It had been rumoured for some time now, and today it is made official : Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, won't present the ritual opening Keynote of the Apple Expo in Paris on August 31st. Steve Jobs, who suffers from pancreas cancer, has recently undergone a surgical operation and has therefore announced that he wanted to have a rest in August.

This keynote (or rather what will be left of it) will be presented by Philip Schiller (Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing).

Apple Expo, what a treat! Once again MacMusic will participate in European's largest Apple event that will be taking place from August 31 to September 4th at the "Parc des expositions de Paris". Your favorite site will be at booth C97, we have invited our friends from MacFr to share this space with us. During that week, if you want to rest your poor feet, to transpose the Open Bar into the real world, but most of all if you want to put a face (or anything else) on the familiar psedos (or for the more daring go and share a beer). The booth C97 (in french Stand C97) will be your privileged meeting point. Just looking at our grins on last year's picture should be enough to urge you to immediately ask for your 2004 Apple Expo badge !!

SimpleChord is a quick, handy reference to chords for musicians. It can aid in learning new chords, building progressions, transcribing, and other tasks. Dan Grover has released a new update (v.2.2.1) which features : fixed display bug with optional black notes under red (default) appearance and interface refinements.

Info on the MacMusic softwares section.

KTGranulator 1.2 is a delay line granulator in VST and AU fomrats for Mac OS X. It works like this: incoming (mono) sound is fed into a delay line from which small pieces of various durations and at different moments in the past are selected. Each of these pieces is then amplified, transposed and enveloped to form a "grain". This new version has a new parameter "split pitch" that when enabled will make the plugin choose either the maximum or minimum value for the pitch (and nothing in between). The AU version also had a few internal changes and a little bug fix.

Info and download from the MM Softwares section.

Avid Technology, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Midiman, Inc., doing business as M-Audio – a leading provider of digital audio and MIDI solutions for electronic musicians and audio professionals.  At closing, Avid will pay approximately $80 million in cash, issue approximately 2 million shares of Avid common stock, and assume all outstanding M-Audio stock options. Under the terms of the agreement, M-Audio will become a business unit of Avid's Digidesign audio division and market its line of computer audio peripherals, PCI sound cards, keyboard controllers and control surfaces, microphones, speakers, and distributed software and proprietary sound libraries alongside Digidesign's award-winning digital audio workstations for the professional and home/hobbyist markets.

For complete details visit Digidesign web site.