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.

LinPlug has updated SaxLab to v1.0.1 (minor bugfixes) and released a beta version 4.1.2 of RM IV, which features : minor bugfixes, MIDI import improved and Logic 7 integration improved.

The demo version of SaxLab is also now available.

Expert sleepers has announced Merger, a utility plug-in that combines two audio channels into one. This is typically useful for e.g. vocoder plug-ins that expect their two inputs on either side of a stereo pair.

Merger is available as a free download.

I3 has just updated its two track audio editor DSP-Quattro to version 2.0.1. This new release features new PlayList command 'Set All Pauses To", the AU plug-in name does not include the vendor name when displaying it on the Effx Send Mixer, a new settable parameter on the preference dialog for the default 'pause' value for newly created PlayList tracks. It also fixes a problem with Waves, Sony and some others AU plug-ins, appearing greyed out in 2.0, and fixes a problem with the Drag&Drop to the finder under MacOS 8/9.

Apple today announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded more than 200 million songs from the iTunes Music Store. The 200 millionth song was part of "The Complete U2" and was purchased by Ryan Alekman from Belchertown, MA ! "iTunes has now sold over 200 million songs, making it the world's number one online music store by far," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.

The iTunes Music Store features a holiday genre page with thousands of holiday favorites, including classics such as Ella Fitzgerald's "Sleigh Ride" and contemporary favorites like Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas" and others..