Steinberg's Xphraze is now shipping. Xphraze has been developed by Wizoo and offers musicians completely new ways of bringing rhythmically phrased sounds into projects quickly and intuitively. Xphraze is the first virtual synthesizer in a long time that has the potential to revolutionize music making for many.

Emagic released their Player Edition which includes their EVP73 vintage piano instrument and EXSP24 sample player now for Mac OS X (Audio Units).

"Both instruments now run under any Audio Units-compatible host software, providing sample-based sound processing and playback, as well as flawless Rhodes electric piano emulation under Mac OS X.

International shipping of the Player Edition has now begun. The Player Edition replaces the previously available individual EXSP24 and EVP73 products. Please contact your national distributor for more detailed information about prices and availability."

The Yamaha SPX2000 features a new reverb-algorithm called "RevX". It will have 24bit/96khz AD/DA converters and operate with 32bit, and it's release is announced for September.

Now available for download.

The upcoming IEEE P1639 MIDI standard is coming!
Well? The IEEE Standard Association is preparing a general wrapping standard to unify by the end of the year MIDI transmition over Ethernet networks or IEEE 802.11 wireless devices. The standard is still base on the oldy but? goody? well? sort of? old MIDI standard BUT!

BUT, now the interfacing is no more linked to a peculiar hardware, so "Hasta la vista" the old 31,25 baud from the beginning of MIDI, look at 10 megabits of MIDI data per second. The number of MIDI devices makes a small jump from 16 to? 16 millions.

We can look forward to use all this ;-)
Under scrutiny also is a future little tiny bitsy thing to plug into old MIDI hardware to make it compatible. Nice touch.

Now how will this interact with mLAN over IEEE 1394 (FireWire) uh?