I spent 4 days in Pittsburgh in early June attending the 2009 NIME conference at Carnegie Mellon University. NIME is a conference devoted entirely to new interfaces and devices for the performance of musical ideas. The conference consisted of three days of paper talks, poster sessions, demos, and performances. There was also a well-curated gallery show with a number of impressive interactive sound installations. In addition to all the talks and posters happening on campus, a number of us gathered for nightly pitchers of Yuengling and pizza at the local watering hole, the Panther Hollow Inn. I will try to summarize here what I thought were some of the highlights of NIME 2009.

Many of us are invited to perform in unique circumstances – it’s a part of the Digital Media life. Recently, we’ve been featuring some interesting examples of Max-based work, including Andrew Benson’s work with M.I.A. and Dana Karwas’ installations. So when I was asked to play with an electronic music All-Star Band, I couldn’t help but document the experience.

Effective immediately, Cycling ’74 will discontinue sales of prebuilt Max-based audio plug-in packages. This includes Pluggo, Mode, Hipno, and UpMix. We will still continue to support current users as best we can, but there will be no further development on either the plug-in packages or their supporting technology.

On the afternoon of April 3rd, I received an email from M.I.A.'s manager asking if I'd be interested in working with them on a one-off show on the mainstage at Coachella that would feature live video processing, 2 DJs, a real Lighting Director, and glowing EL-wire wardrobe by Janet Cooke Hansen (www.enlighted.com, Daft Punk, etc.) for Maya and the dancers. It was a crazy proposition - I drop everything, cancel classes, take vacation time from work right before Expo '74, and put together a full performance system in like 10 days based on a proof-of-concept patch I had only recently posted on the Jitter forum. So I said yes, of course!

Here is the way I think about it. Cycling '74 is a software company. Developing software is our substantive contribution to mankind. We are not professional conference-givers. We are not O'Reilly. I was not born to give a smashing keynote address.

I recently attended Winter NAMM 2009 in Anaheim,CA, where Cycling '74 was sharing booth space with our friends at Ableton. I arrived on Friday afternoon, well after we had released our product announcement for Max for Live, and was impressed by the volume of booth traffic we were getting. Ableton had, of course, also announced their new Akai controller and Live 8 in addition to Max for Live, so there was a great deal of buzz surrounding our area of the show.

Nine years ago, Robert Henke told me about the edit button.

Robert was in Anaheim, giving amazing Live 1.0 demos non-stop at Ableton's first NAMM booth, and before the last day of the show, we were chatting in the topiary-enhanced parking lot of Stovall's Inn. Having used Max to prototype some of the first effects included with Live, Robert told me he wanted to be able to reprogram his effects on the fly, without stopping the music, just the way everything else worked in Live. At that time, the reality for Robert would have involved translating his revised patch into a C program and rebuilding a new version of Live. This was not exactly the real-time development cycle he was used to as a Max user.

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.