MakeMusic, the famous soft editor of Finale, announce a new version for Mac OS X that will be available on october 20th 2003. Finale will get new functionalities : CoreMidi support, and ability to save scores in PDF format.

Gleetchplug it is actually developing a weird virtual copy of famous and mesmerizing EMS SYNTHI A, brother of blood of the more glitterstar "VCS3".

As usual the virtual synth plugin (now called Plasma A) will be usable on Apple PPC with OS 9.x in VST/RTAS/MAS environments with Basic MIDI implementation AND also as a stand alone patch for MAX/MSP Runtime Environment.
Plugin version requires again Pluggo Runtime (downloadable for free from Cycling74.com). Pacth requires MAX/msp runtime (free with the demo). Patch & Plugins require also at least a screen resolution of 1280x850.

Development is now in pre-alpha, chances to try a beta-test in late september, of course for free. (still the final version will be absolutely free as usual).

It's not a music software but it can be useful for ProTools 6 users. If you want to hide the famous "Digidesign Database" displayed on each disk, it could be the right solution. Apimac secret folder is a shareware (29 euros) which allow you to hide or to display (with a password) the "digidesign database" or any kind of folder !

Steinberg Announces Studio Case : a suite of virtual instruments combined with legendary Cubase technology to form a powerful and complete music production software package - all in one box at one low price. Features Cubase SE, compatible with Cubase SL, SX and Nuendo, works on Mac OSX and 5 VST instruments : Virtual Guitarist Electric Edition, Groove Agent Virtual Drummer, The Grand Piano, D'cota Synthesizer, HALion Sampler.
Studio Case is available in August 2003 for EUR 279.99.

I took the wheel (for some hours) of the last Panther Beta on Mac OS 10.3 and took the opportunity to install DP4.01, being warned about the random reactions of a beta system. Panther on the HD of a venerable Pismo Powerbook G3/400, it's like a tiger in the motor of the old John Steed's Bentley! I was surprised... very pleasantly : menus are faster than on OS 9, the buffer size can be reduced more than before, the "Windows" menu correctly display all the opened windows names (it was not the case for Jaguar) et Exposed is very efficient on a lot of opened windows. In a word, DP4 is much faster on the Beta 10.3 with small configurations like G3. Hope that it will last :-)