Native Instruments has announced Maschine
(http://www.native-instruments.com/Maschine.info), a next-generation
groove production studio for beat creation and arrangement. It will
be available in March at a suggested retail price of US$699.
The system combines a software sequencer and sampler with an
integrated performance controller. Maschine is built on a combination
of groove box and drum machine workflows.
Developers, take note: there’s a new project for writing Cocoa
applications in the Basic programming language similar to VB: KBasic
(http://www.kbasic.com/). It’s described as a full featured language,
which supports the best modern programming techniques known with
objects, events and lots of documentation.
KBasic is based on Qt 4.4 and the upcomming Qt 4.5, which directly
supports Cocoa. This means KBasic becomes Cocoa-based on Mac
platforms (leaving Carbon).
EastWest (http://www.soundsonline.com) has announced an update for
its Quantum Leap SD virtual software instrument at this week’s
National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show. The company has
also introduced Play 2.0, an update of software that programs the
EastWest virtual instrument collections.
Quantum Leap SD2 offers a combination of new percussion sounds and a
collection of the “best of sounds” from the SD1 package, according to
producer Nick Phoenix.
The Final Cut Pro Users Group says a standing room only crowd
attended the recent 8th Annual Macworld FCPUG SuperMeet held at the
Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on Jan.7. The next
SuperMeet will be held Tuesday, April 21, in Las Vegas alongside the
giant NAB trade show. The organizers are already lining up the venue
and sponsors with the expectation to draw record attendance.
“Historically, every SuperMeet we hold sells out, but this one was a
complete sell out with a lot of folks standing in the aisles.
Wolfram Research (http://www.wolframresearch.com) has released
Mathematica Player Pro 7, an update of the professional platform for
delivering interactive applications built with the new Mathematica 7
technology. It’s a free download.
With the recently released Mathematica 7, Wolfram Research added over
500 new functions and integrated parallel computing into its standard
product. The new Player Pro 7 comes with the same built-in technology
to parallelize computations over multiple cores.