Mac and Music News

WireTap Pro is the new version of WireTape by Ambrosia Softwares. It allows you to record any audio, saving it to a file for later listening or processing. Streaming Internet audio, sound snippets of a DVD movie, voice notations/narration, audio from a game, digitized audio from a line-in.

Wire Tape is now available only as a "Pro" version and costs $19,00.

VirSyn has announced an update to version 1.5 for Canto. This release is a major upgrade incorporating a completely revised vocal synthesis engine. The new engine makes it now much easier to produce intelligible vocal lines.  This was achieved with an improved filter model and a new kind of rule based phoneme sequencer which adapts the phoneme transitions according to the context inside a word. 

E-LAB has announced that a demo version of Foundation is now available. Foundation is a loop based virtual instrument which features more than 3.7 Gb of samples, 3000 drum loops, 5000 drum samples, 8 tracks of simultaneous drum loop playback with an interactive groove system, MIDI CC Learn, and flexible editing functions for each individual drumloop track.

The full version in VSTi, AudioUnits & RTAS for MacOSX is scheduled to be released in January/February 2005.

Pinnacle has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its Germany-based Steinberg audio software business to Yamaha Corporation. The transaction, which is subject to regulatory approval, is expected to be completed during Pinnacle's third fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2005. As part of the transaction, Steinberg and Pinnacle will cross-license certain intellectual property on a royalty-free basis and Pinnacle will continue to distribute Steinberg's WaveLab Lite audio editing product with Pinnacle Studio Media Suite.

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.