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Entries RSS2020 is the year enthusiasts revived their love of downloaded music - thanks, Bandcamp. So now we just need a player to match, whether you miss Winamp - or even if you miss vintage Soviet hi-fi machines.
The post AIMP is the MP3 player, reborn – and it’ll look like a gorgeous vintage Soviet tape player, too appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
Software maker Output got a very big investment for growth - $45 million Series A funding from Summit Partners. Here's what it may mean, direct from the source.
The post Music-making platform Output just got a $45 million investment appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
SunVox, the genius invention of Alexander Zolotov that's free or just a few bucks on basically every platform, just keeps getting better.
The post SunVox, free-cheap tracker and modular, gets new pitch and dynamic scale features appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
With backing from the Berlin Club Commission and an experienced development team, closecontact is a simple but promising solution to pandemic contact sharing in the German capital.
The post closecontact contact-sharing app: the latest tool in the fight to keep Berlin clubs open appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
Arturia's BeatStep Pro has long been a hub of choice for live performance, including with modular. But the KeyStep Pro actually does more - and these videos explain how. That could help answer how to play live with your gear (and apps).
The post Live strategies for playing with Arturia KeyStep Pro and hardware: must-see videos appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
deadmau5 is releasing the app he's torture-tested in his live shows, OSC/PILOT. It's like a Windows-only successor to Lemur, with some powerful features, developed by one of the developers behind TouchDesigner.
The post OSC/PILOT is a new Windows touch controller app – and deadmau5 is already using it appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
You couldn't come to Berlin for Synthposium. But in this year of the virtual, you can explore electronic media from anywhere, without a plane ticket, at A MAZE. It's relevant to the moment - and can be relevant to music and visual performance, too.
The post Games as art, music as game medium, in free festival online: A MAZE. appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
AI was going to take the fun out of DJing - selecting and mixing for you. But the reason you'll use it could be to make music more fluid. Algoriddim's latest is a showpiece of Apple's custom silicon - and a possible secret weapon for the rest of us.
The post djay Pro adds real-time AI separation on Apple’s Bionic chip – and producers will want it too appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
Apple's desire to tax and control its app ecosystem is earning outcry from developers, government, and outside observers. It's a stand-off musicians and creators should watch closely.
The post Apple’s platform squeeze holds back music and creativity, too – so will there be consequences? appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
Sure, theoretically you should memorize a bunch of keyboard shortcuts and painstakingly map macros for tools you use every day. Or you could use Metagrid instead.
The post Metagrid 1.5 gives your iPad shortcuts for everything – DAW, notation, Ableton Live appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
You’ve seen those split-screen music videos. Now an app helps you make your own – and its normally paid in-app purchases are free for a limited time.
I’m posting this mainly because I hope some CDMer out there will do something weird and unexpected with it. But yeah, this is an app from Roland. And there are some useful features in it.
You can load a song onto your device and use that as a monitoring guide. (There are now even some drum performance video clips to get you started, but hey, you’re going to use your own stuff, right?)
And most importantly, the aspect ratios and layouts are handled for you. So basically you can power up your iPad or iPhone and focus on making your music performance work, rather than the tedium of learning how to deal with the video side.
I’m putting this out there in part because I’d love to see an electronic creation in this fashion. Let us know if you do. But it is absolutely useful having the in-app purchases (IAP) for free, because normally this is limited to two videos and doesn’t have full feature functionality.
More:
https://www.roland.com/global/products/4xcamera/features/
And on the App Store
The post Free IAP sale: make your own split-screen music videos with Roland 4XCAMERA appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
Pioneer’s Rekordbox continues its play to be the DJ software to beat – and there’s a ton of stuff in the latest release pretty much everyone will want, from cloud and mobile sync all the way up to some powerful live visual features.
There’s a ton of stuff here, whether you’re primarily using Rekordbox as your library management tool before you play with CDJs, or if it’s what you actually play in (or run live visual shows and lights in).
Ableton Link.
Cloud sync. You can sync tracks across devices and apps with Dropbox, and integrate with Beatport Link service, so that you aren’t constantly looking for promos and tracks you’ve bought. That also includes metadata – so –
iOS Mobile Sync. You can edit tracks on the companion iOS app, with your metadata in the cloud – meaning you have a palm-sized way of adding markers and adjusting beat sync. This will be especially great when any of us can leave the house again, but maybe by then we can also wish for an Android app? (And until then, hey, lying in bed going through tracks also has some appeal.)
Integrated promos. Inflyte is already the whiz-bang promo platform to beat – basically, it gives you all you need to send press and DJs your tracks and try to get them to send you useful feedback. (It’s the new place to get “Downloaded for R Hawtin” and later claim that was “supported by.”)
Now those promos show right in Rekordbox, so presumably producers can skip the steps of DJs digging through promo inboxes when they make mixes. I have more to say on this topic soon, but for now it’s an intriguing idea.
Combine that with Beatport Link, and at least in theory, there are more ways to get your music played by DJs, though whether that becomes overwhelming or even useful to the producer is a topic for another time.
Autorelocate Tracks. Don’t know about y’all, but I think I’m more excited by this than anything else here – especially since not all my promos come from Inflyte and not all my music from Beatport.
But all my music is now scattered on my hard drive in novel ways that Rekordbox 5 couldn’t handle.
I bet I’m not alone. At the very least, if this sounds like you, I promise you a comprehensive test of what happens when someone has zero interest in organizing files and zero patience in software’s general ineptitude at, you know, search. Fingers crossed on this one.
Updated UI. Now also has light/dark skin settings to match your OS.
3Band waveform. Humankind still struggles to work out how to provide a useful visualization of sound data. This takes waveforms and breaks them up by high, mid, low. Let’s see if that’s useful.
Filter by Attribute in Collection and playlists – handy.
Rekordbox doesn’t just want to be the thing you use to load up your USB stick for a CDJ, or even just another DJ app to compete with Serato and TRAKTOR and their ilk.
It also wants to run your show.
Rekordbox 6 has almost as many visual/show control improvements as music and library management additions.
The Lighting panel now has an Ambient mode and DMX Direct Control.
And there’s more:
There are actually people out there using this stuff. That’s partly for the same reason that the CDJ and DJM are so popular, which is there’s an army of Pioneer sales, support, and venue and artist relations roaming around the world to make it happen.
You had to figure this would come at a cost. The big shift is that Rekordbox is moving to subscriptions, like so many products now.
The free version is still free – and you can unlock features with hardware, which I expect for many users will make the most sense. (You’re unlikely to use the advanced features with just a mouse and no controller, that is.)
The bad news is your old licenses don’t apply to the upgrade if you don’t have hardware that unlocks this.
The flipside is, the high-end version – with all the video and DVS – is now a better deal.
Just don’t panic – the Export mode is still in the free version, and you can actually even use performance features on PC/Mac, which means you don’t have to pay just to unlock those features when you’re away from your controller. And that’s handy – sometimes you want to try mixing two tracks together before you export them to USB.
So, free:
Core (6.99EUR-USD a month, discounted from 9.99EUR-USD regular):
Creative mode ($/€9.99 a month intro, regular price to be 14.99) is where the big stuff is at, and since your hardware only unlocks “core,” you might still wind up having to pay for it:
I am not normally a fan of one player dominating the market, personally, but Rekordbox solves an extraordinary set of use cases in a way its competitors don’t even touch. And hey, the computer DJ experience it offers – which was once pretty deficient – has improved a lot.
When it comes to visual features and performance, Serato remains the functionality rival. So there’s your horse race – especially because Pioneer’s advantage of being the CDJ company is for the moment erased by the fact that there are no festivals or clubs. (Ahem.)
I’ll definitely be trying this out with some mixing soon – and will talk to some of the people working with its advanced video/show features. (They’re still working away, even in the lockdown.) Stay tuned.
Don’t miss their updated macOS info:
https://rekordbox.com/en/2020/04/important-notice-for-mac-users/
Download and more info:
The post Rekordbox 6: Ableton Link, sync with Dropbox and Beatport and promos, find lost tracks, more appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
Start with OBS, the now industry-standard streaming app, and add a bunch of special sauce to make it easier and friendlier. Now you’ve got Streamlabs – and it just added Mac support to its other platforms.
Mention live streaming any time in the past year or so, and someone no doubt told you to use OBS. Open Broadcaster Software, aka OBS Studio, is indeed free and powerful – not only for streaming but live recording, too. (It quietly displaced a lot of pricey and often incomplete commercial screencasting software, too.)
OBS has gotten a lot easier – a cash infusion from Twitch, Facebook, NVIDIA, and Logitech no doubt helped. But it’s still a bit intimidating as far as configuring settings for recording, to say nothing of the manual settings required to then make it upload to various streaming platforms.
That’s where Streamlabs comes in. It’s got its own desktop apps based on OBS, plus apps that let you easily stream from Android and iOS, too. So while you could do all of this on OBS desktop, Streamlabs makes it easier – basically, it’s a bit like having a custom distro of OBS. And then by adding mobile access, those platforms become easier, too.
So in addition to all the things that make OBS powerful – using any video source or onscreen inputs, switching between them, handling resolutions and recording as well as connecting, you get:
Honestly, having played around with it a bit, maybe the best part of Streamlabs is that all the power of OBS is there, but easier to use. So it doesn’t feel like a dumbed-down version of OBS so much as a polished, beginner-friendly interface with all the same features – and some useful additions.
The mobile apps also feature a lot of nice integrations on these lines, too. Think similar cross-platform streaming support, importing OBS settings from desktop, and adding widgets for events, donations, and chat.
https://streamlabs.com/mobile-app
The spin here of OBS is open source, like its sibling. It’s based on Electron, so I hope that now that macOS was added, we’ll see Linux, too. Linux users should meanwhile note that OBS packaging has improved a lot across distros, and Ubuntu Studio for instance even bakes a pre-configured OBS right into the OS. I have no idea how much work would be required to do the same with Streamlabs. (PS, you can beta test 20.04 LTS right now and help them squash bugs before what I think will be a very essential global pandemic stay-at-home OS release!)
So, since this is free and open source, what’s the business model?
Basically, you can grab this for free and have a nicer version of OBS. Tips and donations to content makers go 100% to you – no cut for Streamlabs. (Good – and a major difference with a lot of horrible startups.)
Then for a monthly fee, you can add additional effects (US$4.99/month, “PRO”), or a bunch of custom widgets, custom domain and website, and other extras (Prime, $12/mo billed annually).
https://streamlabs.com/pricing
I hope they allow month-to-month billing, but regardless, it’s nice to see a business built on open source software and that still has sustainable business support. (CDM is possible because of just that idea – thank WordPress.)
I’m sure some people are groaning at me even sharing this information, given how many streams are out there right now. But”streaming” doesn’t necessarily mean to a wide audience – it’s useful in any case where you want to teleport yourself around the world (while under stay-at-home orders, for instance) even if it’s to a small group. Plus, even if you haven’t been struggling with this yourself, now you can tip off your friends so they don’t a) bug you for how to set up their stream and/or b) stream really low-quality material you have to then watch.
And I think just as with blogs, the question is not really quantity or openness, but quality – and whether there’s a model for supporting the people putting out that quality. More on this soon.
The post Streamlabs is an easier, free all-in-one streaming app, now on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
Okay, so everyone is suddenly live streaming. But the thought of setting this up hurts your brain. Fortunately, two of our friends have put together concise videos to get you started.
Live streaming music performances hardly started with this pandemic era – and to be fair, a lot of us have been putting off working out how to do it anyway. So let’s do it properly. Live streaming can be a good way to connect with people and to try out material. Its main enemy is often technical trouble. Michael and Tom to our rescue!
Tom Cosm has a desktop guide that takes just two minutes – he captures both from his screen and a webcam, which could also work for tutorials, live coding, and more creative ideas.
Tools:
Streaming platform (Twitch, Facebook Live, etc.)
Desktop platforms (mobile and custom options coming soon)
Michael Forrest has a live streaming how-to – from August 2019, and a reminder that this can be a good idea that you genuinely enjoy rather than an endtimes substitute for live performance as civilization collapses and you abandon hope of ever playing for a crowd of more than two people or within 2 meters of a human. (I mean – let’s definitely not think about it that way.)
And there is a ton of useful gear here. From his list (and his affiliate links). Crucially, since the OBS part is pretty straightforward, having a good stand and lighting is essential – and based on my cursory research, you can ship from a lot of electronics providers at the moment even given lockdowns (and not only Amazon, in case you want to protest that company).
Best of all, he’s got a terrifically useful scene switcher script:
https://github.com/michaelforrest/obs-scripts
Rest of the gear:
Streaming software - https://obsproject.com/
Audio Mixer with USB out - http://amzn.to/2eu59iW
Audio limiter / compressor - http://www.fmraudio.com/rnla.html
Wirelessly receive video to computer from phone - http://bit.ly/2f6ti0A
iPhone app for clean camera feed - http://apple.co/2f6t21J
Tripod - http://amzn.to/2dVuhON
Tripod phone mount - http://amzn.to/2eKAGeV
Lighting LED lighting - http://amzn.to/2ePZxMw
Lighting stand - http://amzn.to/2feGJe8
Video from DSLR
Thunderbolt video capture - http://amzn.to/2eu3iKP
Connect camera to video capture - http://amzn.to/2eKDHfl
Connect video capture to computer - http://amzn.to/2f6vBB5
My DSLR Camera Body - http://amzn.to/2dJ0GF3
Prevent camera from sleeping after 30 mins - http://www.magiclantern.fm/
Wide angle lens if you’re in a tight space - http://amzn.to/2ePXh8e
50mm lens for portraits-style shots - http://amzn.to/2eu37PD
Macro lens for close ups - http://amzn.to/2eu3iKP
Lots of little relevant tips in this video, as well.
And some more gear…
A few more bits of kit I’ve had an eye on. IK Multimedia have started daily livestreams:
https://www.ikmultimedia.com/news/?item_id=9290
But it’s also worth noting they have some rather useful looking kit for podcasting and streaming, particularly solving this on mobile:
iRig Stream is a useful interface, and
iRic Mic Video bundle (and the associated grip and mics in their Creator Series)
…all look useful.
Roland have their GO:LIVECAST which I’ve mentioned, though it seems to lack stereo line input (still trying to get hold of one of these). See also their GO:MIXER.
Sometimes it’s the stuff not specifically directed at streaming that looks most useful for audiovisual use cases. In particular, one friend clued me into the ZOOM U-24 – 2-in, 4-out interface, with preamps:
https://www.zoom.co.jp/products/production-recording/audio-interfaces/u-24-handy-audio-interface
I’m still not entirely seeing the perfect solution I’d imagine here, so I’m keen to hear what you’re thinking.
And this being CDM, absolutely taking your ideas – and intend to discuss some different approaches to online performance, not only the traditional video Web stream. Watch this space.
The post Learn how to live stream your music with these two easy, quick videos, gear tips appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
If you’re bored of just video chatting with Zoom, Houseparty, and the like, Endlesss might be the musical switch-up you need. And some big personalities are joining in a day long stream today to give you a taste of what it’s about.
First, Endlesss – it’s an iOS-only (for now) collaborative music creation app. The idea is, you get started right away building loops, using built-in instruments, playable pads, and add-on effects. That makes it accessible to first-timers – so it could be ideal for introducing your friends and family to some music jamming now, especially as an antidote to grainy underlit camera footage of all of us in sweatpants.
Plus, hey, slick visuals, for things like this:
Some apps might just dead-end there. But if you are a musician, you can push Endlesss further. There’s an all-critical microphone input, meaning skilled vocalists and rappers and beatboxers can blow this thing away. Instrument and effects packs go fairly deep. And for musicians, you can connect via Ableton Link, export materials (even as stems, at last), and choose custom key, scale, tempo, time signature and quantization.
Yeah, it’s almost like this thing was made by real musicians. And, of course, it was – Tim Exile has led the Endlesss team; he’s known to us as the ultra-virtuoso mega-geek behind Reaktor tools such as The Mouth and Flesh. And that sensibility is here, too – build on looping facilities to let your musical fancies take flight.
So it’s fitting that some key personalities are joining the stream today.
Imogen Heap is of course another defining artist in modern looping-vocal technique.
KiNK has proven that virtuoso live performance has a place on dancefloors, too, even in the age of linear CDJ mixing.
Matt Black and his act Coldcut built some of the software and performances that showed what audiovisual sampling cut-up culture could be.
And there’s more. Flux Pavilion is a major name in EDM at that meeting point between mainstage and producer, singer-songwriter and electronic production. Dan Le Sac is another legendary UK name (and also crossing into game production). And from our Internet music tech world, Gaz Williams of Sonic State is there both as a presence from journalism and synth and bass musicianship – hi, Gaz!
Twitch.tv, while first established for gaming, has of late become a refuge for musicians. Higher-quality streams, better community features that actually work properly, and proper monetization that might not drive artists further into the poor house all set it apart from the major US tech oligopoly providers. (You know who you are.) So this feed is appropriately launching on the channel by touring app Bandsintown with Twitch, just as artists look for ways to keep some trickle of funds and activity coming in during global lockdown.
https://www.twitch.tv/bandsintown/
Tune in today Tuesday daytime UK time. (I’m inquiring about replays for the USA, which will be slowly waking up toward the end of the programming.) If you’re personally puzzling on how to stream while dealing with competing platforms, they’re using the most popular tool for that, restream.io.
And if you’ve got an iOS gadget (iPad and iPod touch work, too), head to:
The app is free, with in-app purchases of additional content.
The post Endlesss is a musical jam app; Imogen Heap, KiNK, Matt Black, more join a stream today appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.
