The Digidesign engineer Ted Barram announces the Beta 2 version of the Core audio driver very soon on line. This version will support Reason 2.5 and above all will be more stable than the Beta 1 (according to Digidesign's tests).

The net has sprouted with excitement as the long awaited DP 4.0 started to arrive. However, France has still a few months to wait before the French version is ready. UMD who are distributing it over here have said they will make the English version available these coming days. The cost of the upgrade from DP 3.0 is 15 Euro and 160 Euro for older versions...

Tascam announces The FW-1884, a professional control surface and audio/MIDI interface that uses FireWire !

Features :
- 24 bit/96 kHz
- 8 motorized 100 mm touch-sensitive channel faders
- 8 balanced XLR analog mic/line with high quality mic preamps, inserts on every channel and phantom power
- Controls for pan, solo, mute, 4 bands of parametric EQ
- Stereo S/PDIF inputs and outputs
- 8 analog outputs, (L/R and 5.1 )
- 4 MIDI inputs and outputs
- Word Clock in and out
- Compatible with DP, Cubasis, Nuendo, Cakewalk...

Also available: FE-8 (eight-channel sidecar) expands FW-1884 with eight additional channel control strips. Price : 1599 $ Available in May / June

Italian sound engineer a.k.a. Tobor Experiment develops freeware Mac plug-ins (Pluggo based) for VST/MAS/RTAS applications running on OS 9. A bundle of 3 plugs is now available for download, more plugs will follow.

Tobor is also looking for CG/photo artists to design backgrounds for future plugs.

If you are the owner of a power Mac from august 2002, don't hesitate to order the exchange kit from Apple including a new power supply and a 12 cm fan. You should install it yourself which takes roughly 45 mn (as I experience it). It's not really complicated, just take your time.

The difference in terms of noise is striking, no more high frequencies noise but instead, a normal low background noise. It costs approximately $24 $ which is quite reasonable for the service.

So just go for it, and remember that thoses are the lastest machines able to boot under OS 9: with a new power supply their value for future selling will only increase!