Arbiter France has announced the coming availability of an RME interface based on Firewire 800 technology (with backwards-compatibility with Firewire 400). The interface supports up to a whopping 56 channels (including ADAT channels), with 192kHz, 25-bit resolution, four class A preamps, two ADAT ports, a MIDI port, wordclock and S/PDIF with the classic 8 analog I/O.

Ed: Incredible: a dream interface. There's a huge amount of I/O there for ADAT lovers. We'll keep you posted as more details emerge. -PK

Refuse Software is releasing an update of Refuse for OS 9. This software allow to connect Pro Tools and Reason using a rewire link. This new version fixes a bug with the sampling frequency and enhance the user's interface. This 1.1 update is free for all registered users.

Happy 1st Birthday to the iTunes Music Store today! To celebrate, Apple has launched iTunes 4.5, with playlist publishing, radio charts, movie trailers and music videos. There's also "Party Shuffle" mode which is a huge boon for those of us who like to take our whole library and hit shuffle: the new feature lets you designate either a library or specific playlist, make changes to the order on the fly, and even save random plays. Here are features I'm even more excited about, though: iTunes 4.5 automatically converts Microsoft WMA files to AAC, and adds Apple Lossless, with CD quality audio in half the size. This could be iTunes 5, as far as I'm concerned.

In other news, iTunes has sold 70 million songs in its first year, short of Apple's 100 million goal but impressive nonetheless (and some of us still haven't redeemed all our Pepsi caps yet!) So, celebrate the 1 year birthday by downloading a free Foo Fighters tune, courtesy Apple -- the first of a series in which one new free song is released each week.

Ed: Yep, we're a day late with this one. Blame latency. -PK

Have a look at the new Creamware WebSite. SFP4 is downloadable (with lot of bugs fixed) and attractive prices for their latest plug-ins.