Christopher Penrose presents Hyperupic, a tools now available for Mac OS X, that allows users to create sounds from digital images. Hyperupic can create AIFF, uncompressed AIFC and SND formatted sounds with 16-bit linear, 24-bit linear, or 32-bit floating point, and can work with TIFF, JPEG, Photoshop, GIF and PNG images. Hyperupic is freeware for Mac OS X and is available on download.

Ed: A NeXT app lives again! Have to take a look at this to figure out exactly how it works. The inspiration here is Xenakis, so I expect this to be quite different from MetaSynth. -PK

This first software update ofthe newest member of the iLife family will upgrade your version of GarageBand 1.0 to GarageBand 1.0.1. "This update clarifies specific alert dialogs regarding system performance." So now, if Apple could made GB a litte more CPU efficient...

Ed: Yes, this one is baffling. An update that does nothing but reword dialog boxes? Think I'll skip that, Apple, unless there's something you're not telling us. -PK

The RM IV by Lineplug is a flexible drum machine that combines analog-style percussion synthesis with a fully featured percussion sampler. The new version 4.0.4 adds support for Mac OS 10.3 Panther and Audio Unit format. The RM IV bundled with more than 170 sample-based and synthesized drum kits.

The RM IV 4.0.4 costs EUR149. A VST demo version is available for download (Audio Unit demo version coming soon).

The guys behind the unofficial site have let me know that they were able to "suck" the whole public FTP from Waldorf shortly before the demise. Once the intellectual property questions solved, they plan to offer all the public content to users as waldorf can do it no more. You'll see soon, OS updates, presets etc. available again.

That's a great news!

Musnoz writes us with this tip: Finale 2004 was released a month ago for Mac OS X, but you can now download (65 M) the demo version from MakeMusic!'s website. Take it for a spin and let us know what you think. -PK