MSA Remote + VDMX + Ableton Live from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Imagine what’s now possible with a mobile phone: anyone with a supported device can jam with other artists, walk up to an installation, connect to other creators and other software, all using supported protocols. Leaving behind the days of painstaking manual adjustment of MIDI commands and obscure drivers, and even the act of having to physically connect gear, software - and with it, digital art - can simply talk to each other in standard ways.

That’s why we’re excited about software like Memo Atken’s MSA Remote. It uses the standardization provided by the network-savvy, open protocol OSC, with additional plug-and-play (or, erm, don’t plug, do play) functionality from the TUIO protocol. OSC provides the communication; TUIO makes the messages standardized.

To avoid confusion: You do NOT need a Mac to use OSC. OSCulator is a cool app - and makes bridging to MIDI easier - but it’s just one tool among many. You can use this app with Windows and Linux, too, and visual apps like VDMX, Resolume Avenue, Pd/GEM, Processing… the list goes on. In fact, almost every visual app today worth using uses OSC, even as the music world is painfully slow to catch on.

When it comes to controlling software, let’s put it bluntly: OSC good, MIDI bad. With OSC, it’s possible to control the array of things software might do, with easy use of high-resolution data, descriptive names in plain English (or your language of choice), a path hierarchy that makes it easier to structure messages in modular software, and smart networking features that makes assignment and communication a breeze. With MIDI, um… well, prepare for lots of mucking around.

Happily, visual software developers proprietary and open source alike have done what music developers generally haven’t - embrace OSC. Thanks to the fact that this community is unburdened by tradition and commercial development tends to involve small, responsive teams, change hasn’t been so tough.

So, visualists, it’s time to reap the fruit of that development work, and make the live performance rig work the way you’ve always dreamt it should work. Our friend Gian Pablo (check out his fantastic blog) clues us in to some recent developments with Resolume 3 “Avenue.”

Ohm64 Backlight Control from Livid Instruments on Vimeo.

It’s been a long time since I touched Livid’s VJ software. But when it comes to hardware, they’ve been doing unbelievable work that could have Resolume and VDMX and Processing and vvvv and Max users turning their heads.

The Ohm64 looks simply fantastic. It’s got an ideal configuration for a lot of live visual applications, with 8×8 triggers and plenty of faders and knobs to go along with them. It’s also finally a controller that’s well-made but doesn’t cost a fortune – you get a well-crafted device made by the people who designed it in Texas, but at $599, it’s still affordable.

Visualists are doing all kinds of new things to expand their performance, so I believe having a truly open controller is essential. The Ohm64 delivers, with a chip and editor software that have extensive open support. That means that, as with the brilliant monome controller, you should see a community that experiments with creative ideas for how to use it. (Nor do I think this is necessarily monome competition – the monome is still beautiful for its minimalism, whereas this should appeal to people who ignored the monome because they needed knobs and faders for additional parameter control.)

For visual software increasingly using OSC, a future firmware update should provide native OSC support (and possibly even DMX in the near future). For everything else, there’s MIDI support now. And unlike the Akai APC40, that means real MIDI support, with actual MIDI in and out ports and endlessly customizable controller assignments and LED feedback, instead of the Akai’s single USB port and permanently-fixed layout. And this is fully bus-powered, so you’re not screwed if you forget your power brick.

I did a full preview for CDMusic. But next week I should get to try one in person, which is the real test.

Livid Ohm64

http://www.lividindustry.com/culture/ blog with more videos

videoprojectiontools, the powerful and intuitive Max/MSP/Jitter-developed Mac and Windows tools for projection mapping, just got a nice update. The new version has OpenSoundControl (OSC) support - and yes, despite the “Sound” in the acronym, it’s really more like Open … Control. Max is not required to use the patches; they’re standalone.

Yet again we see some advantages of using OSC:

The implementation so far for OSC includes preset and cuelist access, and layer fades,pos x and y, scale x and y, and videotracks selection from the individual sources.
With OSC you can now sync several computers and trigger presets from a OSC-able application (which can run as a background application).

Head to the site for downloads, tutorials, and documentation to get you started.

Video projection tools

I’ll give you a second to let that headline sink in.

Max for Live, announced at the NAMM music trade show, adds Max/MSP/Jitter to Ableton Live, including – in a move that really caught me by surprise – Jitter. In addition to the usual Max objects, Max for Live adds objects that allow Max to control and listen to Clips, Devices, tracks, and more, and that integrate it with the interface.

This means two really big things:

1. OpenSoundControl input and output will now be possible with Ableton. Still want to use vdmx or a separate machine running Processing or (whatever app you like) for visuals? Now you can build Max patches that transmit data to the visual app, either listening to the Live set or giving you new visual controls inside Live.

2. You’ll be able to create Jitter windows inside Ableton Live, so you can run video and live 3D inside Live.

This is really huge news, of course – but it’s also worth noting how huge the impact of better OSC implementation in other tools would be, as well. And if you don’t like doing your visuals in Jitter, you don’t have to. One of the things I always liked about Max was using it as “glue,” for doing smaller projects rather than expansive software.  What the Ableton announcement means is, basically, Max has become your glue and your API to Live. And that’s a wonderful thing.

A couple of people are also thinking about Processing integration. Processing in Max in Live – yum.

People have been asking for VJ-style features in Live. In a way, this is better: rather than some boring, prescribed way of doing visuals in Live, you can do whatever you want. Visualists could even write patches for their Max+Live-using friends that they can insert as Devices into their Live sets, with friendly Ableton-style knobs that they can use to adjust the data they’re sending to another machine doing visuals.

It’s going to be a long wait to later in this year when this all comes together.

Cycling ‘74 Reveals Max For Live: Make Max Patches that Integrate with Ableton

The Ableton integration is really the stuff we don’t know as much about – especially now with the revelation that the Max side is really the Max 5 and Jitter we know and love — so stay tuned to the CDMs for more on that.