Interview with Art Kerns of Synthetic Bits

Today marks an exciting new turning point for Minijack, as we’re running our first ever interview. This week we’re shining the spotlight on Synthetic Bits – makers of the excellent Funkbox and Little Midi Machine apps. I interviewed developer Art Kerns via email – that’s him in the photo above, chilling out in his home studio. This is actually just part one of our fairly epic conversation – I’ll be posting part two tomorrow.

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Minijack’s Geek Of The Week is Marklion

Marklion is the solo music project of Vincent Thierion, formerly of the excellent Dat Politics. Recently Marklion passed through LA after a showcasing set at the SXSW music festival in Austin. His performance at downtown Los Angeles venue The Smell was a party-starting mix of nu-disco, French filter house, electro, and acid techno, careening through many hi-NRG styles all while keeping the BPMs up before concluding with a melodic crescendo of noise. A photo of the electro-moshpit at this excellent show is above.

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Epic electronic sounds with Nanostudio

nanoeo2 by ioeo

Minijack reader ioeo sent in this epic Jarre-esque electronic tune he made using only the NanoStudio app by Blip Interactive Ltd. Really great stuff here. Keep sending ‘em in!

Is this IK Multimedia’s idea of a joke?

Yesterday, IK Multimedia announced on their Facebook page that “We’ve decided that, effective July 2011, we will be creating iOS apps only.”

Of course, it WAS April Fool’s day. But if you take a look at IKMultimedia.com at the moment (or the screenshot above), you could be forgiven for thinking that they were dead serious. These guys have really gone ALL IN on iOS.

Sure, it might be an April Fool’s joke for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see IK Multimedia or other companies like them exiting the plugin business before long. After all why content yourself with being on a minor league farm team in the plugin world when you can be the ROCK STARS of the iOS world.

I hope that doesn’t happen though, since I do like using the “real” Amplitube for certain things when mixing. And as long as we’re on the subject, their Brick Wall Limiter in T-Racks ain’t bad, either.

Novation prepping V-Station app?

I always wanted a K-Station, and I’ve gotten some pretty cool sounds out of the V-Station VST. But let’s face it, the layout of the V-Station VST is pretty dated and lame. This looks WAY cooler. Assuming it supports MIDI, I could definitely see myself getting a lot of good use out of it.

Head on over to GearJunkies for the full details.