Digital Performer 5.1 is now available as a free update to all registered DP5 users. This maintenance update, provided as a Universal Binary application, can be installed on an Intel Mac or PowerPC Mac and provides numerous code enhancements and optimizations for both Mac platforms.

Avid Technology, announced that it has acquired Sibelius Software Ltd., for approximately $23 million. Sibelius is a leading music applications software company with products for professionals, educators, and students who want to use computers to write, teach or learn music. The deal further expands Avid's broad portfolio of digital content creation tools with software for music notation and composition, coursework, testing, playback, publishing, authoring, and e-commerce. As a business unit of Avid's audio division, Digidesign, Sibelius will continue to develop and market its own line of software, and going forward, customers can expect to see exclusive and targeted product offerings that combine a range of powerful tools, including Sibelius software, Digidesign Pro Tools Academic software, and M-Audio keyboards, microphones, and other audio peripherals.

X-spat boX is a sort of external DSP expander with 8 mono or 4 stereo inputs and a free configurable multichannel output (from stereo to 8.0 including 5.1 and 7.1). As any other outboard (delay, reverb and so on), just connect the X-spat boX output to an AUX Bus of your mixer and send the audio sources to be processed to one or more X-spat boX inputs.

The X-spat boX is based on a cluster of ADSP-21161N processors dedicated to signal routing, preprocessing of inputs to audio matrix, sends, returns and effects. The Matrix offer various 3D Positional Audio effects in real time, including IAD, ITD, Front/rear Spectral Enhance and Doppler, among the others.
XSpatBoX allows 8 input channels (ADAT or FireWire to DSP card) and up to 8 output channels (DSP to ADAT or FireWire). A flexible routing section allows total reconfiguration of all the available inputs and outputs via MIDI. Surround 5.1 or 7.1 configurations, with discrete channels, offer also external sends and stereo/mono monitoring options. An impressive MIDI implementation chart ensures full compatibility with the best audio/MIDI softwares on the market like Cubase SX, DP4, Logic Pro, ProTools etc.

Wonder Warp Software has today released version 4 of its chord dictionary and song-sketching tool SimpleChord. The new release contains several long-requested features including MIDI export, looped playback, ChordPro importing, and display of interval information. It also greatly expands the selection of chords users can choose from and sports a redesigned user interface. The addition of Standard MIDI file exporting should come as good news to the many SimpleChord users who use its progressions feature to lay down the chords of a song before fleshing it out in other applications like GarageBand, Logic, Finale, or Sibelius. The company has plans to offer a screencast tutorial on the topic in the next week.

The software costs $12.95, but is available for a full-featured 14-day trial. The upgrade is free for existing registered users.

The Golden Audio Gate | GAG-1 by Kjaerhus Audio is a versatile gate / expander & ducking plug-in made for such applications as noise-gating, gated reverb, voice-over, de-breathing and many other practical and creative purposes. The side-chain can be fed with either internal or external audio, or controlled by a MIDI key. High-cut and low-cut filters are available in the side chain to narrow the frequency range in which the gate should respond. The envelope is controlled by attack, hold and decay parameters where the hold function has a soft release behavior contributing to the unique character of this gate. Other parameters such as range, ratio and knee are used to control the audio attenuation and help make this gate sound more musical than typical "bi-state" noise gates. Three plug-in variants are available in the package; stereo, stereo with side chain, and mono with side chain. There is no latency, which makes this the ideal tool for real time performance in the studio or on stage. All parameters can be controlled from MIDI controllers.

GAG will ship on August 2nd in VST/Audio Units for $78.