Everyone knows that NI love Richie Hawtin and Richie Hawtin loves NI, but their strictly-professional relationship has reached new heights as Hawtin's label Minus has developed a new Twitter application that integrates directly with Traktor Pro.

The basic premise is that, every 30 seconds, the track you're playing in Traktor Pro is automatically 'tweeted' to your Twitter account with a 'Now playing:' prefix, through Traktor's Internet Broadcasting function. Check out Hawtin's Twitter page to get a glimpse of the future.

Pretty clever stuff, and it will available to everyone outside The Cube in Traktor's next update (available in June).

Djing with Ableton Live (Tom Cosm DJ Megaset 1.0) from Tom Lewis on Vimeo .

It wasn't so many years ago when noise floor was our enemy, hiding at the moody bottom of well-produced tracks and hissing like an evil snake on the badly produced ones. But now it seems, just like Batman needs The Joker, we need our buzzing nemisis of the studio to inject life in these clincal digital days. In fact, you may recall from last months Deadmu5 interview, his recomendation for injecting a touch of noise between single drum-hits so on compression the noise is pushed and pulled to help glue parts together.

So, here's a brand new freebie from plug-in makers De La Mancha that hopes to inject those lovely imperfections when needed. Unfortunately it's windows VST only - so if anyone knows of a noise-floor for Mac, let us know in the comments!

here's some info from De La Mancha, "Imperfection is an effect plug-in to put some lofi back into your pristine 64-bit audio. Who wants hi-fidelity reproduction when you can reduce the quality, take out some of that bottom-end, add a smear of saturation and bring your noise floor back up. Hmmm, perfectly imperfect"

The age-old debate continues, and as Microsoft slowly (very slowly) begin to lose market share of the computing industry, we thought it would be interesting to see how many people use Windows for their music making...

Does it matter? Is Mac OS REALLY better than Windows?

Comments please!

This special New Years Group Buy offer from Lennar Digital, could help you purchase their incredible Sylenth1 soft synth at up to 43% discount! The more buyers the more discount, so make sure you spread the news about this great deal and sign up.

This Group Buy ends December 31st, 2008, 23:59 GMT. To participate in the Group Buy, sign up HERE

If you haven't already seen this then you HAVE to investigate. This has to be one of the best online music apps we've ever seen! Play with all the drum machines and synths in real-time and patch them together through the available Boss-esque effects – genius! If the magazine comes out late this month, we place all the blame on this online app!!!

www.hobnox.com

Here's some of the Logic video tips we feature on the included Future Music DVD. These tips, from issue 189 take you through the process of building an entire track in Logic. We'll be posting more videos here as often as we can but remember to Subscribe to make sure you get all the very latest, full-quality tutorials on our DVD every month.

So yeah, people make hit records using GarageBand loops, obviously...

Check out the WAV file below to hear a slowed down version of one of Apple's GarageBand loops. Is it just us or does it sound exactly like the drum loop from Rihanna's huge hit Umbrella? Check out the YouTube link and the WAV download to compare and let us know what you think.



WAV file here or alternatively find 'Vintage Funk Kit 03' and slow it to around 88bpm if you're a GarageBand user.

With it seemingly being update season, Ableton have added to the already hefty list of DAW updates with the release of Live 7. Although there has been no confirmed release date (except Q4 of this year) the Beta release today has given some heavily anticipated insight into the 7's features, including:

- The regular audio engine update (64-bit mix summing, POW-r dithering and optimised sample rate conversion)

- Finally side-chaining, not only in compression, but for Auto Filter and Gate too!



- A new Spectrum analyser



- Warped and unwarped video rendering



- Subtle sexy updates to GUI, it's the little things...



- New instruments including Drum Rack - A combination of Impulse and Instrument Rack making it much easier to edit individual hits without complex routing



- Other new instruments include: Tension, Electric, Analog, Sessions Drums, Orchestral Strings, Brass, Woodwinds and Percussions and Essential Instruments Vol 2.

If you buy Live 6 anytime between now and 1st Jan 2008, you can upgrade to Live 7 for free (which implies we won't be seeing an official release for at least a couple of months). Anyone else, it'll cost €419 for the download version and €499 for the boxed version (which includes the Essential Instruments Vol 2 package).



Keep your eyes on Future Music for a more in depth report and review coming soon...

Steinberg Made Easy

The legends behind Cubase bring us a tool that’s bound to kick-start a new music making generation



Steinberg have recently released their new ‘fully-loaded’ software studio, Sequel for PC and Mac. Similar to Apple’s GarageBand, this is directed towards consumer use, boasting a GUI that is incredibly straightforward, and sequencing possibilities that can help a novice compose a track within minutes. An unlimited number of audio tracks (or however much your CPU can handle) can be used in one project and up to eight audio tracks can be recorded to simultaneously. The provided sample library is packed with over 5,000 loops of different genres. By using the media library, the search for the right category, instrument, genre and character means you can locate and isolate the loops you are looking for extremely quickly. The project will automatically set its keynote and tempo to the first sample you place on the arrangement, but this can be changed at any point by using the simple functions on the transport.



The interface is designed to make the program as easy to navigate as possible. Every section of the program is neatly packed into one window All of the tool parameters are accessible in the MultiZone at the bottom of the window, so moving from one ‘zone’ (as each section is known) to another, means whatever is in your arrangement will not be blocked from view. There are even tools that make playback possibilities more functional. Up to 16 sections of a project arrangement can be assigned to Cue Pads, giving you control over which parts are played when by punching each section in, which can be very handy when sequencing or remixing in real time. Over 600 virtual instruments and over 20 built-in effects are included, including 3-band EQ, a fixed compressor in each channel, and event effects (arpeggiator and chorder) for instrument channels. VST and DXi are not supported however, but Steinberg have announced a Cubase update for the summer that will allow you to import Sequel projects.

All typical file formats are supported on import, as well as OggVorbis and WMA Pro, and projects can be exported as WAV, AIFF, AIFC and WAV64. Projects can also be uniquely exported to iTunes. You can buy it now priced at £79.

steinberg.net