A few years ago when desktop computers became fast enough there was a golden era of audio plug-ins being released. Every week there was a new software synthesizer or effect that was beautiful and had functionality or sound quality not yet previously available in software. We are clearly entering the touch golden era. Apps like SoundPrism just have me smiling ear to ear. Wonderfully futuristic. It’s not quite out yet so follow Audanika on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

“What is SoundPrism? An intuitive and fun way to express yourself. An incredibly easy way to compose great music. A tool to create emotions with. A musical landscape for you to explore. What can I do with it? Impress my crush with some lovely handmade tunes. Relax during a stressful day. Build loops graphically. Dream.” – audanika.com

For more info: audanika.com

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I’ve never set up a Facebook Fanpage for my own music (The Horrorist). When I originally joined Facebook it was reluctantly because MySpace was still a living community and it seemed redundant. To top it off the music features in Facebook were seriously lacking. Two external services, one which ties into Soundcloud have changed my mind.

RootMusic helps you design a proper “Bandpage”. It pulls your music from SoundCloud and allows you to make something actually album cover like. In other words your not stuck in tiny font slash baby blue Facebook land. RootMusic also easily pulls in Vimeo, Youtube videos, photos from your Fanpage, and your Twitter and RSS feeds.

Lastly, it has integration with ArtistData. ArtistData takes your show dates and puts them all over your social media sites (Facebook, MySpace, Eventfull…) so you don’t have to do the repetitive task yourself.

For a much more detailed review of RootMusic check out this write up on TechCrunch titled, “Musicians – This Is How You Create A Great Looking Facebook Page”: click here

The Horrorist Facebook fan page: listn.to/TheHorroristmusic

Related Posts:

• Help with Facebook Spam
• From happy to dark the music tells the story.
• Driver’s License as Ableton Live MIDI Controller.

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Future Music Magazine,Mark Knight and Toolroom Records have teamed up with Beatport and Sonic Academy to launch a fresh and exciting ‘co-production’ competition - the first of its kind. The idea of the competition is to give up and coming producers the chance to work with one of the industry’s leading artists, launch their music career with the world’s premier dance label and be financially rewarded for their work, receiving 50% of publishing and an equal share of artist sales royalties. Not a bad deal at all. ­­

The mechanics of the competition are simple…

• Mark Knight has upload key parts of the project to Beatport and midi parts to Toolroom’s online store.

Beatport: Get the key parts HERE
Toolroom: Get the midi parts HERE

• Entrants to finish track, name and upload to Beatport’s SoundCloud by the 15th July.
• No un-cleared samples to be used (full T&C’s relating to music for the competition will be avail on Beatport.com & djmarkknight.com)
• Winning track, as chosen by Toolroom, will be will announced on July 19th and released in physical & digital format as an ‘exclusive track’ on Mark Knight’s forth coming Toolroom Knights CD (out Oct 2010)

Winner receives:

• 50% of publishing & equal share of artist sales royalties
• $200 Beatport voucher
• Focal CMS 40 studio monitors from Future Music Magazine
• Soundcloud Pro account
• Native Instruments Maschine
• Annual subscription to Sonic Academy & 6 months personal mentoring
• Full PR & marketing campaign to launch their career


Mark comments:

“There seems to be an over saturation of remix competitions at the moment, but these aren’t really proving a spring board for people careers. With myself as a producer and Toolroom as a leading label, we felt we had the vehicle to offer up something innovative and put something back into the development of up and coming artists. The ethos of Toolroom has been one of finding and nurturing new talent - ala Funkagenda and Dave Spoon. We're looking for the stars of the future right now, so this co-production competition makes perfect sense. With the 8 bar loop I’ve provided, I've laid down the backbone of the track with enough scope for interpretation. What I'm looking for is clever use of the parts, creative sound design with any new parts included and a good arrangement. Over to you guys...”

Log on to www.djmarkknight.com for full details of the competitionChris Barker00174179674898741007

As the iPad hits Europe and the world generally gets more time with the tablet, it continues to play host to new music software. I still have to wonder when some of its software design patterns – touch interfaces, big displays, and simplified, task-specific user experiences – will begin to influence other platforms. That is, it’s never been clear why arrays of tiny knobs were the best solution for conventional computers, either. But for those of you who have picked up an iPad and are curious what you can do with it, here are some ideas, all now “natively” optimized for the iPad’s screen resolution.

This week’s latest rash of developments includes the brilliant, generative Brian Eno / Peter Chilvers software Bloom, a new creation intended to help manage live setlists, software for displaying (though not editing) music notation, and for those of you who still prefer your more-powerful Mac soft synths and workflow, a demonstration of the iPad as a touch controller for the Mac.

Bloom is an immersive musical experience as much as a musical tool, using touches to allow the user to compose musical patterns visually, then optionally generating its own textures and tunes if left alone. Its release in 2008 heralded some of what the new generation of mobile music software would hold. On the iPad, it’s basically the same app on a bigger screen, though that alloaws for a nice solution for displaying parameters (top). Bloom HD is US$3.99. (Thanks, Peter!)

Etude is another app that’s made the leap from iPhone to iPad; the software displays a selection of pre-made scores on the device, with support for audio playback, display, and even visual feedback for those learning notation. (Image above from the iPhone; no iPad image yet.) The rendering looks lovely, but it is pre-rendered – you can’t edit notation with Etude, and you’re limited to viewing one of a few hundred free scores available. At US$4.99, it’s still well worth a look, but that leaves a big gap open for a more fully-featured tool. I’m curious to hear if anyone tries one of the browser notation tools mentioned here previously in Mobile Safari, which would enable editing and sharing. Check out Etude and scores available for it on the developer site.

Setlists is a free application for organizing sets, lyrics, and the likes for a gig – a feature previously seen in tools like the Mac app Rax, but welcome on the iPad, and a compelling bridge to non-electronic bands, too. Creator Jeff tells us:

It’s a Setlist app that lets musicians manage their sets and songs. You can even email the setlists to your bandmates. I have plans to soon include the ability to record the audio from the set, organize recordings, and do some other clever stuff. Most importantly it’s totally free :)

Full details on the developer site; Jeff tells us there’s more to come.

Audio Palette by interactive audio whiz Kent Jolly (EA’s game Spore, with Brian Eno) is a fantastic, visual loop app which is now available for botouh iPhone and iPad. If you love Brian Eno’s sounds in Bloom, you get even more custom Eno samples in this tool, among others, but with greater interactive control. Via a graphical array of circles, you can trigger loop playback and perform a live mix. The new release now allows you to upload samples wirelessly via the Web, and the iPad brings greater sample capacity along with the greater UI real estate. This tool actually deserves some separate time on its own; check out the demo above, visit the developer’s site, and let us know if you create some interesting mixes of your own.

Lastly, in an example that’s only really practical on the iPad, watch what happens when familiar soft synths get touch-enabled using the iPad’s screen. It stilwel makes me long for more competent touch laptops and full-blown tablets, but in the meantime, the solution works pretty well. Not only does it mean the iPad does touc shh for the UI, but you can easily place the interface of a soft synth atop a music stand by your keyboard, instead of having to hunch over your computer. And the one takeaway above all others should be: developers, design UIs that are scalable and that can support touch.

That’s all for now, but let us know if you’ve found applications that make you productive. I’m also interested to hear reactions on the design of software for iPad versus iPhone. To me, just as there are certain clear examples that work better on larger screen real estate, there’s also a particular pleasure to something you can hold in the palm of your hand, which is not the case with iPad. Whatever your platform of choice, though, scale and interaction design matter – the iPad ought to be an excellent reminder of that.

David Humphrey and the hit squad of audio gurus have some new amazing demos for us. Perfect for a Friday. This is all through the rich Mozilla Audio API work which will hopefully be pushed into other browsers at some point in the not so distant future.

Charles Cliffe has some awesome WebGL visualizations from Audio. David narrates:

What I like most about these (other than the fact that he’s written the music, js libs, and demo) is that these combine a whole bunch of JavaScript libraries: dsp.js, cubicvr.js and beatdetection.js, and processing.js. Some people will tell you that doing anything complex in a browser is going to be slow; but Charles is masterfully proving that you can do many, many things at once and the browser can keep pace.

Corban and Ricard Marxer have been busy exploring how far we can push audio write, and managed to also produce some amazing demos. The first is by Ricard, and is a graphic equalizer (video is here):

The second is by Corban, and shows a JavaScript based audio sampler. His code can loop forward or backward, change playback speed, etc. (video is here):

Chris McCormick has been working on porting Pure Data to JavaScript, and already has some basic components built. Here’s one that combines processing.js and webpd (video is here):

I think that my favourite demo by far this time around is one that I’ve been waiting to see since we first began these experiments. I’ve written in the past that our work could be used to solve many web accessibility problems. A few weeks ago I mentioned on irc that someone should take a shot at building a text to speech engine in JavaScript, now that we have typed arrays. Yury quietly went off and built one based on the flite engine. When you run this, remember that you’re watching a browser speak with no plugins of any kind. This is all done in JavaScript (demo is here, video is here):

In order to do this he had to overcome some interesting problems, for example, how to load large binary voice databases into the page. The straightforward approach of using a JS array was brittle, with JS sometimes running out of stack space trying to initialize the array. After trying various obvious ways, Yury decided to use the web to his advantage, and pushed the binary data into a PNG, then loaded it into a canvas, where getImageData allows him to access the bytes very quickly, using another typed array. The browser takes care of downloading and re-inflating the data automatically. Here’s what the database looks like:

My favourite line is:

What began as a series of experiments by a small group of strangers, has now turned into something much larger.

What an awesome community you guys have... and we are all benefitting. Thank you.