Mac and Music News

The Australian Smart Ltd. announced the Smart Console, a mixing control surface designed for mixing and editing large numbers of channels. The Smart Console is designed to both reduce the number of knobs on a panel and reduce the number of actions required in order to gain access to out of reach controls, and is also designed as an 'open platform' to capitalise on the strengths and experience of other leading audio manufacturers.

info on Smart web site.

Applied Acoustics Systems has announced that the demo version of Ultra Analog VA-1 si now available. Ultra Analog VA-1 is a virtual analog synthesizer with 32 voices of polyphony.

This demo version of Ultra Analog VA-1 is available at Applied Acoustics Systems'
website.

Ultimate Sound Bank announced that X-treme FX is now shipping. X-treme FX is a virtual instrument plug-in for Mac OS X (VST/AU/RTAS) made for sound effects and atmospheric sounds. It comes with 5000 sound effects on over 8 Gb of disc space.

X-treme FX is available now for $399.

M-Audio introduced the FireWire Solo, an audio FW interface for recording guitar tracks, which features a 1/4" guitar input and a microphone input with phantom power (both featuring gain control and clipping LEDs), 2 line inputs, and coaxial S/PDIF digital I/O.

FireWire Solo can be powered via the FireWire bus or optional power supply, and is shipping at $249.95.

URS announced Audio Units support for the Classic Console EQ Bundle (A and N series only). The URS A equalizer is digital emulation of a vintage Neve EQ, and the URS N is a digital emulation of a vintage API equalizer.

The Audio Units versions are a free upgrade for both TDM and Native Classic Console EQ Bundle owners.

Yellow Tools has released Logic 7 compatible public beta Audio Units versions of Culture and Majestic plugins. Culture is a modular virtual percussion instrument and Majestic is a virtual instrument which contains more than 16GB sounds of various basses.

Info and download on Yellow Tools web site.

Expert sleepers has released Latency Fixer, a free AU plug-in that reports to the host application that it has a latency (controlled by the plug-in parameters) but does not actually apply any processing to the audio signal. This causes the host to use its own latency compensation to advance the audio fed into the plug-in by the requested amount.

More info in MM softs section.

Native Instruments has released a hotfix for the Audio Unit version of Kontakt, making it compatible with Logic 7. It passes Logic 7 Audio Units Validation.

Info and download on NI web site.

In Sonasphere 1.2b, functional units, such as sound samples, effects and mixers, are represented as small spherical 'Objects' floating within 3D Space. Users can easily make connections between these objects via simple mouse interaction and establish signal stream networks.

Sonasphere 1.2b is available in our softwares section.

At the 117th AES Convention in San Fransisco CA, Tascam introduced two new FireWire audio interfaces.

1-The FW-1804 can be rack mounted and is a kind of FW-1884 without control surface.

2-The FW-1082 is a kind of mini FW-1884 with a control surface which features 8 balanced inputs (included 4 phantom powered inputs), 2 Midi inputs/outputs and costs less than $1000.

Unfortunately there's no LCD screen on those two interfaces and there is no native integration in Cubase.

Sebastien Bottin, the famous inventor of the directory, could be jealous. Indeed if you're looking for a drummer, a sound engineer, a conductor or even an electronic bagpiper, you will no doubt find it in the MacMusic directory, which lists all those who have registered and it already has 10,000 members. This directory is straightforward and easy-to-use, all members are classified by professions and countries, so you can easily contact another member to collaborate as a professional or amateur. We remind you that registration is free. You only have to modify your profile to be referenced. By the way, you may check your profile and your personal description (the one on top of the page) in particular. Indeed, the more details you give, the more opportunities you get to be contacted. If you choose to display your name for example, anyone will be able to find you quickly in Google (just have a go in Google with the name of a member to see for yourself). Otherwise you can always register in the official music guide, but not for free...

Guitar Tuner by Laidman & Katsura is an Audio Units plugin tuner for acoustic or electric guitar. It requires an application that supports "Cocoa" Audio Unit plug-ins such as GarageBand 1.1, Soundtrack 1.2, and Logic 7.

Guitare Tuner is available from our softwares section.