ChucK Wiki now up

I don’t seem to have mentioned ChucK here before, which is a serious oversight. ChucK takes a completely different approach to sound synthesis than any other language I’ve seen.
Possibly the most interesting feature of the language is the => (or “chuck”) operator, which translates pretty much to “take what’s on the left, convert it properly, [...]

Musicplasma

An interesting search engine with a connection-based interface; you enter a search term, and it returns (based on Amazon’s database) items that are connected to other items matching your search.
Beats heck out of wandering around on Amazon, but a text-based version for the visially-impaired would be useful too.

Converting Mosaic to SCORE

I got an inquiry today about converting MOTU Mosaic files to SCORE for the PC; my best guess was to use Mosaic’s MIDI playback feature and SCORE’s MIDI input processor to do the conversion. If anyone’s got a more elegant solution, drop me a line.

Turning Boodler into a Performance Instrument

Andrew Plotkin’s Boodler provides a sample player programmable in Python. I’ve played with it before on Linux but today I decided to try it on OS X.

It turns out that OS X audio support is even better than I’d hoped. Right now, I’ve got several copies of Boodler running, providing a rather bizarre ambient environment [...]

A surfeit of options

I hadn’t really looked around for a while at my computer synthesis options. It turns out the a surprising number of things that I had tried previously under Mac OS 9 were now available under OS X and working much better than before. There’s a lot more open-source and free software available now.
jMax is a [...]

MOTU Performer owners – a cry for help

Update: less than a day after I posted this item, James Parker offered his help. Thanks, James!
I got mail from a gentleman who is facing a problem that I’m afraid may be far too common in the future:
I inherited after my father’s death, a collection of his compositions in the form of midi files. They [...]

The Man-Machine Interface: Audiopad

James Patten and Ben Recht, at the MIT Media Lab, have created a fascinating new tool called Audiopad. This is a hyperinstrument – a flat surface with embedded antennae that allows it to sense the position of objects on its surface. Combined with custom software and a video projector, this allows you to directly manipulate [...]

Inspired hacking department

Ben Moran has managed to build a working version of csound that runs on the Sharp Zaurus. Binaries available here. This is a cross-compiled binary of Istvan Varga’s unofficial Csound version 4.24.1; console-mode only, but hey. How many other synthesizers can you carry in your pocket?