Plug-in crafter daz disley writes to alert us to his Windows VST plug-in collection. The beta-grade plug-ins are all available as donationware. There are various warnings about “try at your own risk,” which reads to me as an invitation. Three effects have been polished into finished versions; you can get all three for EUR25 if you want to use them beyond 28 days. But the betas are free to try.

There’s some nice-looking stuff in the beta-level collection, including:

• granulOSO: a granular “sample masher,” a bit like some of the Reaktor ensembles out there — and delicious as a result. Note that “granulOSO uses a mono trigger with polyphonic pitch so each new note’s samples join in rather than start again so it can be used as a gnarly harmonizer. “
• voldeLAY: a delay chain that uses volume to determine delay (that is, it integrates a side-chained compressor). Similar: freqDELAY uses multiple bands for delay, and deeeeeLAY, a “stoopidly” long delay. You could route something similar depending on the capabilities of your host, but nice to have it in one virtual box.
• wavePLAY: a “wave-explorer” synthesizer from a sound artist.
• sidePRESS, a hard knee compressor with virtual sidechain inputs — meaning you don’t need a host capable of sidechaining to use it (nice!)

… just for starters; you’ll find plenty of others. And they all have quite lovely interfaces, true to their name.

whiteLABEL plug-ins

I may be tossing this into my sound design / mangling arsenal this week, so stay tuned!

The Asus Eee PC is unlikely to be your first choice of laptops for music. But it’s small, it’s cute, and it’s ridiculously cheap. Some CDM-reading computer enthusiasts are biting, as we found out in March when we asked you if you had turned the Eee PC into a music box.

On the Linux side, you’ve got lots of options. Best among these, CDM reader Dan Stowell has put together a comprehensive tutorial on using SuperCollider, the powerful, free sound synthesis engine. You can even add custom GUIs using a free Java-based tool. There are also plenty of DIY environments for music working nicely (Csound and Pd included, as well), meaning the Eee can very quickly become a programmable, dedicated sound machine and synth for the price of the cheapest closed-box, name-brand piece of music gear.

Linux also supports various music tools that lend themselves to a lower-end machine, like music tracker MilkyTracker. Check it out in videos on the Eee: Eee-PC MilkyTracker Xandros, more. (Thanks, emrox!)

The surprise is, full-blown Windows software holds its own. From the NI forums, a group of intrepid Guitar Rig 3 users have fired up XP and have a pretty usable, self-contained Guitar Rig computer:

Guitar Rig on Eee PC [Native Instruments forums; thanks to Jahmal Tonge for the tip!]

The trick is, you do need modded video drivers to make use of 1000×600 resolution, thus accommodating the user interface. Forum members also suggest avoiding the newer Atom model as they believe it will be slower. Then again, while this proof of concept is tantalizing, I’d probably hold out for more-powerful mini PCs coming out — and the fact that music works this well on this machine means it only gets better from here.

Computer Music Magazine did do a review of the Eee, and were a little more practical about the Eee’s downsides (though the resolution hack here helps at least with that problem). But then, the other way of looking at this is that the Eee is just the beginning. Plenty more budget mini-laptops are coming; already machines from HP and others close the gap with “conventional”, pricier laptops. Linux distributions may soon target these configurations (Ubuntu has promised a “remix”), and Microsoft has committed to keeping XP and Vista going on these machines, as well. And that means the price divide with computer music is getting erased fast.

Few names inspire love from digital musicians quite like Elektron, makers of the Monomachine, Machinedrum, and SIDstation drum machines. So when Elektron’s founder Daniel Hansson passed away in an auto accident last summer, it came as a shock to the tightly-knit, passionate musical community who loved his work and lost him too young. (It didn’t help that it came within weeks of the loss of Argu, the ingenious discoDSP and Image-Line software developer, also in a car accident.)

Tragedies like this are doubly sad, because in that loss we miss the opportunity to celebrate people whose work we love. So I’m pleased to be able to talk about a celebration of Daniel Hansson today.

The artist community who use Elektron’s stuff have put together a really epic compilation of music in tribute to Daniel. It’s all user-driven — Elektron didn’t do the organizing; the musicians did. The lineup has some of our favorite people contributing, famed and obscure alike:

Autechre, Beautiful Planet Earth, Boom Bip, dDamage, Daedelus, Dntel, Erase, Emnine, Future Image, Honey Claws, How Dragons Disappear, John Starlight, Jon Martensson, John Tejada, Kero, Landstrumm, Material Object, Micronaut, Music International, Orsan Kart, Pelektor, Proxy, scutopus, TS3K, and The Brown Moth, Tiga, The Sea and Cake, TreD Grp, Van Basten, AEVSVS, Wanker’s United

Many of these (The Sea and Cake, Boom Bip, Tiga, Proxy, John Starlight and others) are exclusive tracks.

You get 30 songs for US$5, donated to Daniel’s favorite charity, the World Wildlife Fund. (Additional WWF donations are welcome.) You’re even entered to win a SIDstation. (Yeah, I know — some of you are still smarting from not having won a Tenori-On, just as I am from having had to give it away. At least here, you can lose for a good cause, which is what I intend to do.)

45tribute

Another 25 songs are available free — really free, licensed Creative Commons.

(25 + 30 does not add up to 45, it’s true — 45 was Daniel’s favorite number and was in the name of his C64 group, Zone 45.)

Help Spread the Word

The organizers don’t have a PR budget for this, so we’re their PR — and, hey, I’ll bet we can do a better job, anyway. So do spread the word around.

Thanks to Ryan Faubion, the project manager and curator, for putting this together and letting us know about it, and to forum member / compilation contributor Wendell Edwards aka scutopus for the heads-up.

Sure, what with it being 2008 and all, “plug-in” to many people means audio processing. But what if you want an arpeggiator? Or something to harmonize incoming notes, or match them to scales? Or … well, just about anything else you can do with pitch and time with MIDI, from utilities to music effects? And what if your host’s built-in options are letting you down?

The good news: you’ve got lots of options. The bad news: a lot are on Windows.

We saw Chirp, a Mac/Windows utility for assigning QWERTY keyboards to MIDI input, earlier this week. But that’s led to some other discussions.

The MVelope MIDI Toolkit includes a whole range of free MIDI plug-ins for Windows VST hosts. There’s already MKey, a very nice, mature QWERTY keyboard (similar to Chirp, but a little simpler and functioning as a plug-in). In beta or “teaser” form are some other interesting utilities: a pattern-based arpeggiator (pictured, top), filter/router, chord generator, and eventually a Control Change-powered LFO you can drop anywhere you like. (I’d love to have that last one in Ableton Live, since I miss the readily-available LFOs found in tools like FL Studio.) Thanks to Peter for the tip on this one.

But ready to jump down the rabbit hole?

Proprietary systems like FreeHand’s awkwardly-named MusicPad Pro Plus (Pro Plus, eh?) have offered digital manuscript paper for some time. But the idea there is you buy dedicated hardware; the MusicPad Pro Plus is US$899. With tablet PCs starting at about the same price, and the convenience of having your mobile computer also be your music notation, it seems like the convergence of the manuscript page and the computer isn’t far off.

Enter MusicReader for Windows XP and Vista. It runs just US$69-99; bring your own laptop. Better yet, bring your own tablet PC and you have a form factor that fits naturally on a music stand and can be marked up with digital ink. Turn pages with a tap or foot pedal.

Sheet Music 2.0 [Wired.com, via the tablet lovers at GottaBeMobile.com]

With the ultra-thin machine on its way (witness new ultra-thin laptops from Apple and Lenovo, and upcoming low-power, tiny chips from Intel), the future looks even better. Here’s a video of the system in action, lest you think this would never appear in the real world (suggestion: you may want to mute the sound, as the background score is a bit …unnecessary):

Mac users, looks like you’re booting into Boot Camp for now. Too bad Apple still doesn’t think we want a tablet.

Reading notation is good fun, but what if you could write it, too? A little-noticed, open-source tool from researchers at Brown University does just that on Windows Tablet PCs, and even made a brief, official appearance as a Microsoft PowerToy. The recognition is surprisingly satisfying once you learn the shortcuts, which resemble Palm Graffiti strokes. Finally, in 2005 the developers added MIDI export, making this a potentially useful tool. If there’s someone out there with a newish Vista tablet, I’d be curious to know if this still works on modern machines.

To me, the ability to write as well as read makes things far more interesting. But for about a hundred bucks — well, plus whatever your tablet PC cost — you’ve got digital music paper right now.

Music Notepad for Tablet PC

Does any of this actually matter to you? Blogger Tom Whitwell asked that of his readers, and found the answer is, well, sorta:

Can Music Thing readers read music? [Music Thing]

  MIDI is back, baby. Or to say it another way: musicians still care about how to manipulate notes, rhythms, and timbral control. That means that, for all the powerful audio-warping tools you pack into a product, the compositional, musical power of software lives and dies on MIDI. But can you really do MIDI any better than it’s been done for the past couple of decades?

Temper would like to try. It’s not MIDI-only — it does audio, too, and has the requisite support for VSTs — but it is a little different from the sequencer perspective. And whereas innovative sequencers lately have been throwbacks to the tracker design, Temper emphasizes modularity and the ability to create shapes. As the developers put it, it’s:

…a MIDI+Audio sequencer with an emphasis on MIDI. Temper is distinguished by two basic design goals: To provide you with tools that operate on sequences as easily as individual events, and to decouple what gets processed by how it gets processed.

XO Wave is a basic multi-track audio tool with multi-channel recording and mixing, video support, plug-in support (in the Pro version) and built in DSP, double-precision math, and non-destructive editing. It looks like it could be a strong choice for basic multichannel tasks. And it has some less-common features, like automatic softening to remove clicks/pops at edit points, and versioning so you can go back to earlier versions of files. A very capable version is available free, and a “Pro” version is just US$95 (though that admittedly puts it in slightly more competitive waters).

Interestingly, this is also one of the rare cases of a Java-based audio app. (The app is Java-based, at least; the developer notes that audio processing is not done in Java.) The 1.0 final release is compatible with Mac OS X Leopard, with two caveats: one, 10.5’s new security privileges cause it to gripe the first time you run it about security (as it would with any app), and two, dock/switcher icons appear twice. (Java support on 10.5 has a couple of hiccups; at least they’re non-critical annoyances; the icon issue is apparently a Leopard problem, not Java per se.)

1.0 has also arrived on Linux; in that version the software is free (though closed-source, despite the name, with full JACK support). (Hey, how about a JACK-aware Mac version, too?)

XO Wave downloads; comparison of Linux, free, and Pro versions

Ah, those wacky folks at CME. CME is China’s big music tech distributor and manufacturer, and for the last couple of years they’ve been wowing the US market with quite-decent keyboards priced way lower than they should be. (Their keyboards are even showing up free in software packages, kinda like a really sweet Cracker Jacks prize.) If anyone else said they were introducing a one hundred-dollar, ultra-thin keyboard, I’d scream and run away. But CME’s kit has proven to be pretty nice (Thomas Dolby seems to like his controller keyboard, for one). So the new M-Key actually looks pretty interesting.

Yes, it’s a cheap keyboard, and yes, it’s ultra-thin — which means you probably don’t want it as a primary keyboard, just a mobile backup or keyboard for programming synths in tight spaces. But it has some interesting features, like a joystick and semi-weighted keys. Specs, let’s just copy and paste here:

• 49 ultra thin, velocity sensitive, full action semi-weighted keys
  
• 1 x Programmable Joystick
  
• 1 x function button, 2 x data entry button, 1 x slider (assignable), 1 x power LED
  
• 1 x USB port, 1 x MIDI out, 2 x pedal connect
  
• USB MIDI, class-compliant with Windows XP and Mac OS X
  
• Firmware upgraded via USB
  
• Universal pedal connector, compatible with switch and expression pedal

• Note-key shortcut function