Palm Sounds interviews Paul Soulsby about the ATmegatron Synth

I really enjoyed talking to Paul about his synth the ATmegatron, how he developed the concept and brought the idea to life.

So, I said something great was coming, here's an interview with the developer of CTRL, which is due tomorrow

I had an opportunity to talk to Yuli from Reactify Music who are behind a great new iOS app called CTRL. The app is due out tomorrow and it is going to be great.

You can find out more at their twitter stream here.

Cassette Store Day: Interview with Chemical Tapes

It's no secret that I have a little bit of love for tapes so I thought it would be great to round off today with an interview of one of my favourite tape labels, Chemical Tapes. Here's what Rob from Chemical has to say about the revival of the cassette.

For years people have said that the cassette is dead, but it seems to be making a resurgence. What factors do you think are driving the popularity of tape?

Certainly cost, I know in my case I wasn't very interested in releasing CDr's or being a netlabel and vinyl was too expensive to just jump straight into.

You have a fairly granular control over just how much you want to spend, personally from a design and aesthetic point of view we wanted pro-dubbed cassettes and pro-printed covers but you could choose to home dub and home print if you want so it becomes very feasible to have your own label or as an artist to self release a physical product and it not costing you a fortune.

There is also that nostalgic retro vibe that comes with cassettes for my generation, Much like vinyl it has that charm of analogue imperfection and the tangible listening experience that engages you, giving you time to properly connect and digest the music, perhaps the resurgence of the format is also a reaction to the insta-access of the digital age and the limited edition nature of cassette releases probably helps, small limited edition runs of artists that people are really into helps to generate that buzz.

Given that it is becoming more popular, why do you think more artists are looking to make their releases on cassette and what sort of artists do you think work best with the medium?

The sheer number of cassette labels out there gives lesser known or up-and-coming artists a chance to get a release out as opposed to a larger vinyl or pressed cd label. Due to the reduced costs tape labels can take more of a gamble. Ever since the cassette 'died' its still been a valid format in underground/experimental music scenes, it's generally these artists that embrace the format.

What makes a really good cassette release in terms of the content from the artist and the overall design of the package?

Well first and foremost its about the music, but many tape labels really push the boat out on the art and design front with super custom handmade packaging, when you only have for example 75 copies to worry about you can really go for it. Also these days you tend to see tapes released alongside the digital version, which is something I do and something I look for when buying from other labels myself. Its nice to have the limited edition physical object with the flexibility of the digital version.

What kind of artists are best suited to cassette releases and why?

As I mentioned before its generally the more experimental DIY music scenes who have enjoyed the format in recent years, it's these niche genres where artists, labels, and listeners are really open to ideas both old and new and are willing to try something different. But who am I to say, the beauty of the format is that anyone can do it, just know your listeners and make sure they're as into it as you are!

What's been your most successful release and why?

I think each release finds it's little corner of appreciation, obviously the more well known names tend to sell quicker and are more likely to get accepted by mail-order shops. I will only release music that I personally love, if it happens to sell well thats great, but it doesn't dictate what I put out.

What advice would you give to any artists looking to start releasing their material on cassette?

Don't expect to make a shedload of cash, oh and think about balancing your tracks between 2 sides of a tape, thats always helpful!

Do you think other more esoteric formats will start to re-emerge as cassette and vinyl become more popular?

I'd be surprised if any reach the level that those two have, it's cool to see the odd floppy disk or VHS release though. It's nice to know that people are still out there experimenting and doing their own thing with various formats from the past.

What's coming up next and what does the future hold for Chemical tapes?

We have two new releases that are almost ready, 'Sima Kim - Whatever' and 'Bastian Void - Phonics'. Two quite different tapes, Sima Kim's being lovely delicate post-classical ambience and includes two remixes from Wil Bolton and Hakobune. Bastian Void's is a serious retro dream-state synth album. We've also just had our first batch of t-shirts made up which I'm really happy with. We have more releases planned for the future and will continue to provide various doses for research purposes. We also hope to launch our 'sister' label Chemical Beats soon as well, this will be a vinyl based label for deep psychedelic techno experiments, both Andrew and myself have had a love of techno for 20 odd years so it will be nice to have a platform for that form of music too, we are currently in discussions with artists and are looking forward to seeing how it goes.

If you want to know more about Chemical tapes then you can find out all about their releases right here. It's well worth a look.

Launching Mira & Loving Patches: an Interview with Sam Tarakajian

I was really pleased when Derek contacted me about publishing an interview with Sam Tarakajian about the development of Mira and it's great to see the app arrive on the app store today. It's an exciting step forward in bringing not only the desktop and mobile closer together, but also in extending the creative reach of Max. I hope you enjoy the interview and enjoy Mira.

Ashley.

Derek Piotr: An Interview with Sam Tarakajian.

Sam and I have been conversing and collaborating a lot recently. In February he produced a music video for one of my tracks, and in March he made a visit. This was just days before he was to travel to Leicester to give his first presentation on "Mira"; the iPad app he's spent the past few years developing for Cycling74. During his visit with me he rehearsed the presentation, which led to a discussion about music in general, where it's headed, and what he anticipated being the biggest change for electronic music: tactile methods of working with otherwise abstract sounds. Sam’s main goal with Mira seems to be to introduce some “love” and excitement into the often-austere world of producing and programming, as well as implementing a more "hands-on" environment, the depths and features of which are nothing short of mind-blowing. He took time to answer questions via email while presenting Mira in Daejeon at NIME.

Derek: When did you begin work on Mira? Where did the impulse stem from and how has the project changed since you first started working on it? Was the idea always to have a Max app for touchscreens, or were your aims different at first?
Sam: So, I'm not sure that I should mention it, since it is sort of the most embarrassing video of me on the internet, but if you trace Mira all the way back to its roots, you'll find this project called Gelie. The aforementioned video can be watched here. Gelie was the codename for my undergraduate thesis project (never completed), which was trying to use an iPhone to make a gestural musical controller. I've always been really interested in gesture (probably because I'm such a lousy dancer), whether musical or intentional but especially physical. Gelie was my attempt to create an interface for defining instruments that you would play with gesture. At the time I was getting really inspired by the Reactable, so I thought, "What if you used a Reactable-like language to define gestural instruments?" The result was Gelie, where you drag effects, gestural modalities and sound generators together to build instruments. The interface was all on the iPhone but the backend was a PureData patch that would receive updates from the iPhone and use those to dynamically build a separate Pd patch. So, I had an iPhone frontend and a protocol for synchronising with a desktop backend. Obviously, when I made my pitch to Cycling '74, there was a lot of previous work to build on.

D: What does 'Mira' mean, stand for?
S: Mira is how my aunt, who was born and raised in Rhode Island, would have said the word "mirror". You make a patch, Mira "mirrors" that patch, lots of people in Providence use Max–I guess it's a bit of a stretch but there it is.

D: What haven't you been able to do with Mira that you hope to be able to add in the future, or develop within a different context?
S: Loads of stuff. As you can well imagine, one of the biggest problems we have working on Max is too many ideas, not enough time. Mira is no different. The two main things I'd like to add to Mira would be dynamic visuals and haptic feedback. Both are forms of primary feedback, a concept from musical interface design which refers to anything the interface does other than make sound. If you've got a virtual slider, then your primary feedback would be visual, and if you were playing a guitar the feeling of strings vibrating under your fingers would be tactile primary feedback. Anyway, both of these are extremely important for designing good interfaces. So I want to bring dynamic OpenGL to Mira, followed by some way of adding vibrotactile feedback. Obviously that second one's going to be pretty tricky, though.

D: How important is it for you to let elements of chance or "subconscious" processes kick in while developing? Was the development of Mira driven mainly by linear, logical development or sudden swoops?
S: Oh, equal parts both, I'd say. If you look at any long term project as a kind of exploration, then inspiration might be like climbing to the top of the mountain, surveying the landscape and developing broad insight, and then the dedicated, focused work you have to do later involves hiking down into the valley and wading through the undergrowth. Developing a strong understanding of the territory requires both. I guess what's special about Mira, as a software project, is that some of the coolest moments of inspiration come from building and deploying internal builds. It's not something you can really do with a piece of music or a painting–release a demo version, get feedback, and then go back and make changes. With Mira for example, one of the big questions we had early on was whether the iPad should mirror patching mode or presentation mode. So we made a test build that let you jump back and forth between the two options. Well, it turns out that being able to go back and forth was itself a cool feature, so we left it in.

D: What was the biggest challenge in developing Mira? What was easiest? Of those two, which is more important?
S: The biggest challenge was and continues to be networking. Turns out automatically setting up a connection between two computers is hard. There's a lot of moving parts and a whole lot of abstraction between you and what's actually going on at the socket level. It definitely makes me much more forgiving when it comes to streaming movies on the subway. That's some hard as old toenails stuff–next time you have to wait a few minutes for Netflix to buffer try to have some sympathy for the engineering genius who got that junk working.

Easiest? Maybe working with the Max API. At a deep level Max is powered by a very solid, cross platform core that the other geniuses at C74 were nice enough to write for me. Having that available made programming Mira on the Max end much, much easier. But as for which one is more important, I'd say that robust and zero configuration networking is about 60% of what makes Mira cool. It's the most important part of the app by far.

D: What do you hope the dialogue will be once Mira is released? Do you anticipate it being a frontrunner of some musician's processes in 5 years' time, or simply an alternative way to interact with max?

S: When I first met with Joshua to talk about working at Cycling '74, he told me that the best thing about Max was that it didn't make any assumptions about what you, the artist, wanted to make with it (in the interest of full disclosure, he also said that this was the worst thing about Max). On the other hand, you have software like Live or Traktor, software that makes it very easy to do certain things by restricting what the user can do. Mira is the first software, as far as I know, that makes it easy to experiment with interface design in the same way that Max makes it easy to experiment with sound. Whether or not Mira sells a million billion copies, I am hoping that Mira will challenge the expectation that interface is something that a developer sells to you, rather than something you build yourself. If more developers start feeling the pressure to provide configurable interfaces, then I will be a happy man.

Mira is on the app store now.

An interview with Doug Wright, Sonoma's CEO on their Android solution

Sonoma have been a big part of the mobile music world for some time now in terms of software and hardware, so it was interesting to see their latest development into the Android world. I was able to put some questions about this to Doug Wright, Sonoma's CEO. Here's what he said ...

What was it that helped you decide to target the Android music market with your new Android solution?

Users have been asking us for Android versions of our products since 2008. We didn't move in that direction due to Android latency issues, and stuck with iOS as exclusively. When GarageBand was released on iOS in 2011, we saw a marked reduction in our recording app sales. Android is a market that doesn't have a recording app competitor with prime time TV ad money. We realized we had the right team of engineers to solve the latency problem and musicians were contacting us with more requests for Android solutions, so we got to work.

What is your view on Android as an OS in comparison to iOS?

Development is harder on Android. The platform is more fragmented. The audio APIs are not usable for our purposes, but we see that as an opportunity to make improvements.

Do you think that the market for music applications on iOS has become saturated, and where do you think it will go next?

GarageBand provides most of features that the majority of users are looking for, and sets users' expectations very high for a low price of $5. That said, even when FourTrack was a top 50 music app at $10, those sales alone could not fund a dedicated development team.

Why did you decide to bring a solution that would underpin other applications for Android rather than bring your own music applications to Android?

See the next question...

Do you plan to bring any music apps to Android using your own solution?

Yep.

Who is your Android solution targeted at? Is it for large scale developers / manufacturers or is it aimed at the mass market including small dev teams?

Sonoma's LLA solution needs to be loaded with the OS. In order to achieve the lowest latency, we need to work with each manufacturer to tune it for optimum performance on each device.

How do you see your Android solution benefiting the music community?

Once Sonoma's LLA is delivered on devices, Sonoma's SDK will make it possible for real-time processing audio apps to run on Android.

What are your views on Android fragmentation?

Since we will know which devices have the LLA, the burden of trying to release an app for every device will be reduced. Trying to view Android as a single platform is unreasonable. It is a collection of platforms that have a common API, but radically different hardware. If 5-10 new devices are equipped with Sonoma's LLA, then the audio industry will have a good development and sales platform.

Do you plan to continue to support and develop your AudioCopy/Paste solution in the iOS world?

Yes.

Will your solution bring something like AudioCopy/Paste to Android?

Probably.

What are your views on Audiobus and do you think it could have a place in Android?

We are investigating adding Audiobus to our iOS apps. Audiobus may have features that make it useful on Android too, but Sonoma's LLA enables multiple simultaneous audio applications to process and share audio.

Are there any other mobile operating systems that you think could challenge the iOS / Android hold on the market, especially for music?

No comment.

So it'll be interesting to see how Sonoma's Android solution gains traction in the Android world. Time will tell and I'll be keeping a close eye on how this develops.

In case you missed it, here's my interview with Jordan Rudess