Attack on Ableton!

While owners of Ableton rest on their laurels with their multi-multi-multi creative DAW (digital audio workstation), which turns even the housewife into a DJ, musician and producer with a worldwide reputation, some of the sacked personnel has taken a source code and is trying to make money on this and win back a piece of the music market.

MPC or Laptop?

Recently I got some interesting music gadget: MPC-500 by Akai Pro. It is small sampler-sequencer with 12 pads, running on batteries and as well as from AC. I sat above it couple of evenings, experimented with built-in samples, recorded guitar through the entrance, made a house-pattern... But the more I turned the wheel of choice and pressed navigation arrows, the greater was feeling that it's a good old DOS-tracker, but for some reason in a separate box and at value of $500. I did not believe in the fact that somebody can completely finish project in this box, without any help of computer. May be I could not quite figure out all the features, but I didn’t feel intuitive understanding, at least as it was with Korg EMX-1 (although that is an awkward device too).

Android Based Sequencers

Today I try to overview music programs for the "Android" platform. A lot of them has been written, and now I review only a few to leave the topic open for further discussion and elaboration.

FLOSS Manuals

Most of my hobbies are somehow related to the computer, so I'm constantly in the search stage of software to meet my needs. But the more professional is software, the more the price of all these developments. But I'm not a professional! So why should I spend big money on the purchase of certain products, if I did not earn a penny from them in the long term?

Use of limited "home" versions or "light" packages is also not an option, because they usually cut a very interesting and useful functions... So I concentrated on testing the "open source" analogues of the various programs, fortunately enthusiasts willing to share their experience are enough in the world (for what they have honor, praise and respect). But here there is one problem: the developers of professional products are focused on "loyalty" of its user, so running in parallel with the development of the product they supply it usually with serious and informative guides. But in the case of "open source" it is not always possible. It could be argued that the "good" software is clear and intuitive for the user at any level, but personal experience suggests that to read manuals is still very, very useful exercise. Because every program has its own quirks, to understand that empirically is not so simple. And manuals speed up the process at times (unless of course, they are not stretched more than a 500 pages, but in any case there is a glossary or table of contents))).

So, in search of regular manuals to music program I dug up a project called FLOSS Manuals. List of manuals decently surprised me: besides the well expected VLC-player or a sound editor Audacity, I found a manuals for such interesting projects as Csound (audio programming) and Ardour (digital audio workstation (DAW)). Well, a manual for Pure Data (a program for creating interactive audio-visual applications) I think one of the most convenient, complete and easy to understand for a standard user!

My pd-patch © :)