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| Originally Published: 08/19/99
What caught our attention the quickest at this year's Summer NAMM show was the "purvasivness of the iMac" in our society, music society, if I may paraphrase Mr. Jobs. Much of these revelations can be found by checking out our feature article "It's an i, i, i World!" Also there a re a couple tidbits at our iMacRocks section.
More Hardware: Apogee, notorious for high end studio electronics, caught our attention with their product line and the Macs tucked here and there at their booth. Yamaha spokespersons are playing it pretty close to the vest as to info on the implementation of mLan, their standard for music & multimedia over the IEEE-1394 (FireWire) protocol bus, on soon to be released products. One unnamed source in the pro audio division at Yamaha tells us that there will be one or more products (keyboard, most likely) that has the hardware provision inside for an mLan card to be added. Our source continued to point out no plans have been made to make this feature obvious or available to the consumer for "a while." Not much to go on there; but it does confirm Yamaha is going ahead with it's 1394 plans, albeit cautiously. Find out more about FireWire, and our biased interest in the protocol, at MacRocks.com's FireWatch section.
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| | NAMM Wrap Up, Pt. I 
Here's a quick run down of some of the insights and goodies we had encountered at the trade show in Nashville. By: Cris Dunnam, Editor Hardware: I had a very encouraging talk with MIDIMan/MAudio Technical Support Manager J.D. Mars. Prior to the trade show I had received a number of emails from panic stricken MIDISport 2x2 buyers that could not get the darn thing to work on their iMac or blue G3. Rest assured, it will work, but Mars says to look over the tech support FAQ info at their site for the remedies to the most common problems with this product. So far all the questions we have received on this subject were solvable by upgrading or reinstalling Mac OS8.6 properly -- that's a lot easier than having to do it on yer peecee!
The DM Pro Kit is a five piece system including a drum rack, dual trigger snare, three toms (single trigger), a beefy inverted beater & kick trigger block, hi hat pedal & cymbal, crash (with choke) and a dual trigger ride cymbal. Also included are Alesis' DM Pro module, all cables and mounting hardware. At $2599.00 suggested retail price, the combo of Hart's top of the heap pads & controllers and Alesis' award winning 64 voice drum module, makes it worth every penny for a true professional live or studio electronic kit.
Software: Our good friend Andre Rocke at Bitheadz Software This software from Bitheadz is among our favorites and we plan to have reviews very soon -- that is if our assignment editor would stop playing with it and start writing. We had a brief but pleasant chat with Jeanette Scarborough from Koblo Software, makers of the Stella, Vibra & Gamma range of software synthesizers. Koblo's Project manager Max Gronlund and Chief Engineer Emil Tin seemed to capture the interest of anyone passing by the modest booth and display at the end of NAMM's 'Technology Central' showcase. Quite brilliant was the minimalism of their booth. Sure they had a big sign with their logo emblazoned -- the real eye catcher was the B&W G3 with Studio LCD running Koblo's product line. Koblo's software has a fabulous interface and generally has low memory requirements. MacRocks.com will be reviewing select products from Koblo very soon! What we can tell you now is, we love it! TC Electronics impressed us with an array of high end software and plug ins for ProTools and VST. Although there we many new plug ins for DirectX on the PC, the attention was on the Mac products. TC MegaReverb for ProTools features the company's M5000 algorithm technology and hundreds of reverb types for your ProTools |24 Mix system. My personal favorite was Spark, a realtime digital audio editor for the MacOS. Among it's many features, Spark offers some very useful input multibanding to apply specific dynamic and effect processes to individual eq bands within an audio track. This is essentially the same technique I like to use via hardware in the old kind (analog) studio. (Did I mention this was high end stuff?). Speaking of high end, if you're interested in the cutting edge of audio analization, go see our new friends at Metric Halo Laboratories. Co-founder Dr. B.J. Buchalter gave us brilliant conversation regarding Macs, audio, ProTools and their product, SpectraFoo. This stuff is way out there. If you're not using ProTools, you'll not have much use for SpectraFoo; Metric Halo deserves mention as there is a very interesting story about this company, and it's founders, the brothers Buchalter. With so much talk about the public perception of Bill Gates as some kind of technological genius, it's good to know there is true genius out there interested in better music and sound, rather than greed & world domination. Worth checking out their bio on the Metric Halo web site. A very interesting conversation with music notation software Sibelius' Western Region Manager Ted Peterson. Again, we were drawn to their booth (as with many) by the very obvious placement of one or more Macs. In this case, an old Blackbird (500-series PowerBook). Sibelius appears to be the end all in notation software, but until a few month's ago was only available in a WinTel version. After about a year of Wintel availability in the highly populated Los Angeles pro music market, no copies of the product were sold. Peterson said the reason was, "...no one in L.A. uses Wintel machines for music." We didn't get much of a chance to test drive the software, but just glancing over the features makes it seem to be a top choice for stand alone music notation on the Mac -- particularly once all of the features from the wintel version are made available to the Mac side of life. One of the coolest Mac-ready products we witnessed at NAMM was a Filemaker app designed specifically fo What I do know is this software is worth it's weight in gold to the pro or semi pro, giging musician. Rather than bloat this paragraph with details, we will publish a feature review on this product very soon -- it's very cool!
We've got volumes of stuff to shovel to the sight very soon. Check back for more of the info that matters most the the Mac music user. |
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Among the many exhibitors we were pleased to discover were totally Mac based organizations was 
tells us their Unity & Retro software is doing well and are very excited about their newest products Black & Whites, Osmosis and the much anticipated VooDoo drum machine software. If you're serious about piano and want nothing but the best in multisampled piano sounds, Black & Whites is for you. Osmosis is a utility for converting and importing Akai type sample files for use on your Mac. 