Mac and Music News

Apple today announced that Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" will go on sale Friday, April 29, beginning at 6:00 p.m. during special events at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. Tiger has more than 200 new features and innovations including Spotlight , a desktop search technology that lets users instantly find anything stored on their Mac , including documents, emails, contacts and images; and Dashboard, a new way to instantly access important information like weather forecasts and stock quotes, using a dazzling new class of applications called widgets. Tiger also features native 64-bit application support and an improved CoreAudio. Apple also announces that OS X Tiger Server will be available too at the same day.

Tiger will cost $129.

With more than 95,000 media professionals and 1,400 exhibiting companies from 130 countries gathering to network, collaborate and learn, The NAB 2005 will take place from April 16 to 21, at Las Vegas Convention Center.

Read more info on the NAB official website.

Moog Music announces this months that's the new Voyager Rack Mount Edition begins shipping. The Voyager RME features all of the same front panel options of the Minimoog Voyager (sans the touch pad), in a 19"wide, 5U high rack mount format for $2195. MoogMusic also announces the second annual Moog Fest in New York city, which will take place this May 31st, BB King's Bar and Grill in Times Square.

58 magazines from all over the world voted at Musikmesse / ProLight & Sound for the best products of 2004/2005 in more than 40 categories. Here is the full list of nominees and winners :

BEST INNOVATIVE PRODUCT
Apple GarageBand
Line 6 Variax Acoustic
Spectrasonics Stylus RMX

Digidesign today announced D-Command; the newest member of the ICON integrated console family. ICON D-Command incorporates much of the same functionality, industrial design, and custom workflow capabilities of the ICON D-Control. With its compact size and powerful feature set — including dedicated EQ and dynamics editing sections, custom fader modes, and touch-sensitive rotary controls — ICON D-Command is a natural fit for facilities that want ICON's unique mixing capabilities at a more affordable price.

This is a nice project who was started in the context of ICMC 2005 (international computer music conference of Barcelona), and is a website for creative-commons licensed audio material exchange :

" The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to

Sound Burst has announced North Mood, a virtual reproduction of the Clavia Nord Modular player, available as a VST plug-in for MacOS X. It features 650 Presets. 30,000 samples, up to 64 voices of polyphony (CPU dependent), 24 bit/96 Khz quality and 32 bit internal processing.

North Mood will be available in May, 2005 with for $/€149. (grrr...manufacturers, please note that US$ 1 = 0.77 euros, thanks !!!).

Pure Data announces a new version which now features a Pd.app rather than an installer. Pure Data is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio and graphical processing.It was planned as a free, better and more stable Max/fts, which has also been developed by Miller Smith Puckette at IRCAM.

This update is available in the MacMusic softwares section.

At MusikMesse, Korg unveils a new compact 4 tracks recorder, the D4, which allows you to record one or two tracks at a time, to a CompactFlash removeable media card. This small unit features 8 virtual tracks per track, for a total of 32 tracks, two tracks of simultaneous recording, extended recording times using MPEG-1 Layer-2 compressed recording format, XLR and 1/4 inch inputs and Built-in mic.

After nightmares to get a working internet connection from the show, here is finally a nice set of 44 photos which should let you evaluate the Musik Messe feeling. Enjoy!