Now, this is how it’s done: Create Digital Music » On Demand: CDM Winter 2008, with Gift Guide, Bending and Slicing Tutorials, More.

Rather than just assembling a collection of gear porn, deals and curiosities for his year-end/seasonal/holiday post, the estimable Peter Kirn over at CreateDigitalMusic.com has put together a full-on publication that covers some of his favorite topics.

This is the real deal. Fonts and design and print resolution and real articles. Free pdf and $19.99 for a print-on-demand publication.

So, thanks, Peter. This looks really wonderful. Thanks for another year of a great site.

The always reliable Create Digital Music got the jump a product coming down the pike that is sure to spark lots of pixel inches of debate among the usual suspects and sites. So, I guess I’ll get in my off-the-cuff reaction now and get it out of the way.

So, yeah, the V-Machine Standalone VST Player. In a nutshell, a little stand-alone computer that hosts VST effects and instruments. Or, more specifically, a curiously-spec’d, some might say under-spec’d, little stand-alone computer that hosts VST effects and instruments.

My first instinct was, neat? Then, no MIDI out? Curious. Then, 512 MB RAM? Really? And, come on, those are the in/out connections?

I don’t know, I don’t want to judge something I haven’t seen but it doesn’t look like it would suit me much. Sure, who wouldn’t love to have some extra DSP power to tap? But other than that, there are so many ways to stack and layer synths/effects natively this seems unnecessary. Perhaps if I was playing out, you could use it to compensate for an under-powered laptop in conjunction with a proper audio device with some decent electronics. So, I suppose there is that market.

$600 while significantly cheaper than any other products that have tried to pull this off is still not chump change. Studio nerds such as myself are way more interested in either in analog or software – it’s not hard to kit out a computer that can pump through 128 tracks with softsynths and effects at like 12ms latency. Live? I don’t know. I guess if someone were to buy it for me I might use it to come up with some sort of laptop integration. Or if I was a DJ. I guess it would work for a DJ.

Somebody help me out here.

The high-end DSP plugin company Waves have been, yes, making waves (groan… I know, it’s too easy) with their newest efforts to crack down on those using cracks (someone stop me!), banpiracy.com. I won’t rehash it all when Peter Kirn over at createdigitalmusic.com has been doing a far better job than I could. But a couple of things to note: a.) as far as anyone can tell banpiracy.com is simply a front for Waves and no other developer/company is copping to being part of this “initiative” – i.e. visiting pro studios under one pretense and checking to see if they’re licenses are up-to-date, then suing them if they’re not. 2.) Waves have a long history of actively and aggressively protecting their wares (…I’ll stop, really, I will…) with OS-hooks, dongles, on-line licenses – the works, all at once. Thirdly, even in the high-end audio software market Waves charge a lot of money. And finally, piracy is a problem, even among pro and semi-pro studios. Don’t even argue otherwise. Anecdotal stories demoing cracks and/or later buying cracked software do not a solid case make. I personally had a very busy, albeit ghetto, urban studio brag to me about how much/many stolen software and sample libraries they had, and if I ever wanted they could hook me up.¹

My views on the quality of Waves actual software are as immaterial as they are uninformed. I’m sure they do what they promise and indeed sprinkle Magic Pixie Dust^TM all over your tracks. I’m sure they make tracks warm, and fat, and, erm, whatever other audio buzz-word you want to use here. They sure do make them louder. I, however, would not know. Well, other than what I’ve read from others who know a lot more about this than I, and it’s hard to argue with a list of users that reads like a (very geeky) who’s who of audio production. As much as it’s a money thing, it’s the whole copy protection issue. Additionally, as pretty and impressive as the Waves plugs may seem, if I was going to drop that kind of coin, there are a lot of other options.

So, let’s look at that proposition.
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via createdigitalmusic.com: A project that has been in the works for some time is now beginning to surface, Jack for the Windows Platform. If you’re not familiar with Jack – not making music on Linus, or you don’t need it on Mac – it’s a low-latency audio server for your music software: i.e. – a way to route the audio from one software program to another. If you use different software for different tasks, have stand-alone applications that you’d like to play in real-time rather than rendering/importing, you know how useful something like this could be.

Since this is a more or less open source matter, a lot of the technical information may take me a while to absorb. But from what I can tell, it is working, though still in early (?) development. There are graphical controllers for the Jack server: here & here. And if you have a multi-processor setup you’re golden. So if you’re at all inclined to hack your OS and really loosen the tyranny of closed systems, get in on this. And since I’m still playing catch up with the technical end of all this (I’m a little thick sometimes if you haven’t noticed), I’m not entirely clear whether it is able transmit MIDI as well. But on the CreateDigitalMusic thread the developer of the Jack API joined the comments to give some good insights into the workings of this project. Good stuff.

Also,

Another commenter pointed to LoopBe1 a virtual MIDI-driver that I wasn’t aware of. It appears to be a good alternative to MIDI-Ox/MIDI Yoke which, frankly, is looking a little long in the tooth. If I could just find a decent system MIDI monitor than I would be set.