MOTU DP keyboard by Logickeyboard (no less) - Logickeyboard’s custom keyboard for Motu Digital Performer is available though only using the Ultra Thin Aluminum Apple Pro keyboard at the moment. It features all the regular letter, number, and symbol labelling found on a conventional keyboard, so it can be used as your regular keyboard. It’s a bit pricey, but Logickeyboard tells me that they are also developing a set of replacement keycaps for older style Apple keyboards. (This will be much less expensive obviously.)

Bandcamp – I’m probably a little late to announcing this party, but Bandcamp is another free music distribution/viral marketing/sell-your-music-directly-to-the-public site that looks the business. It provides “drop-dead easy tools to share your music with their friends, and most importantly we do it in a way that drives traffic back to you. We also give you complete transparency into how your music is spreading…” The last point refers to their extensive online stats which are pretty impressive. Check out the screencast.   

SoundCloud goes live – I know for sure that I’m late announcing this party, but SoundCloud officially opened to the public recently. SoundCloud is a music distribution/viral marketing/’net 2.0 kind of application with a focus a bit different from Bandcamp. SoundCloud is not really set-up for the general public to find music for downloading.

Just a quick update…and an experiment in “mobile posting”. (I’m on a break during jury duty.)

I posted 30 seconds of this track to SoundCloud almost a month ago. (Check out the “Current Music Projects” page link in the first column on the right near the top of the page.)  At the time I thought I would have it finished in another week or two. Ha! Hardly. It’s taken me longer for a couple of reasons:

• Life happens. This being a new dad thing requires a lot of time!
• I’ve been pushing myself to use more of my tools. This means I’ve been burning some time making things a bit more complicated than they need to be so that I can try using these tools. For example, I lost a solid week trying to use an instance of Battery3 in a multi-output configuration with KORE2 inside Digital Performer 6. Not really necessary as you can accomplish much of the same thing without KORE. And in the end I just set up Battery with multiple outs not using KORE at all.* Now I knew how to do that from the start, but I don’t consider it a waste of time as I learned quite a bit (though it was a tad frustrating).

• As I work on this piece, my conception of it evolves.