome Operating System

The company has stated that the Google Chrome Operating System project will be an open source by the end of 2009. Although, it is based on the Linux kernel, it will use “a new windowing system”. The Chrome Operating System is being targeted at users who spend most of their time on the Internet and is designed to run on computers ranging from netbooks to desktop computers.

Chrome Operating System concept

Various developers said that the concept behind browser based operating is simple, use enough Linux under the browser to run on modest hardware and you have a hit formula for the success. It is assumed that if Google can develop its Chrome OS in about two years, Microsoft, Firefox, etc, would be able to develop their own “browser based operating system” at the time when Google’s version arrives next year.

It seems that there are various customers for Chrome OS out in the market, which include Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Lenovo and Asus. Therefore, Microsoft, needs to respond, who holds the world’s operating system market with more than 90 percent share. Further, Firefox and Opera could also release their versions to retain their future market share and stand with the competition.

It is assumed that such browser based OS would support its parent’s own web-based productivity applications, but Firefox could be a spoiler as Microsoft and Google will head in proprietary directions. Developers said that if these browser based OSs have similar specifications like Google than users can have interchangeable operating systems in future, which can be carried on memory cards.

Mr. Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management said that if any other browser maker wants to build their own version of the OS using their own browser, they can. It is assumed that Chrome OS is going to make computers cheaper. Analysts predict that there can be a drop of $100 per PC. Since the operating system will not involve any licensing fees and up gradation charges.

Conclusion

In spite of recent breakdown in Google services, the company has convinced people that their data is safe in the cloud, as their personal information is already up there. However, the company has not detailed that what apps can be run on the operating system. Can we run Photoshop on it and what are the applications changes to make Chrome OS a better choice than Windows? But we can say that only for self-defense, Redmond giant needs an alternative to Chrome OS to offer its customers.

Google and T-Mobile have teamed up to create a new breed of cell phone. The T-Mobile G1 is the world’s first Android Phone. An “android” is traditionally defined as a robot with human qualities. Perhaps the name was chosen because of the capabilities of this new phone.

It’s known as the T-Mobile G1 Android, the Android Phone, the G1 Phone, or (more informally) the Google Phone.

The G1 Phone integrates fully with your Google accounts. Here are a few of the features and capabilities of this new cell phone:

An Android phone allows you to browse the Internet just as you would on a normal computer. It allows one to run several applications at the same time, on one phone. You can switch between applications, and you can also be notified when something new occurs on one of those applications. It allows you to chat and share photos on applications such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, etc. It allows you to copy URLs and share them with friends via a chat line, using a simple touch-screen interface.

The following Google applications can be accessed and used directly by the Android Phone:

Google Maps YouTube Gmail Contacts Calendar IM (Instant Message)

All of these Google applications will be available to you with a single logon – and they will automatically be synchronized with the web. What that means is that any change you make in one of your google accounts from your phone will also show up the next time you log on from any other computer.

For example, when you are out and about with your phone and you meet a new contact, you might want to save their contact information. All you do is save it into your Google Contacts on your G1 phone. That information will be available to you any time online, in your Gmail account, and in any other applicable Google account, and you can access it through any computer in the world which is connected to the Internet.

Any information you save on your phone in this way will appear on your computer as well – and vice-versa.

If you lose or break your phone, you won’t lose your information. Your data will be there waiting for you on your Google account, which you can access the next time you are online. And there is no need to worry about your information being stolen, as its password-protected.

Here is another example of the a use of a Google Android phone. Once you have a contact address saved into your Google account, you can easily find that location on a map – using Google Maps, of course. And what’s more, you can access street level events in any area where this is available.

This makes it a breeze to get directions to a new location! Simply find your contact on a a map with a couple of clicks, and use a street-level view to find your way if needed!

Another example of the use of the this phone is the integration of the cell phone with your Google Calendar. Any event you save on your Google Calendar will be available to you on your phone, wherever you are. So you can access your schedule easily, on the go and from anywhere, as long as you have your phone with you.

No more schedule books! And you can say goodbye to those tiny notebooks and pads of paper you carry around so that you can jot down notes and phone numbers.

What’s more, once you save information on your Android phone, there’s no need to transfer it over after you get home. Its all there, safely stored on your Google account, for ready access whenever you need it.

In case you haven’t seen already, Propellerhead is slowly doling out new feature information on its website for Record 1.5 and Reason 5. So far, they’ve announced pitch correction and vocal synthesis in Record (because we really don’t have enough AutoTune-style vocals in the world, apparently), multiple loop support in REX, and new block-style arrangement (a bit reminiscent of Cubase’s implementation to me).

It’s all good stuff, and I look forward to seeing what the final announcement is later today. I’m still hoping that Record gets ReWire host mode, because I can think of some users who would love to drop tools like Ableton Live into Record for final mixing and mastering. (Flying Lotus, Steve, I bet you agree with me!) Update: Nope. It’s not a deal-breaker; you can just import audio, which is okay, given that mixing and mastering generally happens last. Of course, I still think it’s a good idea.

But the big news so far is that sampling has come to Reason. What a lot of Reason users I talked to said following the Record release was that they had no desire for a big, SSL-style console, but thought a lightweight sample input was what Reason had lacked all this time. Sure enough, that’s exactly what you get in this release, as seen at top. It makes perfect sense for the Reason workflow, and the implementation appears to be fairly easy to use, complete with a sample editor. Yes, I know – what many of you would like to know is likely why it took four releases to get here. But for Reason die-hards, it could be well worth the wait.

With sampling and the Blocks feature both in Reason, you also aren’t forced to by Record just to get audio input or arrangement.

Sampling in Reason 5

Our own Matt Ganucheau is currently in Sweden at Props headquarters; I’ve scheduled the announcement for 9am NYC time / 3pm Berlin and Stockholm time / 1pm Greenwich Mean Time… you know. Some time today.

Full CDM upgrade story, to go live later today

The launch video doesn’t tell you much, unless you’ve been so caught in Reason world that you didn’t realize mics can be used to record things. It does, however, give us a picture of what the world’s strangest, audio geek mod of Unreal Tournament would look like. (Duke Fieldrecordem 3D, anyone? We could totally have a CDM clan.)

And yes, it is absolutely fair for Propellerhead to point out that too many “samples” don’t allow live input. It’s a crime. It’s not a sampler if it only plays things back and doesn’t record. This sort of thing is the cure. Input is a good thing.

View full post on Create Digital Music

Live vj set.