Spectrasonics is fully committed to developing for the new Intel Macintosh platform. This is an exciting and major platform change for all music software hosts and plug-ins.
Industry-wide, 2006 will be a transition year on the Mac music software platform. As a result, the current PowerPC G4/G5 systems are a much more mature, robust platform for professional music production, where a variety of stable software applications and plug-ins is required.
Although the new Intel Mac computers look the same and feel the same as Power PC Macs, they are fundamentally different inside. Apple’s PowerPC software emulation layer – called “Rosetta”- is not suitable for realtime audio work in most digital audio workstations. Therefore, audio plug-ins in particular must be recoded as native “Universal Binaries” to work within native Universal Binary hosts. For the end user, this means major updates to every plug-in and music software host you are used to using on your PowerPC G4/G5 Macs.
Stylus RMX/S.A.G.E.
Spectrasonics has released a FREE support update for our best-selling Stylus RMX – Realtime Groove Module on the Intel Mac platform. The new version supports all Mac OSX Universal Binary VST and Audio Unit hosts, including Logic Pro 7.2, Garageband 3, Ableton Live and others.
Being one of the first third party plug-ins to support the new Universal Binary format, Spectrasonics has opened a new Public Beta forum for registered Stylus RMX users to try it out and give us feedback as host software applications become available for the new Intel Mac platform.
The new Stylus RMX Intel Mac Public Beta forum is located at http://publicbeta.spectrasonics.net/
Spectrasonics president Eric Persing explains the new public testing program, “Some of our customers like to be on the forefront of the very latest technology. So we wanted to give these early Intel Mac adopters a chance to use their Stylus RMX right away, even before most of the major hosts have been released. The public beta forum gives them a chance to work with it, and a chance for us to gain valuable feedback as we make the major transition to Intel Mac Universal Binary plug-ins.”
Atmosphere/Trilogy/UVI engine
As many people know, our popular Atmosphere and Trilogy instruments use a special version of the UVI engine, which Spectrasonics originally licensed from Univers Sons – not our own in-house developed S.A.G.E. (Spectrasonics Advanced Groove Engine) technology that Stylus RMX uses.
The Intel Mac transition is a major one for all music software companies to make, but it’s much easier to make this transition with in-house developed technology. This is one of the main reasons why we have been able to make the transition to Universal Binary for Stylus RMX so quickly.
Therefore, it’s going to take much more time for our Atmosphere and Trilogy customers to be able to make the transition to the Intel Mac world than it has for Stylus RMX users.
Although we cannot announce the specifics or a timetable yet about our plans for Atmosphere and Trilogy, we can say that we are fully committed to their future development and long-term growth – and these future plans will of course include native support for Universal Binaries on Intel Macs.