You all know (who doesn't in this world ?) our famous software section. This true Alladdin's cave for MacMacmusicians contains thousands of treasures, updates, freewares, sharewares where you can navigate, thanks to the famous tracker. And yet in a cave, as it is the case in any house, the paintwork has to be redone at times. It's done! From now on, the software section allows you to find the history of all the versions of a software, to have access to a complete list of software by the same manufacturer, to read all the news linked with this manufacturer, or else for plugins you'll be able to move from VST version to Audio Units version for example, in absolute comfort.

In the part of Aladdin, it's our friend June Bug who proposes these improvements and whose daily and titanic work allows us all, MacMusiciens, to have this softwares database : unique and essential.

Anwida Soft announces a new VST Pack for MacOS X, which contains 5 VST audio plug-ins in a bundle : CX1V compressor/expander, L1V limiter/maximizer, GEQ15V - 15 band 2/3 octave graphic equalizer, GEQ31V - 31 band 1/3 octave graphic equalizer and PEQ1V - parametric equalizer.

VST Pack costs $199.

IK Multimedia has announced their studio instrument workstation Studiophonik. This plugin station is designed to control the sound of a band in a studio and allows user to create a virtual band. Studiophonik offers a huge variety of different vintage and custom brand instruments and comes with 2 DVD of 7 GB sound sets.

Studiophonik will be be available from Spring 2005 at 399 euros.

Cycling '74 and Octiv released Octirama, a surround dynamics processor for Digidesign ProTools TDM systems. Octirama is a multi-band dynamics processor for 5.1 surround mastering for the Digidesign TDM environment. Octirama incorporates four and five band processing for each of five channels plus advanced bass management.

Octirama will be available in first quarter 2005 for $995.

Mackie has announced a new update to v2.0 of its Audio-Midi sequencer Tracktion. This new release introduces an enhanced MIDI editor, more comprehensive keyboard control and the ability to map hardware MIDI controllers to filter parameters. This version also adds a new 64-bit mix engine, improved external synchronization support, eight auxiliary sends and returns, and full integration for Mackie Control Universal and C4 controllers.

A demo version is available on Mackie web site.