The MacWorld Conference and Expo will take place from January 10 to 15, 2005 at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco. The Steve Job's MacWorld keynote address will take place on Tuesday, January 11 at 9:00 AM.

PG Music has announced a general maintenance update, adding styles descriptions, for Band-in-a-Box, its automatic music accompaniment software. This version 12b23 is of course freely downloadable from the MacMusic softwares section.

FontanaMixer 1.0 by Karlheinz Essl is a generative sound environment based on John Cage's "Fontana Mix" (1958). The original concept of the piece uses a graphical random generator that is supplied with the score. This new computerized version, however, uses realtime sound generation and produces completely unforeseeable sonic results which are reflecting Cage's ideas of indeterminacy, chance, and silence.

LinPlug has announced an update to version 2.1.3 for DaOrgan, the recreation of the B3 organ, and an other update to version 2.1.2 for Albino, the synthesizer by Rob Papen. These two updates both fixe problems when saving or restoring presets using daOrgan's or Albino's internal file functions.

Fraunhofer IIS has announced the availability of MP3 Surround Evaluation Software 1.0 for Mac OS X. MP3 Surround supports high-quality multi-channel sound at bit rates comparable to those currently used to encode stereo MP3 material, resulting in files half the size of common compressed surround formats. At the same time, the new format offers complete backward compatibility to any existing MP3 software and hardware devices. MP3 Surround was developed by Fraunhofer IIS in collaboration with Agere Systems. Using a psychoacoustic technique called binaural cue coding, MP3 Surround captures the spatial image information of multi-channel sound.

The evaluation period of the MP3 Surround encoder will expire on the 31st of December 2005.