Create Digital Music

createdigitalmusic.com · Group blog · on HN since 2008

Create Digital Music is a site covering music technology, synths, apps, and creative sound hacking.

What HN saysHN links it for music software and hardware stories, such as audio coding tools, spreadsheet trackers, Apple app disputes, and Behringer's copying.
67HN people shared it
24linked it in comments
89stories submitted
1.1Kstory points
10 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    NASA Posts a Huge Library of Space Sounds (2014)
    4 people · 47 points · first shared 2014 · 8 comments on HN
  2. 2
    Homepage
    4 people · first shared 2009
  3. 3
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  5. 5
    In Free App, Circuit Bending Done with Bits
    2 people · 6 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
  6. 6
    One line of code into music
    2 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · 2 comments on HN
  7. 7
  8. 8
    Yamaha's Latest Silent Brass
    1 people · 209 points · first shared 2014 · 32 comments on HN
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
    How the THX Deep Note Creator Remade His Iconic Sound
    1 people · 84 points · first shared 2015 · 29 comments on HN
  12. 12
    The Mac Pro from an audio pros perspective
    1 people · 69 points · first shared 2013 · 75 comments on HN
  13. 13
    Grammy for MIDI Creators Dave Smith, Ikutaro Kakehashi
    1 people · 39 points · first shared 2012 · 6 comments on HN
  14. 14
    Behringer's Clone of Apple's Homepage
    1 people · 17 points · first shared 2009 · 9 comments on HN
  15. 15
    Teletype Eurorack module from Monome
    1 people · 11 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

shams93 · 2016-02-26
Yeah for an example of what I would love to be able to use on both android and ios : http://createdigitalmusic.com/2015/01/free-audiokit-lets-ios-mac-devel…
burrokeet · 2013-08-19
A couple interesting places: DJ Tech Tools forums (a lot of stuff about controllerism and related hacking topics) - http://forums.djtechtools.com/ Create Digital Music - http://www.createdigitalmusic.com/
Gibbon · 2009-09-06
There's also a follow-up to the article covering Behringer's notorious IP thefts over the years. http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/09/06/on-behringers-track-record-va…
nosuchthing · 2015-10-29
The app was called "Orphion", and it had several methods for detecting gestures/articulations: a gentle finger tip touch, a tap, and a push down. Apple cited forbidden private API use. http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/06/hands-off-apple-wants-to-pull-or… Apple just called me to nicely tell me I use a private API function to sense the area of the screen which is covered by the finger for its articulation gesture ([CDM] wrote about it). This is crazy – thousands of users love it for this and it makes Orphion so expressive. The app will be removed from the App Store in two weeks if I don’t submit a new version without it – and I currently can’t think of Orphion without this gesture. So what I can recommend is 1. Everyone who wants to have the “original” Orphion get it NOW from the app store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app /orphion/id495465097), it will be only be there for a few more days 2. Backup the current version to keep it. (Michael Tyson from Audiobus made this great tutorial) 3. Tell Apple to make this great function officially usable in apps (Any ideas how to do that?) So far… let’s see if this is really the end of Orphion. ...looks like the petition worked and Orphion was allowed to keep the gesture functionality; https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/orphion/id495465097
Ryanmf · 2014-04-11
This isn't exactly a revolutionary concept. Onyx Ashanti[0][1][2] has built an entire performance around it (literally, the the whole system is custom built). And on a sort of parallel track, nerds like Herrmutt Lobby and DZA have done some really remarkable things pushing the boundaries of what can be done with off the shelf MIDI gear[3] as well as with game controllers[4]. Perhaps Mi.Mu will be the best execution of a MIDI/OSC glove to date—it will probably have to be if it's going to make it on stage with performers like Imogen Heap and Tim Exile. I will say, sometimes an encoder is exactly what you need. Other times what you need is a long throw fader (to say nothing of the very particular engineering of crossfaders for scratch DJs). I hope designers and engineers continue to experiment in this space, but not every conventional interface needs 'disrupting', and they certainly don't all need to be made wireless. I always feel a bit annoyed when these developments are framed as a breaking down of walls between performer and audience, a paradigm shift away from the dark ages of electronic musicians hunched over banks of knobs and 'checking their email'. It's a cliché, and I'm not even sure it maps to reality all that well. I'm fairly certain Miles Davis spent the majority of his time on stage looking at piano keys. And if not there, at his collaborators. Maybe occasionally a glance towards the audience. Maybe. Stevie Wonder never looked at anybody. It never mattered,…
msutherl · 2012-12-16
I try to keep my subscription to an absolute minimum since I like to leave some time for reading books. After a lot of culling, I'm currently subscribed to some popular feeds: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ (general web design / dev) http://www.alistapart.com/ (long form web design / front-end) http://dailyjs.com/ (Javascript / node.js) http://createdigitalmusic.com/ (digital music / software) http://www.creativeapplications.net/ (new-media art) And a handful of unpopular ones: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/ (absolutely my favorite blog in the world – self-describes as "refactored perception) http://www.tempobook.com/blog/ (same author as above, posts related to his last book) http://worrydream.com/feed.xml (not really a blog, but Bret Victor writes some of the best long-form articles on interaction design around – read all of them) http://www2.technologyreview.com/rss/video_rss.aspx (Tech Review videos, sparsely updated – mainly because the editor's interviews are awesome/hilarious) http://idlewords.com/ (breathtaking travel blog from the founder of Pinboard) http://www.loper-os.org/ (awesome / hilarious posts by a software heretic on the general terrible state of things in technology – keeps me in touch with Alan Kay-esque thinking) http://we-make-money-not-art.com/ (the only contemporary art blog I like from a very dedicated Italian writer) http://vagueterrain.net/ (occasionally published digital art magazine, themed topics, guest…
gcheong · 2009-03-19
My "crap app" got rejected for being of "minimal functionality" even though it duplicates the functionality of a physical device found in many restrooms in Japan, so it seems Apple is indiscriminately applying their policies regardless of application quality, leading to some making it through and others not. Case in point: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/03/16/apple-rejects-free-iphone-too… I would hardly call this as having "minimal functionality". Yet Apple thinks so. But neither I nor Apple should have that call beyond apps that are illegal, overly resource intensive or malicious. The market should be able to decide. This behavior hinders development across the board, especially when you have no insight into why an app is rejected or what it will take to get it approved. Will Shipley has a great post on his blog about this very issue: http://wilshipley.com/blog/2008/09/iphone-app-store-let-market-decide.…
david-given · 2016-01-26
"This thing was going one day when a friend of mine named Edward Fredkin, who’s a professor of computer science at M.I.T., came in, and he said, ‘That sounds pretty good. How did you get it to make those sounds?’ I showed him, and we spent the afternoon making more sounds. Fredkin formed a company to manufacture the machines as toys.”" I believe this is it: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2014/06/meet-strange-wonderful-70s-machi…
Polyphonie · 2015-04-16
One of the reason for the audio latency issue on Android is the complex power management circuitry (PMIC) implemented on most of not all Qualcomm SoCs. That's why to anyone with experience in regards to using Android device in audios production, most would agree that the older 2011 Galaxy Nexus is still the Android device to use. Unlike the the recent Snapdragon based Nexus device, the GNex is based on TI OMAP4460 (dual-core ARM Cortex A9). It might not be a coincidence the Apple kept the number of cores on its A series SoCs to a minimum (only moving to 3 with the A8X). http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/05/why-mobile-low-latency-is-hard-e…
bgruber · 2014-09-21
Before Max 5, making vst plugins with was very much supported, and was explicitly dropped in favor of Max for Live. Here's a blog post exploring some alternatives from when the drop in support was announced: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/05/cycling-74-ditches-plug-in-devel…
swift · 2013-09-09
Apparently AudioBus has already been updated to be interoperable with inter-app audio: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/09/audiobus-for-ios-7-update-is-alr…
jrabone · 2013-03-05
Seen any music software or soft synth plugins recently? (eg. Rebirth http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/05/rebirth-reborn-as-synths-in-your…
cageface · 2012-07-14
Actually Jelly Bean is finally supposed to provide usable audio latencies for audio apps: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/07/android-audio-improvements-will-… Unfortunately, it will probably be a while until there's enough of an installed base of 4.1 to matter, but at least the fix is in.
anigbrowl · 2012-07-02
Much tighter multimedia kernel, which is a big deal for me. Downside: not on the ARM tablets. So paradoxically, the opposite of your pro/cons. I'm neutral on teh tablets; I have an Asus Eee pad and Android just got a major audio shot int he arm with Jellybean, so I haven't decided whether to stick with that platform or switch to Surface (or indeed an iPad). But for big projects, you need a desktop. http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/06/music-developer-on-windows-8-a-l…
tommyd · 2011-11-09
Probably been posted before, but this reminds me of this rather awesome article about one-liner algorithms outputting to /dev/audio to create some really quite cool "compositions": http://createdigitalmusic.com/2011/10/entire-musical-compositions-made… There's a site to try your own at: http://wurstcaptures.untergrund.net/music/
raju · 2011-10-13
Nitpicking, but the URL posted is to a comment in the blog-post. Here is the actual url http://createdigitalmusic.com/2011/10/one-line-of-code-into-music-now-…
martron · 2011-10-13
More info at: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2011/10/entire-musical-compositions-made… Somehow I never realized it was that easy to just pipe audio to /dev/audio (or aplay for ubuntu).
teeja · 2009-10-17
Depending on how 'sophisticated' you want the music to be, there are more & more decent online Flash/JS sequencers that you could record. http://beaterator.rockstargames.com/beaterator.html http://www.lilyapp.org/about/ http://www.ampledesign.co.uk/va/ There's also this collaboration site: http://www.kongregate.com/collabs For more ideas, have a look through CDM: http://createdigitalmusic.com/
brianwhitman · 2011-03-06
Yes, that is a better analogy, but the technical bar for streaming audio is very low -- far lower than understanding the music. You'll be seeing a lot more consumer oriented uses of our data in the near future that stream music. Developers interested in making a 'pandora of the future' should read about our deals with 7digital, IDJ and play.me/dada that handle the content side of things: http://notes.variogr.am/post/1373556723/the-future-music-platform-musi… http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/09/when-data-and-music-meet/ http://mashable.com/2011/02/24/idj-echo-nest/ For example, 7D has many millions of songs available for on demand streaming -- and you can get their IDs from us in API calls. Here's a pandora style playlist for KFW with 7D IDs, sorted by increasing tempo and only popular artists that sound like KFW; when we say things like "we have more data, we can do more" this is what we mean http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/playlist/static?api_key=N6E4NIOVY…

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