Mackie Designs Inc. announces the arrival of Baby HUI into its growing family of touch-sensitive control surfaces. Baby HUI (US $799 MSRP) is the first affordable control surface that supports the HUI/MIDI-mapping protocol-allowing it to work right out of the box with any HUI-supported digital audio workstation (DAW) on PC or Macintosh platforms. The growing family of HUI-supported DAWs currently includes Mackie Broadcast Professional Soundscape 32, Mackie Mixtreme, Digidesign ProTools and Digi 001, MOTU Digital Performer, Steinberg Nuendo, Emagic MicroLogic and many others.

Word is that Apple could soon propose a "family license" for Mac OS 10.2 that would cover installation on up to 5 computers (200$) while license for one computer is 129$.

NATIVE INSTRUMENTS has announced the availability of a crossgrade to its sampling program KONTAKT for all registered HALion, EXS and Gigastudio users.

In addition to standard sample playback and manipulation abilities, KONTAKT features realtime time-stretching and resynthesis, graphical breakpoint envelopes, an integrated loop editor, analog-modelled filters and visually displayed modulation. It also includes a sample library containing more than three gigabytes of sounds in various styles and categories.

The KONTAKT 1.1 Mac release and PC update also introduces some exciting additions to the current functionality, such as EXS, HALion, and SDII file import, a greatly improved auto-search function and other enhancements. Additionally, NATIVE INSTRUMENTS is developing EMU (EIII, ESI ...

Virsyn Software synthetiser announces the release of Virsyn Tera for Mac.
This modular software synthesizer (based on five different synthesis technologies including the "Spectrum synthesis") allows the creation and manipulation of resonant bodies with up to 128 formant frequencies. The user interface of VirSyn TERA is said by its developpers to set a new standard in design and functionality. Thus simplifying the access to the huge sound space of its predecessor(Virzyn 1.1).
Shipment date for the Mac version is August, 26th.

BitHeadz, Inc., the music software manufacturer has released a new update for the Unity product line.
The 3.0.4 update will provide a number of improvements and features to the current owners of Unity Session, Unity DS-1 and Unity AS-1 version 3.0.0 and up. It will be available as a free download for all registered owners of any of these programs.

Unity 3.0.4 will introduce support for the MP3 file format. Users will be able to import them as samples just as they currently can with AIFF, .wav and Sound Designer II files. The imported MP3's will then be fully editable with all of the features provided in the Unity Editor.

Another addition to Unity version 3.0.4 is support for VST clock, which allows users to sync the tempo of any loops loaded into Unity to their VST compatible sequencers.
Some other extra features are improved OSX menu support, better bank loading, and restored support for Mac OS 8.6 and 9.0.