AFP - Nearly two-thirds of US Internet users have paid to download or access online content such as music, movies or news articles, a survey showed Thursday.

The first law of musical robotics: rock hard.

We’ve seen plenty of robotic musical experiments, but finding a robot that can seriously shred is another matter altogether. Meet the robotic string instrument, Poly-tangent, Automatic (multi-) Monochord – let’s just call her PAM. Built by Expressive Machines Musical Instruments, a group of University of Virginia PhD students and composers, PAM is capable of creating raucous musical performances like the one above, by composer and EMMI member Steven Kemper.

Musical robotics is cool, but it also hasn’t evolved much technologically in fifty years. It’s gotten cheaper and more accessible, but the fundamental design hasn’t changed – and that accessibility hasn’t translated into widespread use.

Now, the EMMI crew, in anticipation of a residency at Amsterdam’s famed STEIM research center, are hoping to take robotic music to the next level. MARIE is a project to put robotic music in a form that you can easily take on the road. They want to make the project open, so others can benefit, complete with schematics and code.

There are several aspects that make the MARIE project special beyond just road-ready design. The new instruments are intended to be more modular and controllable, to make the robotics as flexible as classic MIDI and analog modular gear has been. They also benefit from acoustic sound creation, controlling columns of air and physical strings instead of just digital or electrical models as on synths.

To fund their vision, the EMMI crew have started a Kickstarter project. You get something in return from your investment, including even training on robotics and good, old-fashioned instruments like the sax and bassoon. (That should put to rest any fears that these guys want a robot-only musical future.) Here’s how they describe their work:

MARIE are a set of virtuosic and expressive music robots that are portable, reliable, user-friendly, and fit within the dimension/weight limits for international checked baggage. In other words, these are music robots for touring musicians. The hope of EMMI and the EAR Duo is that the usability and portability of MARIE and similar music robots will finally push this powerful technology out of research labs and onto stages around the world. Within this aim, the entire project will be publicly documented online and the source code and hardware diagrams all provided as public knowledge for other enterprising musicians and technicians to construct similar robots.

EMMI-ers, I hope you keep CDM posted as you go. It looks like a very worthy project indeed.

Fundraiser for MARIE, open music robots for touring musicians [STEIMblog]

Expressive Machines

MARIE: a virtuosic band of robots made by and for musicians [Kickstarter]

The jury’s still out about how many music producers will want to run desktop OSes on tablets. But here’s one thing that’s not in doubt: alongside dedicated mobile OSes like Android and iOS, you can expect to see tablets in 2011 that do the things your laptop does now. They’ll have standard ports (like USB), they’ll run full-blown desktop OSes (Linux and Windows), and you’ll be able to run traditional software on them. Don’t get me wrong: I think dedicated software design for tablets is a good thing, and the iPad isn’t going anywhere. But the imminent availability of Windows and Linux tablets – different animals from the iPad – ought to send a strong message to “desktop” developers to test their software and user interface design on these new devices.

And yes, all of this means you’ll have a slim, tablet-sized machine that can run Pro Tools. Thanks to the fact that Pro Tools now works with standard Windows audio interfaces and not just Avid and M-Audio gear, it’s possible to ship a tablet that runs Pro Tools. Trinity Audio Group tell CDM they’re doing just that.

The machine is not powered by an Atom processor; instead, it uses a low-voltage CULV SU3500 processor, which in turn is based on Intel Core 2 architectures. (The 3500 is a 1.4G Core Solo processor.) Trinity is pre-installing Pro Tools 9 with an iLok key so you can run out of the box. Performance certainly won’t be stellar, but it’s good enough for some applications. Trinity tells CDM they got 8 stereo tracks (16 total) with 2-6 plugins on 2GB RAM; the finished system they say will be tuned for better performance, and will ship with twice the RAM. The price, unfortunately, puts the tablet alongside high-end laptops, at US$1799.

The Indamixx tablet is an interesting proof of concept, but it faces tough competition. There’s nothing stopping you from watching the marketplace in 2011 to find a tablet you like and installing it yourself, and I would hope some of those machines will ship with beefier processors. (Knowing readers of this site, that may hold more appeal, too, with options from Ableton Live to Reaper to SONAR, none requiring an iLok.) And while you don’t get a touchscreen, the MacBook Air is still fairly light and portable, significantly faster, and costs a fraction of the price – and it runs Mac OS in place of Windows, which will be a draw for at least some consumers.

Of course, the same sort of compromises existed when laptops first arrived on the scene, then blurred over time. I think there’s something to all of this. It’s not hard to imagine an artist taking a quick set of bounced tracks, still in a Pro Tools session, from a hefty studio machine onto a tablet and heading to a coffee shop or nearby sofa to listen and get a different perspective. I don’t know whether the Indamixx tablet will be that tablet, necessarily, but there’s a trend here, and its architecture really is fast enough that it’ll work for quick mixing sessions or even live performance. And if I were a developer, I’d be budgeting for a couple of tablets to test my software and see how well it holds up to touch input.

Main production machine? No way. But for those times when you need to walk away from the studio, some kind of tablet will soon have you doing this (as seen here on an Indamixx prototype):

I fully expect the mention in this story of Windows, Pro Tools, and iPads will evoke some sort of flame war in comments, but I’m completely uninterested, so I’m going to move onto other stories and make some music sketches and let y’all hash that out.

http://indamixx.com/

Promo video link

You can also see the Pro Tools-running tablet in person at the NAMM trade show in Anaheim, CA next month, booth 6799.

See our previous coverage of the Linux-powered, more inexpensive sibling, available now in beta.

Nearly two-thirds of Internet users are paying for some form of digital content as more information, services and media continue moving to the web. The numbers, resulting from a Pew Internet survey of Internet users, skew towards dollars spent on digital music, software and apps, with fewer consumers having spent money on newer content markets, such as e-books, and podcasts. On average, those surveyed are spending $47 per month for digital goods and access to premium web services.

The average monthly spend is affected by extremely high-end users, such as cord-cutters that have unsubscribed from traditional television and instead are solely dependent on web-based media solutions for video entertainment. The Pew research team reports that without these consumers who rely heavily on the web, most purchasers actually spend $10 per month for digital subscriptions, content and access to media behind a paywall. Here’s a rundown on some of the Pew results for spending on digital goods:

• 33% of internet users have paid for digital music online
• 33% have paid for software
• 21% have paid for apps for their cell phones or tablet computers
• 18% have paid for digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports
• 16% have paid for videos, movies, or TV shows
• 11% have paid for members-only premium content from a website that has other free material on it
• 10% have paid for e-books
• 7% have paid for podcasts
• 5% have paid to access particular websites such as online dating sites or services
• 2% have paid for adult content

A few thoughts jump out at me from the survey results, the main one being that only 21 percent of surveyed consumers have purchased apps for their cell phones or tablets. Initially, I figured this number would be higher, given growth of the mobile app economy. But two factors are likely at play here. Smartphone users download more free apps than paid apps, so free downloads wouldn’t count for this statistic. And second is smartphone ownership: it’s not until this time next year that we expect one in two U.S. consumers to have a smartphone. As a result, smartphone adoption here (which is high compared to other countries) is likely around 30 percent, which would preclude 70 percent from buying apps on their phone.

I’m somewhat surprised by the low number of e-book buyers, however. Digital books for most platforms can be read on a wide array of devices: smartphones, computers, tablets and of course, dedicated e-reader devices. Even though it won’t share sales numbers, Amazon recently pointed out that its newest Kindle is the best selling product on Amazon (s amzn). Between that news and the cross-platform support for e-book content, I would have expected more spending on e-books from the Pew Internet survey.

Related GigaOM Pro Research (sub req’d):

• The Week E-books Won the War
• Evolution of the E-book Market
• 3 Ways Google Can Succeed in E-books

AFP - Skype on Thursday made its first foray into video calls on mobile telephones, launching a new application for users of Apple's iPhone as well as the iPod music player and the iPad tablet computer.

PC Magazine - The Wi-Fi Kindle, Apple MacBook Pro, and Samsung Captivate were among Amazon's best-selling tech gadgets of 2010, while books from Stieg Larsson and music from the Black Eyed Peas were among the most popular entertainment downloads.

Investor's Business Daily - Apple's (NMS:AAPL) iTunes rents about 475,000 videos a day, according to Gleacher Co., slightly less than 10% of Netflix's (NMS:NFLX) average daily volume. The researcher said Apple could potentially enjoy similar growth to what Netflix experienced in recent years. Since about 90% of iTunes TV episode sales are rented for 99 cents each, Apple's rental business could top $1 bil in 5 years, adding $300 mil to profits. Gleacher notes that users of Apple's online TV service are consuming 550,000 movies or TV episodes a day. Apple dipped 18 cents to 325.29. Netflix fell 1.9% to 180.27.

AP - iTunes' top 10 selling singles and albums of the week ending Dec. 27, 2010:

Chances are more than good that many of you are familiar with Pandora, the digital music service that suggests songs based on your likes or dislikes.  It’s a service that’s free and can be a great way to discover new music.  I probably would never have come across Richard X.  Heyman ( a power pop artist with a voice that reminds me a bit of tom petty) if it hadn’t been for Pandora’s suggestion.   Pandora’s great strength is it’s music search engine that engine that throws new artists at you, but in doing so there are bound to be songs/artists that you can’t stand for a moment (do you hear me Styxx, i’m talking to you.  UGH come sail away).   And that points out the largest reason why pandora and i parted ways a while ago, because pandora limits the number of songs that you can pass on in a given  timeframe.

Which is why I’ve fallen hard for grooveshark.   Go there and play around for a while and then come back.  you can listen to my christmas mix if you’re into that kind of thing.

grooveshark allows you to search for artists, create playlists, and then share them with friends on facebook and twitter.

with all of this great digital music out there and as more people are using their laptops to send music  to their stereo systems(i didn’t play a single christmas CD this year, just ran my grooveshark holiday playlist), i’m wondering where library collections of CDs will be in 5 years.

i don’t have any answers, but i’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

posting by jim who will never understand the attraction of Styxx, and doesn’t care who knows it.