Panic announced that the company has decided to officially retire Audion, its popular Mac MP3 player/encoder. The good news is that Audion is now free of charge but is no longer being actively developed, and is provided as-is without support.

Audion X 3.0.2 is available in MM softwares section.

Make Music just updated its music notation software Finale to version 2005a. This latest update now features a new System Spacing Options, repeat "Show On" settings in Document Options, human Playback improvements include enhanced Incorporate MIDI Data, batch processing FPA files is now possible with FinaleScript and many bugs fixed.

As usual this free update is available in MacMusic softwares section.

Digidesign just posted an update to version 6.7 for its Core Audio manager. This new driver features : fix for large TDM systems where the driver would timeout waiting for the Manager app to auto-launch and fixed a problem where older versions of Avid Xpress DV and Avid Xpress Pro would produce noise out of outputs 5-8.

Native Instruments announced that a demo version of Battery 2 is now available. Battery 2 takes drum sampling to the next level with a powerful new sampling engine, enhanced sound shaping and modulation capabilities, sophisticated
sample control and a revised user interface. The Battery 2 demo version comes with a selection of five drum kits, and is available now as a free download on the NI website.

Both demo and full versions are now available. For more information, please see www.ni-battery.com.

ChucK is a new audio programming language for real-time synthesis, composition, and performance, which runs on commodity operating systems. ChucK presents a new time-based concurrent programming model, which supports multiple, simultaneous, dynamic control rates, and the ability to add, remove, and modify code, on-the-fly, while the program is running, without stopping or restarting.

The 1.1.5.3 version is available in our softs section.