When i was younger i (not so suprisingly) played a lot of video-games. Sega and Nintendo was the shit back then. Atari was just about to fail, and Sony was a brand selling stuff like VCR’s and cd-players. After Sony did make the Playstation, and even microsoft made the Xbox. I called it quits. Well offcourse i still like a good round of GTA every now and again, but i am not a “gamer” anymore.
What gives me an excuse to buy a console nowadays?
Music! I got myself a Nintendo DS back in December, and started searching around for good homebrew applications. There’s allready tons of sites informing about the latest homebrew in all sorts, shapes and sizes. So i’m sticking to the musical side of things. Being an avid Ableton and Reason user, what kind of programs would satisfy my producing needs?
– Nitrotracker http://nitrotracker.tobw.net/
A tracker for the DS, a good start to the list, and definitly the first download you should get if you want to produce music on your DS. The program loads samples straight of your SD-card and those samples can then be programmed like any other tracker would allow you to. It also supports DSMIDIWIFI (next on the list) which makes it the worlds smallest sequencer. The only downside i can think of is the lack of effects (the ones usually found in fasttracker clones). My guess is the DS is just to slow a computer to handle effects.
– DS Midi WiFi http://dsmidiwifi.tobw.net/
Pretty much does what it says on the tin. You can use you Nintendo DS as a midi-player over your wireless connection. The site provides some more additional applications to toy around with as well.
– Protein DScratch http://gorgull.googlepages.com/protein
Touch-screen scratching, very cool. I personally use it to slow down samples, because it does that perfectly! Sounds real good.
– Glitch http://www.glitchds.com/
Using samples, the touchpad control and the other controls on your DS to manipulate the sound in some very weird ways. Ideal for IDM, BreakCore and Techno. Glitchds.com also provides RepeaterDS, a sampler using the touch-screen to play the sample from different staring points.
– KORG DS-10 http://www.aqi.co.jp/product/ds10/en/index.html
It’s not out yet, and it’s not a homebrew app. This is what i’ve been waiting for! A simple synth with all kinds of parameters to tweak and an arpreggio and a step sequencer. Should come out next month, i can’t wait!