Mac and Music News

Expert Sleepers has announced that Meringue 1.0.2, Multitap Delay 1.0.3, Phaser 1.1.2 and Ping Pong Delay 2.0.4 are now available as VST format. More info and download in the MacMusic software version.

The Zicos team is proud to announce that its "shortcut to news" site is now online and available to all. Zicos is an useful aggregate web news extractor. It allows visitors to quickly keep track of every news published by over 90 renowned web sites over the world. Zicos news are refreshed every 15 minutes and covers the following topics: Pro Audio, Mac, Tech/PC, Downloads and more to come... The engine on which Zicos is based was originally developed for the internal needs of a famous internet portal. It's developers worked for several months designing a smart and efficient engine, helping their news editors, quickly see if they missed important informations. The developers as well as the owners of this great engine agreed it would be a shame not to offer such a nice tool to everyone.

Zicos is now open to all !

AudioEase announced that they're working on Altiverb version 5. This new release will support surround formats up to 192 Khz, and will deliver more instances and less CPU overhead. Dates and upgrade fees are to be announced but the upgrade to version 5 will be free for users who purchased Altiverb after December 1, 2004.

More to come...

Apple has released a new Xserve G5. It offers dense power in a 1U server with dual 64-bit G5 processors at speeds of up to 2.3 GHz and features unlimited clients, up to 1.2TB storage, PCI-X expansion, dual Gigabit Ethernet, fast I/O ports and an optical drive. The new Xserve starts at $3999. Apple also introduces Xsan, a storage networking solution. Xsan lets multiple computers concurrently access terabytes of storage on Xserve RAID over high-speed Fibre Channel. Xsan costs $999 per node.

Vanguard 1.1 by ReFX is a VST synthetizer for Mac OS X. Equipped with 31 different types of oscillators, including rarely found digital oscillators with new modulation options, Vanguard also includes 13 filter types with different slopes and includes a new kind of combined dual-filter variations. Along with a delay and reverb, Vanguard features the Trancegate and Arpeggiator tools. Trancegate is a 16-step gate allowing you to create rhythmic gated patterns while the Arpgeggiator features inspiring patterns and several play modes.

More info in the MacMusic softwares section.

"Le Synthé" by Pierre Couprie is the third version of an AKS Synthi emulator, and is based upon a modular matrix to construct your sounds. This new version fixes several bugs, adds a new GUI, and features a new external module : the spectroscope, and of course contains all features of previous version : MIDI, VST plugins support, and more.

DrumThing by Ron Miller is a compact and simple application designed be a software version of a drum machine for creating drum patterns, loops and grooves. This 1.7 update features a new "Save creation before quitting" alert dialog, a Play counter for visual interest, a new option to automatically create new random creations per loop mainly for its entertainment value and more.

Info and download in the MacMusic softwares section.

The Steve Job's MacWorld keynote address will take place on Tuesday, January 11, and here is the web rumors list from our friends of thinksecret : Apple will launch iLife '05, with iDVD 5 (one-step DV-to-DVD without editing and support for dual-layer DVD media), iMovie 5 or HD (support for HDV, panoramic 16:9 aspect ratios, and MPEG-4), GarageBand 2 (with a new instruments and loops utility accompanying software), and of course, the new FireWire audio interface "Asteroid". Jam Pack n°4 will be called "Symphony Orchestra" and will include 2,000 new Apple Loops and 30 new orchestral instruments.

No iPhone but prehaps other surprises : a new iWork '05 productivity suite was speculated to be the successor to AppleWork, and will include Keynote 2 as well as a new application, Pages. And at last, the new $500 headless iMac, an affordable system as being ready-to-go out of the box with all the software most needed by users, including PC switchers.

Just wait now...

WaveWindow AU is an Audio Units plug-in software oscilloscope. It's useful for anyone who works with sound on the Mac. It's educational and fun to play with. There are several synchronization methods and display modes to choose from. This new version fixes a problem with the preferences.

Info and download from the MacMusic softwares section.