Virtual Analogy

Did you know that Hamburg (GER) is Silicon Valley for music software? Besides PreSenus eg. Steinberg is located there. Well, Germany has many music software companies – we can mention Ableton, Native Instrument, Melodyne. Matthias Juwan, current PreSonus Software CTO, is known for simple freeware DAW Kristal Audio Engine (actually one of very few freeware DAW at that time). And because PreSonus is releasing version 3 of their flagship StudioOne they are kind enough to show us some backstage shots from their development team.

Tomorrow in Brno (Czech Republic) starts SynthFest as a part of synth boutique opening. Part of the event are workshops where you can build your own hardware synths!

GPL is a well know software license which stays behind success of Linux and GNU tools. Many well know software applications use this license: the Linux Kernel, GNU Compiler Collection and JUCE – C++ framework useful for multimedia application and especially audio plugins programming. JUCE is provided under GNU GPL as well as commercial license. Many companies use JUCE for their commercial plugins. Such as Arturia, Korg etc. Let’s have a look what is GPL, In this article I am referring to GPL v2. And IANAL! (more…)

This week I came across an interesting article about using super-sonic sample rates. The article is rather long, so for myself and anyone who is interested I made a question-answer style sum up. The original author is Justin Colletti.  (more…)

In last post there was a video about Ableton Live development. Here is another video of icon of music software and people behind it – Native instruments. It is not so development focused as the Ableton’s but it is still interesting to see people behind great products.

How does the development of Live happens at Ableton? How do they handle problems, bug fixing, how they do Scrum? Lately they release a video at their blog:

As part of a campaign to recruit new members to our team, we made a short film to show – instead of just describe – what it’s like to work as a developer at Ableton. Here’s your chance to meet the people who make the tools you use, see how their work is evolving, and find out what inspires them.

Some points that I found interesting:

• They have small self-organized teams of 2-3 people
• Time is organised into milestone (a feature) which is 4 sprints and one hacking and planning sprint. One sprint is 2 week long.
• They have Dev and Music salons where they share knowledge.

Lately I came across this video which is kind of funny. But audio-programmers should find it at least inspiring 🙂 MIDI notes are mapped as keyboard events so player can program a software.