Dr. Dre Finally Ready To Release 'Detox'

Legendary hip-hop icon Dr. Dre is finally satisfied with the quality of his long-awaited Detox album - and is aiming to release it by the end of the year.[...] Read more!

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http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2008/07/23/dr_dre_finally_ready_to_releas
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New Breeders Video - "Walk It Off"

We last saw Kim and Kelley last splashing around at McCarren Pool, which is great because they hardly turn up at all in the split-screened clip for Mountain Battles' "Walk It Off." Instead it's the year's second vid focusing on a day in the life of a bike messenger. Unlike Nada Surf's "Whose Authority" it features no old Nickelodeon stars, but it too stars a determined package deliverer, staying with his addressee even when he turns out to be totally parcelphobic. So much for waiting for the message all night.

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Brian Wilson Offers Concert Refund After Online
Complaints

Former Beach Boy Brian Wilson is offering a refund to fans who paid to watch him perform in New York this month, after a flood of complaints about the concert.[...] Read more!

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http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2008/07/23/brian_wilson_offers_concert_re
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Life After Giga: A Call for Open Source Sampling
Development

In case you missed it in comments, amidst the news of a major pro sampling product being discontinued, reader Darren Landrum is interested in offering a free/GPL open source framework for samplers:

The LinuxSampler project offers GigaSampler 3 compatibility for Linux and Windows, so it’s already an open alternative for dealing with your orphaned Giga sampler files. (Naturally, you could also look to a number of Giga-compatibility samplers on the market.)

But the open source community has long been under fire — often rightly so — for simply copying proprietary software rather than doing something new and innovative. I enjoy "new and powerful," so that sounds like a great idea, and that’s what Darren is proposing. He writes:

What I want to do is build a code framework (not to be confused with a library) that will contain classes for handling streaming sample playback, resampling, and all that fun stuff, as well as directed graph building for DSP. From here, the framework can be used to build monolithic applications for sampling and synthesis, as well as a Reaktor-like application, if we do it right.

Yes, it would be better to split things out into libraries, but that takes a lot more work, and I?m tired of things not happening. The sooner we can get some code working, the better.

I should also mention that there are existing open source libraries we can and will leverage, like libsndfile, libsamplerate, libfftw3, and the Rubber Band library, so we won?t be starting completely from scratch.

This sounds terrific to me — not necessarily as a replacement for existing, proprietary tools, but as a framework on which new tools could be built. There are research and compositional projects that could absolutely benefit from the existence of such a library. And having this tool as an option could strengthen computer music platforms in general. (In other words, wherever you stand in terms of open source and philosophy, it could be a good thing. Hey, I’m happy all around — I couldn’t live, basically, without both systems.)

But enough theory — the idea needs developers and real code, so it’s not just an idea.

If you’re a developer, do get in touch. I’m happy to help host and support any such work in any way we can via CDM. Darren is on gmail as dmlandrum, or leave a comment here.

By the way, happy OSCON day.

Image: jagelado. (Interestingly, since the creation of that image, Microsoft has come to make more use of open source — you can argue about the reasons, but not the effect.)

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Don Omar Cleared Of Drug And Gun Charges

Reggaeton star Don Omar has been cleared of all drug and weapons charges in relation to an incident dating back to 2004. [...] Read more!

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Life After Giga: SONiVOX Now Doing Their Own
Development, Among Others

What do you do if Tascam lets you down, and you?re a sound house dependent on their GigaStudio/GigSampler player? For major soundware development house SONiVOX, the answer was: make your own software.

Somerville, Mass-based SONiVOX has announced ?announced the existence? of an in-house software development team. Read: the team has been there already, but they haven?t wanted to talk about it until news broke that Tascam?s GigaStudio was going away.

SONiVOX says they have developed ?a universally compatible player technology that focus on intelligent MIDI performance, intuitive interfaces, and the highest sonic fidelity.? It will support not only SONiVOX?s own products, but third party-products, as well. SONiVOX points out their experience working with clients like Motorola, Analog Devices, and Google, on sound software.

The press release apparently went out on Friday, but I missed it. Now, with it clear that Giga is dead, the news makes more sense. Peter Alexander at Film Music Magazine, who also broke the GigaStudio discontinuation story, correctly read the signs as early as Monday. He has a long, excellent opinion piece on that site that laments Tascam?s failure to develop their own, long-promised player. He wrote then:

?SONiVOX, an American company substantively smaller than either Tascam or their publicly traded parent, TEAC, has beaten the Giant to market by creating their own dual platform player for both PC and Mac with product ready for shipping by late July early August.?

Memo: To Sample and Software Developers [Film Music Magazine]

Nor is SONiVOX alone. They join EastWest and Spectrasonics, as Peter observes, along with Garritan, whose Steinway-authorized piano instrument runs on the in-house ARIA Player. And that’s to say nothing of developers like Native Instruments, Cakewalk, Steinberg, MOTU, and Apple, all of whom might be considered soundware developers themselves, running on their own virtual instrument products.

Of course, this also illustrates just how tough the market is for any sampler, even one from a company the size of TEAC. In fact, it seems to be the independent companies who are most willing to keep fighting in that climate.

What remains to be seen is how well SONiVOX can support third parties. If they can do so affordably and effectively, you could see serious migration to their sound platform.

SONiVOX’s own virtual instruments, the first for the platform, are scheduled for release at the end of the month:

http://www.sonivoxmi.com/

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Abbey Road Bosses Overturn Oasis 'Ban'

A bag of cash helped Oasis overturn a ban from bosses of fabled London studios Abbey Road - and steal recording space from U2. Rocker Noel Gallagher has revealed [...] Read more!

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Madame Tussauds Unveils Waxwork Of Troubled
Singer Amy Winehouse

LONDON (AP) - Madame Tussauds unveiled a waxwork of Amy Winehouse on Wednesday complete with her signature beehive, black eyeliner and a bright yellow minidress.[...] Read more!

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Life After Giga: Kontakt 3 Free 64-bit Upgrade
Soon on Mac, Windows

The current holy grail of sampling seems to be getting at more memory by providing 64-bit memory addressing, as I said this morning. With Tascam?s Giga out of the picture, it’s up to competing sampler products to deliver. Cakewalk’s Dimension Pro is already 64-bit support, as is their host, SONAR. Native Instruments points out that their flagship sampler Kontakt is on track to be 64-bit soon.

Kontakt 3 does support disk streaming now, but it can’t yet do 64-bit memory addressing. With 32-bit memory addressing, you’re limited to around a couple of gigs of available RAM. That should change soon for Kontakt, with a cross-platform release supporting as much RAM as your machine and OS can handle in the works.

The official announcement was made back in January; I think I missed it amidst the NAMM hoopla. It’ll be a free update for existing Kontakt 3 users. NI’s forum admin Thomas wrote then:

I want to bring you the good news that NI has started development on a Kontakt version that supports 64-bit memory addressing for Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista 64.
This will be a free update for Kontakt 3, and will allow to go beyond the 32-bit memory addressing limit and utilize as much RAM as your operating system or host makes available.
This version of Kontakt 3 will also run as a VST plugin under 64-bit hosts in Windows Vista 64 (Windows XP 64 will likely not be supported; standalone and 32-bit plugin operation under Vista 64bit are already possible with Kontakt 3.0.1).
No specific info on the release date yet, but you can expect it sometime in the second half of 2008. It is a substantial development effort and requires a lot of testing and optimization.

Details of the update and a thread you can follow for further news is available on the NI forum:

Official update status - Kontakt 3

I expect, with the release of greater 64-bit support in Mac OS X Leopard, other cross-platform sampling solutions are likely to go 64-bit, too; any vendors with news, we’re happy to run it.

See also:

Cakewalk has a 64-bit Computing for Musicians site that talks more about what 64-bit means; their SONAR host would also provide access to 128GB of RAM for Kontakt 3.1 for 64-bit Windows, when it becomes available, so this is information that’s important across vendors.

Disclosure: CDM writes about Kontakt on our Kore minisite, which is sponsored by Native Instruments.

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A Day In The Life Of Man Man In Paris

Man Man recently did a five-song "Take Away Show" for La Blogothèque. A few are labeled as "warm-ups" -- the fragments should be recognizable to fans of the band ("Warmup 2 - The Deal" = "Doo Right," etc.). Each of these bits is enjoyable in its own way (there's a Metallica cover in Warmup 3), but the most sustained clip is the epic epilogue, "A Day at the Races and a Night at the Opera," where Honus talks about a broken heart (the dude she married has a mustache) and that the show must go on. And it does: They turn the city into their drum set. As far as the explanation for all of this Parisian vagabond rock, I can't make out all the French, but the words "Tom Waits" are in there somewhere. Whatever the case, it's definitely more spacious than when they recently crammed into the Black Cab.

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