Tag Archives: Speculations

The MicroBrute from Arturia

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So Arturia is about to announce ‘something BIg‘ on October 25. The internet is full of speculations but the most likely contestant is a mini version of their wildly successful MiniBrute synthesizer, dubbed the MicroBrute. The picture below has been floating around for the past 24h or so. No one knows if it’s real or not…

microbrute-image

I’m just speculating here but one detail that seems to give cred to this story is that already today the following link

http://www.arturia.com/evolution/en/products/microbrute/intro.html

appears to be a valid URL. It wont give you anything but a blank page, but any other ‘invalid’ URL on the Arturia domain actually produces an error message. The above one, which mimics the format of other Arturia product pages, actually looks like it exists.

If the new product is indeed a mini MiniBrute (MicroBrute) my guess is it will probably have the same fat and interesting sonic character, but with less variation due to fewer hands on controls and mod possibilities.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see…

Ableton Live and Bitwig (follow up)

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(See the first post on Live and Bitwig that introduces the topic!)

So while discussing the whole Ableton Live and Bitwig situation with my good friend Adam, an interesting thought emerged that I thought I’d share.

(Keep in mind that the below is pure speculation.)

Perhaps the real story on the relationship between the two companies / applications, and why Ableton has basically stayed silent since Bitwig was announced back in 2009, is that Live 9 is being built as an extendable, modular type of application (a platform?), which developers can extend with their own UI and workflow components. Bitwig Studio could be the first, ‘semi-internal’, example of this used by Ableton to showcase Live 9’s abilities.

This kind of architecture, which already exists to some extent with the Max4Live announcement, would allow 3rd party developers to provide customized or original Live scripts and user interface extensions, or just straight up new ‘versions’ tailored for a specific workflow or ‘application’. Kind of like a ‘Live for Live performers’, ‘Live for Mastering and Mixing’, ‘Live for Beat and Loop Making’ and so on.

If Live 9 contains an internal scripting engine it would also enable stuff like batch scripts to remove repetitive tasks or chained operations (additional automatic processing on a clip as soon as it’s recorded into?) that could be triggered by events in the DAW or via MIDI.

The Bitwig site talks about a ‘Native Modular System’:

Native modular system

Create your own instruments and effects or modify existing ones. Design their appearance and share them with the world.

(http://bitwig.com/bitwig_studio.php)

This would certainly be possible if Live 9 allows for modular extensions and new UI to be plugged in, and Bitwig is built on Live 9 as a platform…

Well, one can always speculate…

UPDATE: After this post I received a direct message from the Bitwig team dismissing this scenario. You can read more about that here:

No, Bitwig Studio is not Live 9 afterall