As some of you may have marked it, the update of Tiger to 10.4.3 is available. A few important things to know beforehand:
- This is a heavy update, the combo is 105 MB, and the smallest automatic update is "only" 57 MB.
- A lot of things are changed, in particular in Core Audio, so I strongly recommend not to try it on productive computers, let some try it before.
- Prepare your OS before the update, verify all is well (drive, permissions). Repair permissions after too as usual.
- note that the update include previous security updates, as they seem to be a source of problems for some plug-ins, especially in Cubase, beware! (see the forum on this issue).

The exciting other stuff: Safari pass the acidtest, that is, it is the only browser out there fully W3C compliant for CSS. Lots of fixes in Spotlight, syncing, Mail, networking, iChat… Now the Disk Utility can verify the Mac OS X 10.4 startup volume (Yeahhh! at last!)

Also, Apple stated again but this time with a strong warning that Quartz 2D Extreme is still unsupported but this time it leads to kernel panics if enabled, you're warned, it's true!

No news of a iPumpKin Widget though… ;)

MacMusic reminds you that tonight, in the USA, Canada and EEC countries : clocks return to Standard-Winter Time. So at three o'clock sharp, you will have to put the hands back an hour, and like magic, it will only be two then ! So the choice is yours : it can either be one hour sleeping , or one partying and for some of you one exchanging in the forum ...

Don't forget to go to your MM "user control panel" to ajust the base time zone ! ("user account", "Control Panel : board setting").

Audio Ease announces a cosmetic update - version 5.1.1 - for Altiverb. They also announce, because Digidesign decided to give up HTDM, that the upcoming Altiverb version 6 will be available as TDM version ! A special upgrade offer will be available for HTDM registered users.

ESI unveils the new MIDI Mate, a very compact-sized MIDI interface, USB powered. It features 16 MIDI channels, one input, one output, and a standard USB MIDI adapter cable. The MIDI Mate is Mac OS X compatible.

It costs $49,95.

Sonic Studio announces PreMaster CD, a simplified version of SonicStudio DDP. This new tool is a host–based premastering application that opens AIFF, WAV, BWF and SD2 stereo files. PreMaster CD creates DDP version 2 file sets, and CD-Rs & Roxio's Jam image file format. The program features Sonic Studio's familiar NGC user interface, and is OS X–native.

PreMaster CD will cost $795.