Mac and Music News

Rumours have been growing since Pascal Cagni - Apple vice president and Europe chairman - moved to London and today rumours have proved true : Apple Europe is about to leave Greater Paris to settle in the British capital. If we trust the various sites spreading rumours and the English press, Apple would have undertaken to rent for a period of 15 years the 2000 sqm of offices located just above the Regent Street Apple Store. Apple does not communicate on this subject but had given a very simple explanation for Mr Cagni's move to London, saying it was due to a surprising, according to me, "increase in power of the British market." Apple "Europe" in the country which hates Euro, it's funny !

For the next Apple Expo, I therefore suggest other countries whose markets are increasing in power : Andorra, Gibraltar, Guernesey, Jersey, Luxemburg, Madeira, Isle of Man and Monaco.

Done ! Digidesign has sold 150 ICON integrated console systems since the product began shipping on April 18, 2004. The 150th ICON system was sold to producer and engineer Nathaniel Kunkel. ICON is Digidesign's integrated console environment featuring the all-new D-Control tactile worksurface, Pro Tools|HD Accel as its core DSP engine, and modular Pro Tools|HD audio interfaces for analog and digital I/O.

For more information, visit Digidesign web site.

Expert sleepers has announced Megingue 1.0, a freeware Audio Units plugin for Mac OS X. Meringue is a delay effect. Unlike most delays, the delay runs alternately forwards and backwards, rather than continually forwards.

Meringue is available in the MacMusic softwares section.

The MacWorld Conference and Expo will take place from January 10 to 15, 2005 at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco. The Steve Job's MacWorld keynote address will take place on Tuesday, January 11 at 9:00 AM.

PG Music has announced a general maintenance update, adding styles descriptions, for Band-in-a-Box, its automatic music accompaniment software. This version 12b23 is of course freely downloadable from the MacMusic softwares section.

FontanaMixer 1.0 by Karlheinz Essl is a generative sound environment based on John Cage's "Fontana Mix" (1958). The original concept of the piece uses a graphical random generator that is supplied with the score. This new computerized version, however, uses realtime sound generation and produces completely unforeseeable sonic results which are reflecting Cage's ideas of indeterminacy, chance, and silence.

LinPlug has announced an update to version 2.1.3 for DaOrgan, the recreation of the B3 organ, and an other update to version 2.1.2 for Albino, the synthesizer by Rob Papen. These two updates both fixe problems when saving or restoring presets using daOrgan's or Albino's internal file functions.

Fraunhofer IIS has announced the availability of MP3 Surround Evaluation Software 1.0 for Mac OS X. MP3 Surround supports high-quality multi-channel sound at bit rates comparable to those currently used to encode stereo MP3 material, resulting in files half the size of common compressed surround formats. At the same time, the new format offers complete backward compatibility to any existing MP3 software and hardware devices. MP3 Surround was developed by Fraunhofer IIS in collaboration with Agere Systems. Using a psychoacoustic technique called binaural cue coding, MP3 Surround captures the spatial image information of multi-channel sound.

The evaluation period of the MP3 Surround encoder will expire on the 31st of December 2005.

LinPlug has updated SaxLab to v1.0.1 (minor bugfixes) and released a beta version 4.1.2 of RM IV, which features : minor bugfixes, MIDI import improved and Logic 7 integration improved.

The demo version of SaxLab is also now available.

Expert sleepers has announced Merger, a utility plug-in that combines two audio channels into one. This is typically useful for e.g. vocoder plug-ins that expect their two inputs on either side of a stereo pair.

Merger is available as a free download.

I3 has just updated its two track audio editor DSP-Quattro to version 2.0.1. This new release features new PlayList command 'Set All Pauses To", the AU plug-in name does not include the vendor name when displaying it on the Effx Send Mixer, a new settable parameter on the preference dialog for the default 'pause' value for newly created PlayList tracks. It also fixes a problem with Waves, Sony and some others AU plug-ins, appearing greyed out in 2.0, and fixes a problem with the Drag&Drop to the finder under MacOS 8/9.