In the April issue of Recording Magazine's French edition, the bundled CD features a free VSTi, Carbon by Native Instrument (OS 9, OS X and PC). Carbon features four oscillators, a noise generator, a multimode resonant filter, drive FX, 4 band EQ, 2 LFOs, 2 envelopes, delay and stereo chorus, all with low CPU consumption. 100 patches for Carbon are on the CD, as well. A no-brainer at less than 6 Euros!

Ed: Anglophones, don't despair -- certainly you'll find an import in the UK and many larger booksellers here in the US carry French publications. Hit comments and let us know if you're able to track one down. -PK

RogueAmoeba has released major updates of their audio software. Audio Hijack Pro has been updated to version 1.3 with a number of bugfixes, including iTunes crossfade compatibility; its next version will arrive in the summer and the Lite version has been updated to 2.1.1. NiceCast has hit 1.5.1 with improved AppleScript support. RogueAmoeba has also released an improved version of its streaming audio server
(www.macstreams.com).

Updates are free for registered users, downloadable from the link below.

Wave Arts has announced FinalPlug, a peak limiter/volume maximizer plug-in that combines several of the company's major products, TrackPlug, MasterVerb and WaveSurround Pro. Final Plug can be used on individual tracks or an entire mix, operating in mono to mono or stereo to stereo modes, with up to 192 kHz sampling rate. Free 30-day demo download; full version is available immediately for US$149.95 for Mac OS X AU/MAS/VST/RTAS and Mac OS 9 MAS/VST/RTAS.

Version 2.0 of MHC's Space Synthesizer is now available as an AudioUnit plugin for Mac OS X (plus VST on Mac OS X). The AudioUnit version of 2.0 contains the same features as the VST version: 17 new waveforms, a new GUI, and 256 presets, including the old 128 presets and 128 new ones. Space Synth 2.0 is part of the Studio Setup plugin bundle which costs $89, and a 30 day trial version is available.