Streaming music power house Spotify comes to the US
The award-winning music service that’s taken Europe by storm has landed on US shores. Millions of tracks ready to play instantly, on your computer and your phone.
How to become an expert user:
Pagedown in results: First up, finding the song you want. Spotify has an annoying habit of only giving you the most popular editions of a track. If you want the whole list in search results, you can click a track in the list and hit the Pagedown key to get more. Keep holding it, and eventually you’ll get to the bottom, far faster than through scrolling.
Ctrl-F to filter: Once you’ve got your nice long list of tracks, finding what you want in it by eye can be a bit of a pain. So hit Ctrl-F to bring up an enormously useful filter. Try it on a search for Label:EMI for Radiohead, for example. Much easier than scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.
Scrobble from Spotify: You guys have Pandora, right? Lovely. But it doesn’t learn your taste when you’re not using it, so Britain-based Last.fm pretty much blows it out of the water. Get yourself a Last.fm account, head to Spotify’s preferences screen, put in your details, and every track you play will be logged for your perusal. That way, when you know what you want to listen to you can go to Spotify, and when you don’t you can go to Last.fm. You can also import your loved tracks and recommendations back into Spotify using Spotibot. The perfect partnership.
Search through other people’s playlists: Spotify appears to have pretty much stopped development on new features since its big social launch about a year ago, and one thing the service is crying out for is a way to easily discover playlists that other people have created. Happily, ShareMyPlaylists.com has stepped into the breach, and offers a nice way of searching through playlists that people have uploaded to the site.
Backup your playlists: There’s always a chance — not an enormous one but a chance nonetheless — that something will go wrong on Spotify’s database servers and all your playlists will be irrecoverably lost. That might not matter to you, but once you’ve gone through a year or two of Spotify and you’ve accrued playlists that you associate with particular moments in your life, you might want to back them up. It’s simple. Select all the tracks in the playlist with Ctrl-A, drag it into a Word document or an e-mail, and voila — backup made.
Roland’s Jupiter 80 enters Europe
Roland has announced the official UK launch date for the new Jupiter 80 synthesizer – Saturday, July 30th – check out the different locations right here:
One of the most revered prefixes in the history of synthesis returns. Welcome the arrival of the JUPITER-80— a live-performance powerhouse that pays homage to its legendary namesake with road-proven hardware and massive sound, yet blasts into the future with advanced SuperNATURAL technology.
The JUPITER-80’s expressive, organic approach to synthesis makes a new world of sound design possible with multilayered SuperNATURAL textures under the control of a full-colour touchscreen and creative hands-on controllers. Experience the metamorphosis of a legend with the all-new JUPITER-80!
Check out ELECTRIC TEA 2.0
Electric Tea 2.0 is the second in a series of works that put sound where it doesn’t belong. This table was an installation at the 2010 Urbanscapes Festival in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The sounds in the water come from 8 MP3 players playing synced sounds that looped every 5 minutes. Left and right channels each played different sounds yielding 16 individual sounds to play with.
The 4 orbs are connected to the speaker in the middle of the table. When a person holds an orb and touches the water at the same time, the sound passes through their body and into the speaker. Multiple notes can be played by touching more than one cup.
For more info- lavajumperstudios.com
About the Artists
Ion Ray (Michael Ion Furjanic)- is a musician, sound designer and inventor living in Kuala Lumpur.
Isaac Souweine- is a media producer and designer living in Singapore.
Mixing 20 tracks in 10 minutes with Touch DJ Evolution on iPhone
Here is a cool teaser for an upcoming mixing app for iPhone:
Mix done 100% visually (without headphones), shows the usage of Auto-Sync and Auto-EQ features of Touch DJ Evolution. The app allows extremely easy, almost perfect instant mixing. The preparation phase for this mix was just loading the tracks an defining some cue points to mark entries and transitions. The tracks were loaded in alphabetical order (what is wrong in general, but good for demo purposes)
What happens in the video is simply navigating on cuepoints (by tapping them in the track waveform overview), engaging Auto-Sync at the right time, and ultimately moving the crossfader and loading another track.. App handles mantaining constant BPM of the mix through time-stretching the tracks, not pitch-shifting (although that setting is also possible, separate for each deck).
The application will hit AppStore soon, as a universal app for iPhone & iPad.
Cement – nice pattern generator for Kontakt
Cinematique Instruments has released Cement, a pattern generator instrument for Native Instruments Kontakt.
Cement is a sequencer based pattern generator which is well suitable to enrich your music production and lend it a specific character. As the name suggests you can easily create cementing textures, crawling patterns or a fundament for your musical idea.
Cement comes up with three layered instruments which can create numerous sound colors. The instruments are: a sinus synth, a banjo combined with guitar harmonics and a music box. For changing the entire sound character, Cement provides plenty of options to modify the sound to your very own requirements: lowpass- and highpass filter (with a random high pass modulator), distortion- and speaker switches, an alternate sinus sci-fi sound, separate length settings and separate slider to set the amount of two delays and a reverb.
Cement runs in stand alone mode as well as in-sync to your host application. Just easily click on the 16th note of your choice to play the sound – a second click increases the velocity level – a third click removes the note, then click on the note symbol to change its pitch. That´s it! Beside that Cement provides 4 different kinds of scales, transposing functions, shuffle- and tempo modes and finally load/ save switches to save/recall your entire setting of Cement
Cement (requires Kontakt 4 or higher full version) is available to purchase for €19 EUR.
Deep inside the electronic music lab
Welcome to the mico-galactic frontier:-)
Here’s a new Digimancy video with Eurorack and video game logic
Jitter-free MIDI from the ES-4
This video shows how the Expert Sleepers ES-4 SPDIF/CV module can also be used to send MIDI, via a simple cable adaptor and using features of Expert Sleepers’ Silent Way software.
Because the MIDI is being sent via an audio interface, it is sample-accurate with the audio and free from the timing jitter normally associated with USB MIDI interfaces.
http://expert-sleepers.co.uk/es4.html
The Sound of Harry Potter
After eight films over a 10-year span, the epic adventure of Harry Potter and his circle of wizard friends will close the last chapter of this celebrated series with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2.
Director David Yates returns to direct his fourth Harry Potter film and returns with his talented sound team including Re-recording mixers Stuart Hilliker and Mike Dawson, Supervising Music Editor Gerard McCann, Supervising Sound Editor James Mather, and Sound Designer Dom Gibbs. Expecto Patronum!
Nice Waldorf Q demonstration
“The Waldorf Q is a professional virtual analog synthesizer well suited for demanding performance and studio work! The Q was a large and bright yellow beast but now they come in a sleek dark grey look. Through digital emulation the Q faithfully reproduces the sounds and programming characteristics of virtually any sophisticated analog synthesizer with state of the art control and precision.
With 16 to 32 voices and 16 multitimbral parts, the Q is well adapted for reliable live use. Waldorf’s excellent analog sound emulation is complemented by sophisticated yet familiar analog-type controls and parameters. There are 3 oscillators per voice, 3 LFOs with ramp, sine, square, etc. and 2 12/24dB Filters (Low pass, band pass, hi pass, notch, comb, ring mod and more). A powerful arpeggiator and sequencer are also on-board for creating complex accompaniment or arpeggios. There are 58 knobs to aid you in tweaking away at creating amazing sounds! All knobs and edit parameters are MIDI controllable. The Waldorf Q is topped off with 8 effects processors (2 per sound that include Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Overdrive, AM, Delay, Reverb, etc.), 2 analog audio inputs, 6 outputs and 1 S/PDIF output (44.1kHz / 48kHz switchable) and vocoding capability. The Q is a professional-grade virtual analog synth that combines the raw power of analog synthesis with modern technology, stability and creativity.”
Facts provided by VSE
Chris Jeffs Releases the iOS Monnix synth
Chris Jeffs has released a new synth for iOS called Monnix. This live performance synthesizer uses three points of touch to control the distribution of up to 16 harmonics, allowing for unique sound effects.
Features:
Monnix is a synthesizer app which can distribute up to 16 sine waves in various harmonic or inharmonic ways. There are 5 screens allowing performance, playback or synthesis patch editing.
Perform
Use up to 3 fingers to control the frequency and distribution of harmonics and the LFO parameters.
Replay
Any movements made in the Perform page are stored, and can be played back here.
Sample & Hold
Controls the sound as in the Perform page, but with the periodic freezing of the partials, according to the selected tempo.
Synthesis
Select the amount of FM or jitter applied to the synthesis, and the balance between odd and even harmonics.
Envelope / FM
Change the volume envelope and FM ratio
Movements can be played back in the Replay page and the pitch altered by tilting the device forward. The Sample & Hold screen freezes the partials according to the selected tempo. FM ratio, jitter and envelope parameters can be set in the remaining pages, allowing for a wide variety of sonic mayhem.
Available through iTunes. To learn more about Monnix’s many features go to http://chrisjeffs.com/monnix/
DATAMASKIN
