As you should already noticed, since several months the MacMusic pages are more and more difficult to load and you're very often faced to the "Server Overload" page or even to the very "poetic" message "Mysql too many connection error....". Not to mention the pathetic moments when the server is not reachable because it crashed and the mornings when digest mails aren't sent anymore.

The reason is crystal clear: as expected our server can't bear anymore the increasing traffic! We should absolutely and very quickly shift to a more powerful server.

Of course this has a cost and unfortunately the very little numbers of active members doesn't allow us to pay the one-year fee needed to upgrade the server.

We only miss THIRTY more Active Members to succeed. So if you were hesitating, it's really the right time to "Activate" yourself: We won't be able to survive without your support!

Moog Music ence Dr Moog himself just announced the Piano Bar. This MIDI controller was in developement in the laboratory of Don Buchla (hmm a lot of big names in this news) for some time, was shown at last Winter NAMM to some happy few.
The Piano Bar is a MIDI system extracting thru infrared sensors the data out a common keyboard, you have a piano, you have a controller! It's being redesign for the better (smaller, smarter, better) at Moog Music and will be presented in July at the next summer NAMM show.

Don Buchla's lair

The PT LE 6.0.2 is now available. This (long awaited) version was made for the Digi 002 users on the OSX platform. This version will be delivered to the the new Digi 002 cutomers. A free update will be available for the registered customers which have purchased the Digi 002 after the 1st january 2003.

For the others, the update will be charged 75 $ and will be available end of may for US and Canada. For Europe the users are invited to contact their local Digidesign dealer to order their update.

As we predicted 3 month ago ;-), Digidesign released a firewire audio interface, based on the Digi002 features, without the control surface. This 2U rack interface is compatible only with MacOS 10.2.5 (and up) and provides 18 channels of I/O and 2 MIDI out ports. Protools LE v6 is obviously included with Digi002 Rack.

This week's Mac Help Radio show will feature one of industrial music's pioneers, cEvin Key from the legendary Skinny Puppy. Skinny Puppy has been using Macs to create their music almost from the beginning and have worked with other bands such as Tool and Ministry. We will be talking to cEvin about how he uses the Mac in the studio and what kind of technology they have used over the years.

We'll be talking about how to start producing music on your Macintosh. Dru, Robert and Louis will discuss the basics and how to get started. We will demystify some of the technologies like Midi, what software to use and how to put together a song.

We hope that we can do justice to a topic that you guys here at MacMusic.org talk about on a daily basis. Enjoy the show.

LIVE: 8pm US Central time - archived within 5 hours of broadcast.