Mac and Music News

At the Frankfurt Musikmesse 2003, Steinberg unveiled the new 2.0 version of their HALion VST sampler. Deliveries of HALion 2.0 began on 16th April, and began arriving at specialist music dealers a few days later.

Among the new features are brand new filters by the synthesizer specialists at Waldorf and the new 5.1 surround functionality.

The MacMusicians Pro Directory will soon be on line. Sorted by jobs and countries, this directory is already very helpfull with over 2500 registered members.

So in order to be listed correctly and to find contacts or jobs, thanks to check out the informations in your user's profile : especially your activity, registration type, self-description, name and geographical location.

The Vienna symphonic library is now available on exs24 mk2 for the Logic 5.5/6 users, on Mac or PC. You'll find the same features as with Gigastudio.

Tfpro, home of ted Fletcher, the "infamous" mind behind the green things marketed as Joemeek until recently, and after a small batch of red painting, is coming back with an Edward. Edward the Compressor precisely. P8 for the ones in the know.

Edward the Compressor is a multitalented "classic" comp. The method used is as you can imagine optical but the guts of the red thing hide in fact not a multipurpose comp, but 4 types of different circuits of compression. You select the one you need.

The Digidesign engineer Ted Barram announces the Beta 2 version of the Core audio driver very soon on line. This version will support Reason 2.5 and above all will be more stable than the Beta 1 (according to Digidesign's tests).

The net has sprouted with excitement as the long awaited DP 4.0 started to arrive. However, France has still a few months to wait before the French version is ready. UMD who are distributing it over here have said they will make the English version available these coming days. The cost of the upgrade from DP 3.0 is 15 Euro and 160 Euro for older versions...

Tascam announces The FW-1884, a professional control surface and audio/MIDI interface that uses FireWire !

Features :
- 24 bit/96 kHz
- 8 motorized 100 mm touch-sensitive channel faders
- 8 balanced XLR analog mic/line with high quality mic preamps, inserts on every channel and phantom power
- Controls for pan, solo, mute, 4 bands of parametric EQ
- Stereo S/PDIF inputs and outputs
- 8 analog outputs, (L/R and 5.1 )
- 4 MIDI inputs and outputs
- Word Clock in and out
- Compatible with DP, Cubasis, Nuendo, Cakewalk...

Also available: FE-8 (eight-channel sidecar) expands FW-1884 with eight additional channel control strips. Price : 1599 $ Available in May / June

Italian sound engineer a.k.a. Tobor Experiment develops freeware Mac plug-ins (Pluggo based) for VST/MAS/RTAS applications running on OS 9. A bundle of 3 plugs is now available for download, more plugs will follow.

Tobor is also looking for CG/photo artists to design backgrounds for future plugs.