Cycling '74 began developing and selling software officially in late 1997, and it was in 1998 that the company incorporated and hired its first few employees. To celebrate ten years of our continued existence, we decided to have an anniversary party. Since the employees and consultants are spread over a few continents, the timing had to be just right to include the most people possible. After AES in San Francisco this year seemed to be an opportune time, and following are a handful of photos and details from the event that you will hopefully find amusing. Other details will be kept to ourselves as a basic self-preservation effort.

We rolled out of bed and into our suits this weekend to attend the annual Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, a mere 5 blocks from our SOMA office. We occupied a small piece of real estate in the shadow of the big Mackie booth, and directly across from a booth featuring big reels of magnetic tape.

I'm pleased to announce that Cycling '74 will be hosting its first user conference next year, Expo '74. The conference will run three days from April 22-24, 2009 and will be held at the new (and intensely colored) Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. I'd like to tell you why we decided to put on this event and what you can expect to happen if you attend.

Last week, Siggraph 2008 took over the Los Angeles Convention Center, and Cycling '74 was there to bravely represent Jitter to a huge crowd of CG enthusiasts, production professionals, and academics. For anyone who hasn't been to a Siggraph show, it is a huge, over-stimulating event for the computer graphics community, complete with academic talks, screenings, an exhibition hall, an art show, competitions, and a job fair.

Recently, CNMAT at UC Berkeley held their annual MaxMSP/Jitter summer school classes at their beautiful Arch St. facility just off the UC campus. This year, for the second year in a row, I had the pleasure of teaching the Jitter Night School - a 3-night intensive of focussed tutorials covering a variety of Jitter topics.

This year, we decided to set up shop at the 3rd annual Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA. Last year, Cycling '74 shared a little corner of a booth with the nice people at MakingThings, and that was enough to get us hooked on this crazy annual celebration of all things DIY and electrified.

Some of you may have heard that major changes are imminent in the Max world, and there is a lot of speculation about what those changes might be. On the eve of our first public exposition of the new version of Max at the AES convention in New York, I thought it would be appropriate to offer some details on the product.

Painting Day

For those of you who know San Francisco, there are two things you are well aware of. One, if you ask a pair of friends walking down the street where to get the best burrito, it could result in a fistfight. Two, it rarely gets hot here. Warm, yes. Hot, about 1 week each year. Monday, May 7th was hot and it was painting day.

Growing out of and growing tired of our 379A Clementina Street location, Cycling '74 is moving its headquarters into a great new space a few blocks away at 730 Clementina Street. Apparently, we have an affinity for aromatic alleys south of Market.

We held another Max/MSP/Jitter workshop from the 27th to the 30th of March in the Dutch city of Delft (yes, as in "that color blue associated with porcelain"). Our hosts were in the Industrial Design faculty at the Technical University. In fact you could take a nice "back way" walk back to the center of town and pass by the porcelain factory at the end of the day. It was a week of largely good Dutch weather, too, meaning that the sun was out pretty much all week. Since we went on Daylight Savings Time while I was there, our dinners were in sunlight.

Last week I arrived home from a 'vacation' in France. In my case though, the term 'vacation' means that I was programming and debugging objects for Max/MSP/Jitter. The occasion for this trip to France were two workshops focusing on Jamoma that were organized by Pascal Baltazar, GMEA, and Incidents Mémorables. The workshops were held in Albi and Paris, respectively.

At this year's Musikmesse, Ableton announced it has entered into a strategic partnership with Cycling '74 to develop new products. You can read Ableton's story about this partnership here.

I wanted to share my perspective on what this partnership will mean (as well as what it will not mean) for Cycling '74 users.

The Seoul International Computer Music Festival (SICMF) is a yearly event sponsored by the Korean Electro-Acoustic Music Society (KEAMS). Having both concerts and a post-festival paper session, it is in some ways similar to the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), reviewed elsewhere on the Cycling '74 website. However, because it is a festival, not a conference, the main focus of the SICMF is the music - and to provide both the local Korean computer music community and the invited international guests with a fertile cross-cultural environment for sharing musical ideas.

With an enigmatic name that refers to a specific time and activity of questionable relationship to the organization's actual purpose, Cycling '74 has received its share of athletic sponsorship requests during its nine year history. Typically these have been bicycle tours or related events, and after careful consideration, we have rejected all of them. However, when I received an urgent call from the coach of my son Bruno's soccer team saying that they were flirting with disqualification for lack of a sponsor, our corporate policy of exhaustive review (involving multiple levels of committee meetings) was carelessly discarded in order to seize the opportunity to market advanced audio and video software products to sports-minded 11-year-old boys and what we hoped would be their easily influenced parents.

This last week saw several Cycling '74 folks leaving behind their solitary monastic cells and journeying to the great city of N'awlins [New Orleans, to the rest of you] for the 2006 ICMC computer music conference and festival. Although no words will suffice to describe what remains after Katrina's passing, the dignity and pride of the inhabitants or the Big Easy, or the warm welcome from Tae Hong Park and the fine folks at Tulane, here's a modest report on what we saw and heard (and ate).