Rumor says that Apple will discontinue standalone version of Soundtrack audio software. Effective last week, the company reportedly told its distribution partners that all variants of the Soundtrack application and license bundles are "End-of Life" and no further orders would be accepted. Separately, sources also anticipate that the company will soon release an update to its industry leading professional grade audio production tool, Logic Pro 7. The update, which is expected to debut prior to the National Association Music Merchants show during the third week of January, will reportedly update the application to version 7.1.

M-Audio announced three drivers updates for FireWire 410, FireWire Solo and FireWire Audiophile audio interfaces. These new drivers (v1.4.1) features : added support for the Ozonic, uninstaller now removes preference files and improved performance on older CPUs.

Info and downloads in the MM softs section.

Symbolic Sound today announced that Kyma is updated to X.1, and is a major update to its sound design environment. Kyma X.1 delivers its enhancements in threes support for using a Wacom pen and tablet as a 3 dimensional control surface, 3 new kinds of oscillators, and modules for turning presets into a 3 dimensional parameter subspace.

Kyma X.1 is now available as a download to registered Kyma X owners.

Chopitch is a VST plug-in for pitch shifting without delay featuring : dramatic pitch swoops in perfect time with the music, intelligent gating system, instant octave down, play bass lines on any instrument, pitch can follow the volume of the input signal, for "talking drum" type effects , and more.

Chopitch 1.0 becomes shareware and now costs 30$.

Bidule is a realtime modular creation studio aimed mainly at artists seeking a new creative environment to experiment with. With Bidule, you create your own live music creation environment, inserting audio and midi devices, ReWire Devices, VST instruments and plugins. This new 0.7002 version features : AU can now save any presets not just the User preset, faster application shutdown, Group Config Dialog: changed max number of ins/outs to 128, Polyphony Config Dialog: changed max number of voices to 128.

Bidule is available in the MM softs section.