Archive for September, 2009

Noone feat. Nekochan- Just because of a little water (Live @ Ninkasi, Lyon). Noone is one of the hot live performers in France who has been spotted with AudioCubes lately. Check it out.

Remember Julien (jul on Vimeo) who has been working on Drumbox, an application for AudioCubes? We talked about his work a while ago, see the original post here.

Julien has been very busy lately, and we’re grateful he had a chance to stop by for an interview about his interests in technology and music. Read the full story here.

A while ago we showed Deckabridge, first as a Max/MSP patch at the NAMM show in LA back in January, and then as a standalone and finished application at the Messe in Frankfurt.

The software lets you use your AudioCubes with Deckadance, great DJ software from Image-Line, the people who made FL Studio.

Among other things you can:

• Control the transport (CUE, seek fwd / backw)
• Control EQ and effect sections (bit crusher, lowpass filter, …)
• Control loop length and enable/disable
• Control various parts of the relooper beat slicer (a unique feature in DJ software!)

Deckabridge is a very simple application that lets you control Deckadance without any MIDI mapping. Both applications talk to each other using MIDI. You can use just 2 cubes for effects, or you can use cube pairs to control the reloopers.

There are simple buttons available in the software to choose the mode in which the cubes should work. There is also an easy to use control panel for setting the colour of AudioCubes and for sensor fine-tuning.

Of course Deckabridge is free software, just like the other apps for AudioCubes made by Percussa. You can read more here about the application, and you can also read more details on digital DJing with AudioCubes.

Do you know about PluginWrapper?

It’s a VST/AudioUnit plugin we released back at NAMM2009 in January. It is capable of hosting your favourite VST and AudioUnit effects and instruments, mapping AudioCubes sensors instantly to the parameters, without having to MIDI map anything.

You can also send MIDI controllers and notes to the plugin to control the AudioCubes colours.

We developed the plugin after getting numerous requests from people using AudioCubes.

MIDIBridge, the original application we developed for AudioCubes, is a very powerful piece of software that lets you do pretty much anything with the AudioCubes, and which is sort of the swiss arme knife for the AudioCubes user. You can use it with both software and hardware instruments.

However, with that power also comes some complexity. Some people don’t like to map anything and just want to get going with it. That’s why we made PluginWrapper.

It won’t do all the powerful stuff MIDIBridge does but it’s perfect for a lot of situations, like when you want to use just one AudioCube in the studio to control some audio effect parameters or design some loops or sounds using your favourite VST synths and DAW.

You can read more here about the application, and there is also an in depth page on using the wrapper in real life situations.

Have you heard about loopshaper yet? It’s an application we previewed at the last Musikmesse in Max/MSP, and which we rewrote using the fantastic JUCE toolkit lately.

The app is now completely standalone, and is the first app in a series of tools we are releasing to let you use AudioCubes without needing other software.

It’s a great little sound design tool and hosts your favourite VST plugins. If you don’t have any VST instruments we have some resources where you can download some for free.

Check it out here:

• LoopShaper application page
• Sound Design with LoopShaper

We recorded some video last night at the 999 concert at Logos Foundation (see http://www.percussa.com/2009/09/08/audiocubes-at-logos-foundation-999/). Enjoy!

We stopped by Logos Foundation today where Kristof is working on a PD (pure data) patch using the new topology firmware and external for AudioCubes (send us an email if you want to join the beta testing). Great to see how the topology is being used to control the MIDI patterns going to each of Logos’ musical robots. The concert is tomorrow, you can find more info here: http://users.telenet.be/stichtinglogos/lb/0909/lb0909kon.html#090909. Dancers will control various musical parameters of the performance, such as tempo and music dynamics.