Crowley & Tripp are a new US company founded in 2004, interested into some unusual solutions for quality microphones, their latest soon to be released in february is the Naked Eye. It is a double voiced figure of eight ribbon mic, which can be hence be used with 2 different colors depending the way you turn it: rising response on one side like a vocal condenser without the typical harshness or, traditional warm ribbon response on the other side. It's a naked ribbon C&T design identical to the other high end models. It's the casing which makes the difference and it's blueish! Else it a low noise, high output, smooth bass and clean signal with a custom transformer design. Wood case, rotary mount (low difraction), 3 year warranty included.

Matched pairs can be purchased at no extra charges. Price $745

M-Audio will bring support for Apple's new Intel-based computers to several of its USB- and FireWire-compatible products. M-Audio posted beta drivers for the entire FireWire-compatible family of products, including FireWire 410, FireWire 1814 and the new ProjectMix I/O. Beta drivers for the Fast Track USB and Fast Track Pro have also been posted to M-Audio web site. The M-Audio engineering team is actively working on Intel-based Mac support for the remainder of the company's USB interfaces.

Looperlative LP1 is a 1U rack for loop addicts. It allows 8 stereo loop tracks simultaneously, each synchronised or not, with independent volume and feedback control. One stereo input, 3 stereo outputs (all: unbalanced TRS, maximum signal level +7 dBu, input impedance 20 kOhms, output impedance less than 100 Ohms, balanced i/o may be possible later thru a factory update).

A/D is done at a 6MHz sampling rate to end with a 24 bits/48 KHz signal (44.1 to 192 KHz may be possible later thru software update).

We just released a new version of our popular MacMusic Widget. Our widget prints the latest news, software updates and articles publisehd on MacMusic.org in Dashboard (Tiger required).

This new 1.2 version adds the following changes:
- Use the new RSS 2.0 feeds
- Parse 20 items
- Bigger item text size
- Back panel now shows the version number

Please note that the 1.0 version will no longer work. You have to replace it with the new 1.2 version.

Mackie announces the release of six new free plugins for its Tracktion 2 software. This free bundle includes :

- MRVB-1 Studio Reverb
- SP-1 Stereo Panner Plus
- CM-1 & CS-1 Mono & Stereo Compressors
- EQ6M & EQ6S 6-Band Mono & Stereo Multi-Mode EQ

The Mackie Mixing Tools is available for free for all Tracktion 2 Boxed Version owners.