There is something that’s been bothering me recently. Maybe it’s been bothering you too. Or maybe it used to bother you and now you don’t care anymore. Anyway…

The turn-around time and support responsiveness from Electrotap has been inconsistent the past couple of years. How did we get here?

Electrotap is structured somewhat like a small co-op with five or six individuals contributing time and energy in an adjunct capacity. As we’ve grown-up, added children to our families, and transitioned through different jobs and towns, we’ve continued to love Electrotap and believe in what it’s doing. But how do we provide a better more responsive support experience and also free ourselves up to do some much needed new product development?

The first part comes directly from us: recommitting ourselves to a positive and fulfilling support experience. The people who have been our customers have produced some really amazing art, music, and research over the last 6 years and we want that to keep happening. The second part of the equation comes from an upgrade in technology. Last month we opened the doors on http://community.electrotap.com — our new support site, forum, and knowledge base.

The new site is powered by GetSatisfaction, an effective and high-powered service that helps customers and their companies get quick answers to questions and keep from drowning in overwhelming numbers of queries. Especially when it’s the same kinds of question that occur over and over again. Through this change we are aiming to improve our responsiveness, make answers easier to find, increase our accountability by making these dialogs public, and foster community by providing a forum where community members can help each other instead of being solely dependent upon us.

Through this change we also are able to expand our coverage of support issues as they come up because there are now tentacles reaching out from http://community.electrotap.com to Facebook and Twitter as well as our main site. Also as a bonus: answer someone else’s question on community.electrotap.com, and we’ll give you 10% off on your next order!

In Charlottesville, Virginia the EMMI group is working to create a human-robot experience that is sonically interesting musically fulfilling.

As we discovered when designing our own sensor interface (and the reason we started Electrotap), doing this kind of work gets really expensive in a hurry. To raise money for the Teabox we started Electrotap. To raise money for EMMI, this group has created a project on Kickstarter to receive donations.

Electrotap has no affiliation with this awesome project, except that we find it inspiring and cool, and we’ve decided to help support it. We hope you’ll consider supporting it too!

Thanks to all who participated in our Cyber Monday festivities. It was fun, if exhausting. We had 40 times the usual traffic on our site, the most sales we’ve ever had in a single day, and a lot of interesting conversations with customers. We gained a lot of valuable insights from these exchanges!

If there is anything we can be doing better, please let us know. Also be sure to follow us on Twitter and find us Facebook (not to mention our http://community.electrotap.com pages). Those are the places where we really have our “ear to the ground” and are listening to feedback.

Thanks again for making this Cyber Monday a huge success!

We decided to try and have a little fun for Cyber Monday this year. We’re having a super-crazy sale on everything: Use the coupon code CYBRMON at checkout and you’ll get 40% off your entire order. For example:

• Max/MSP/Jitter (with Free Tap.Tools): save $279
• Teabox Sensor Interface: save $158
• Tap.Tools Pro: save $39
• Sensors, etc. all 40% off

It’s only one day! So if you’ve been on the fence, or have a demo that is going to expire, jump in now! More info @ http://static.electrotap.com/cybermonday.html

More than a couple of people have told us we’re nuts ;-) We hope you’ll have as much fun as we’re having!

Last week I had the privilege of visiting Stetson University’s Digital Arts Program in DeLand, Florida. I knew Nathan Wolek from the early days of MSP, at which time we were both grad students: Nathan working on the GTK Granular Toolkit while I was working on Tap.Tools . We later worked together on bringing Hipno to life.

Time goes by quickly and I had never had the chance to see the program that Nathan is shepherding at Stetson. Knowing Nathan, and having caught the occasional glimpse of the Mobile Performance Group on Youtube (see video above), I figured that some good things were happening. But… Wow! The program is completely amazing.

The first thing they’ve done is truly collaborate across disciplines and across departments. I’ve seen lip service to this at too many institutions to mention, but at Stetson they are actually doing it. It’s pretty exciting to see. The faculty of the digital arts department bring expertise in digital audio, sculpture, realtime video performance, electronics, etc.

Two things really stood out during my visit. One was a show by Stetson faculty member Matt Roberts entitled Waves Walks . I find it difficult to put my finger on what was so ‘right’ with the works in this show, but I think part of it had to do with how all of the elements both within the works and between the works integrated so well to form an extremely strong impression. The different works sonically engaged different spectral regions so as to not interfere with each other but rather work together to make it feel as though you were fully immersed in a surreal coastline environment.

Following a day with 3 lectures (one focused on MaxMSP, one on music technology and entreprenuership, and one on listening, aesthetics, and electronic music history/literature), I had a day to discuss the future of the GTK with Nathan. And I also had another standout moment from the visit: a meeting with Stetson student Eric Baum.

Eric showed me his Max patcher, which is a more evolved version of this Max patcher . He was producing some really interesting results. To make it performable, he showed me a double-neck guitar that he had built and retrofitted with a bunch of sensors, some of which he made himself. Here’s the part that really blew me away: he had been using an Arduino and switched to the Teabox. Why? Because the results he got were so much better.

The Teabox gives much higher resolution, a lot faster, and the electronics in the Teabox do a significant amount of signal conditioning to produce more usable results. It’s pretty cool to hear about someone who can pull together the skills and experience to make an Arduino work, then turn around and replace it with a Teabox because it works so much better! It was nice way to wrap up a really great trip.

My thanks to Nathan and everyone at Stetson for their gracious hosting, spotless organization, and an inspiring experience!

We’ve extended our 20% discount on all orders, now through December 1.
To get the discount, enter the coupon code MAX4LIVE on our checkout page.

Hope you enjoy Tap.Tools 3.2 and everything else that’d hiding in our shop!

Tap.Tools 3.2 is now officially released! It can be downloaded here .

The focus of this release is on improving Tap.Tools in the Max for Live environment.

20% Discount

To celebrate we’re offering a 20% discount on all orders through November 1.
To get the discount, enter the coupon code MAX4LIVE on our checkout page.

If you want more frequent updates, are you following us on Twitter ? It’s totally worth it!