There's a (pleasant) rumour going round about Digidesign and G5 ... The G5 family (1.6-GHz, 1.8-GHz, 2.0-GHz) would support Digi 002, Digi 002 Rack and mBox.

A ProTools LE update will be necessary, particularly for OS 10.3 Panther compatibility. This major update should be available in mid-november 2003. It will be free for PT LE 6.1 and 6.1.1 users. To be continued ...

Sibelius has introduced Sibelius 3, a major upgrade to the music notation software. We'll offer an exclusive look at this new release soon, but in the meantime, here's an overview of new features.

170 new features have been added, plus a special collaboration with Native Instruments to design a special version of Kontakt to play back music using high-quality instrument samples (no more cheap-sounding QuickTime Musical Instruments!), burn compositions to CD, and create audio files for the Web. Here are a few of the more interesting enhancements:

Font smoothing Mac OS X's font smoothing already made Sibelius for OS X look substantially better than OS 9 versions of Sibelius and Finale, but a new display setting will smooth all graphical elements on the screen for a look closer to ...

Digidesign is releasing the Impact compressor, the first TDM plugin optimised for PCI HD Accel cards, and the first to feature bus mixing compression for Pro Tools similar to what you'd find on a classic mixing board. Impact features support for up to 7.1 tracks and sampling frequencies up to 192kHz. For a limited time Impact is offered to every Pro Tools|HD 3 Accel system owners; available separately for US$695.

BT's new album "Emotional Technology" is an enhanced CD including Ableton Live. Remix a song from the album, burn it to CD, and send it to BPM magazine. The Grand Prize winner will be awarded M-Audio's Mobile Studio Package.

M-Audio came to Paris Expo to showcase its new audio card line, now optimised for the Power Mac G5. They've worked closely with Apple to ensure that all its new PCI cards were optimised to take advantage of the Power Mac G5's architecture. M-Audio's G5-compatible PCI cards include Revolution 7.1, which enables high-quality surround sound up to 7.1 and supports high-resolution audio output up to 24-bit/192kHz.