Jef Raskin, the man who gave his name to the Macintosh (nammed in reference to his favorite apple brand, the macintosh) passed away saturday from a pancreas cancer at the age of 61 years. Informatic professor, he was hired at Apple in 78 when the company only had 30 employees. In 79 he was asked to lead the development team in charge of creating a simple and economic computer. He was the creator of the famous "Drag and Drop" who was and still is a highlight of the grafic interface of Mac OS....He quit the project in 81 following a conflict with Steve Jobs.

DSP-Quattro is a powerful sound editor, a highly innovative product that uses the new millennium latest technology. This new update (v2.0.2) now features : the audio file Info dialog allows the editing of the sample rate to force this value without applying any resampling algorithm, the MIDI parameters are editable into the audio file Info dialog, DSP-Quattro keeps memory of the last mouse click position on the waveform when pausing the audio file player, and several bugfixes.

This new DSP Quattro update is available in the softwares section.

Before the keynote, the Mac sites firmly mentionned that an audio interface "made in Apple" may be released and this rumour apprently resurfaces. Indeed according to various sites (macgénération, appleinsider), it seems that this famous interface audio (Asteroid ou "Q97") does exist. Our colleagues base their judgement on the resources of the GarageBand 2 application, in which you can find an image file "asteroid.tiff" whose creation date goes back to November 13th 2004. We don't have any information about the progress in this interface project, which could though be a real one since it infuriates Apple when a site mentions it.

To Be Continued...

U-he has just released the VST version of the Filterscape plug-in for MacOS X. Filterscape is a flexible sound bending plug-in. It's a parametric equalizer. It's a virtual analog filter. It's a delay effect. It's a modulation device. It's all at once - and more. In addition to the effects plugin, there are 2 sister plugins included. One of which is Filterscape VA, a virtual synthesizer, the other one is Filterscape Q6, an advanced, dynamic 6-banded equalizer.

The user manual has also been finished.

X-SpatFX is a program for MacOSX to be used with the X-Spat card (made by A & G Soluzioni Digitali) and generates 3D spatial effects for one (assignable) channel of the card. It can be used in conjunction with A&Gs X-Spat controller to add the excitement of 3D special effects to live performances conducted in the 3-D soundspace that the X-Spat card provides. 'Snapshots' in X-SpatFX are recalled via MIDI program change messages, and the interface provides a 3-D graphical interpretation of the position of the sound source in the 3-D soundspace.

A demo version is available as download.