Metasynth

U&I Software has released MetaSynth 5, an electronic music studio for Mac OS X.

MetaSynth is not intended to be a soft-synth or plug-in. It is a complete sound design and electronic music composition environment with six “rooms “that you can use to create and process sounds in a variety of paradigm-smashing ways.

MetaSynth 5 Features:

• MetaSynth 5 is universal binary, multi-threaded and fully Leopard-compatible.
• Recording available in both Sample Editor and Montage Room.
• 32-bit floating point sound buffers and 64-bit floating point math for all audio operations.
• Full support for .caf and .wav files. – MetaSynth 5 can read and write .aif, .sd2, .caf and .wav files in all rooms.
• Add output device selection to Preferences. – MetaSynth no longer uses the default output device chosen in Audio MIDI Setup. MetaSynth now allows the selection of any available output device.
• Files can be saved at up to 32-bit resolution.
• Much longer sounds can be loaded and created than previously.

MetaSynth retails for $599.

If you’ve used MetaSynth, leave a comment with your thoughts!

Electronic Musician has an interesting article penned by Dennis Miller that looks at 8 tools for turning photographs into audio and manipulating audio visually:

Eerybody knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. But did you know that a picture can also buy you the frequencies of a thousand oscillators?

Using any of several modern music applications, you can convert the data that forms a picture on the computer screen into information that will generate an audio file. In most cases, the program uses the vertical position of each pixel of the image to control frequency and one or more color (RGB) values for parameters such as amplitude and stereo position.

Applications covered include:

1. Adobe Audition 3,
2. Thomas Baudel’s HighC 2.2
3. Camel Audio’s Cameleon 5000 1.5
4. Rasmus Ekman’s CoagulaLight 1.66
5. Nicolas Fournel’s AudioPaint 2.1
6. Image Line FL Studio 8
7. U&I Software MetaSynth 4
8. VirSyn Poseidon 1.4

It would have been nice if the online edition of this article had included audio or video demos of these apps, which would have made it more clear why these can be useful tools.