UK-based software developers Camel Audio, whose 'CamelPhat' VST multi-effects plugin has won a cult following around the world, announced the arrival of their first full-blown software instrument. Cameleon 5000 is the creature's name, and it's an unusual and exotic hybrid! If you're looking for fresh and original sounds you should definitely take a closer look.

Described by its creator as an 'Additive Morphing Resynthesizer', it combines a powerful and flexible sound generation engine with some unique audio analysis algorithms, to produce an instrument that's not quite a synth and not quite a sampler, yet invites comparisons with both.

Arturia is hosting an enquiry to eventually release the Moog ModularV as an hardware synth (hardware dongle anyone? A way to provide much more power thru dedicated DSPs?). If this interests you or gives you nightmares, please let them know. They really want some input and given the rather good job they did on the ModularV, they deserve a little help :)

We announced a few time ago the future availabitily of North 2, a new set of folk instruments from North India, by Swar System.

It's done: North 2 is available today, for OS X only.

One by one, Panther compatibility issues are being resolved. This just in: Steinberg's HALion has been updated to 2.0.2.2 for OS X with full compatibility for OS X 10.3 plus improved file loading times. Not familiar with HALion? Check out MacMusic's Software Pages for HALion info.

We kick off our series of interviews with Mac Maestros, outstanding Mac-based developers. musicians, and composers, with a chat with composer and developer Tom Erbe. Tom has become legendary in the Mac music community for creating SoundHack, the free spectral sound processing software. Tom has been involved with various other projects from his own music to the creation of an electronic violin and spatial audio processing for NASA. I spoke to Tom about music and technology on the Mac on the eve of the release of new realtime audio plugins inspired by SoundHack.