TXT:: I'm back from San Francisco after 3 days of the Macworld Expo 2003. Sadly, the expo seemed a little smaller this year with fewer venders showing their new Mac stuff. This is certainly the result of the slump in the technology sector and the downturn of the economy.

Despite the rumors that this year's expo would be the least exciting in a long time, Apple Computers' new product line certainly proved the rumors wrong.

Steve Jobs proclaimed 2003 as "The Year of the Notebook" for Apple Computers. The new line of powerbooks was definitely the main attraction at the expo. It was quite a wait before I actually had the chance to try one out, but I managed to fight my way through and get my hands on one.

It's BIG.... I mean that it's bigger than the ads suggest. When the Ads for the TiBook came out, the ad made the TiBook look bigger than it actually was. The AnodizedBook is the opposite. Make no mistake, it's much bigger than a TiBook.

Other than that it's really a sweet machine and it has an Audio input!

Last summer, I was invited to a focus group organized by an "anonymous" Pro Audio Software company in the SF Bay Area. The topics soon shifted to a Pro Tools discussion and one of the suggestions we offered was to incorporate time stretching automatically by adjusting regions in the editor. Suprisingly, Digidesign has incorporated this feature in Pro Tools 6 --now Mac OS X compatable. Now, you can lock the editor to a quantization grid, and stretch the region to fit into that grid section and a streched/compressed region is automatically rendered. Groove Quantize feature is also included in PT 6. The Representative from Digidesign also mentioned that PT 6 LE might work with Audiomedia III cards.

A representative from Edirol was at the show with the new Roland PCR-30 MIDI controller. This is by far the best MIDI controller I've seen. It's USB powered and will act as a MIDI interface. Unlike the Oxy8 which has no MIDI input, the PCR-Series of controllers will accept MIDI input from an external device. You can connect a drum machine to the PCR and it will route MIDI Clock data into your computer so you can synchronize your hardware with software like Reason :-)

I've always liked the Roland Keyboard action, and the PCR has that classic Roland feel. The keys are solid and the action is stiff enough to for sensitive velocity playing. They are also felt padded so the impact is not hard like some controllers.

At one of the User Conferences, a representative from Apogee Electronics gave a presentation on Using your powerbook as a mobile Recording studio. During the presentation, he introduced a new product called the "MiniDAC". This is a USB 2 channel Digital to Audio converter that handles sample rates up to 192khz and 24bit resolution. The MiniDAC is the complement to the MiniMe ADC. Both devices are fully compatable with CoreAudio.

As far as firewire mLAN support AMBus mLAN cards, the apogee Rep clarified that there is a hold up at apple. Eventually there will be mLAN support, but he was really uncertain about Apple's time frame. I tried to find someone at Apple who might know something, but most of the time I got the "what's that?" answer.

M-Audio won a "Best in Show" award at Macworld 03. Congratulations to them! They also had their new keyboard controller on display--Radium

Yeah... I thought the same thing, too, when I heard the name "Radium" :-)

I guess someone in their marketing department doesn't know much about internet stuff...or perhaps they do and they are trying to market it to people who use "Radium" stuff :-)

Cycling '74 didn't have a booth at the show, but they did have a pretty nice party during the week of the Macworld Expo.

The party was held in someones (jhno's?) loft, and the cycling 74 crew put together some performances. When I walked in Joshua Kit Clayton was busy on the turntables while others were setting up their powerbooks and preparing their Max/MSP performances along with jitter video presentations.

I even managed to find copies of Producing Music with Reason at the show! I was rather excited since I had not seen the packaged version. (Yeah, you would have thought I would have been sent one, eh?)

The guys at Other World Computing aka Macsales.com have the tutorial CD rom in stock. They are located in Illinois, so anyone interested in purchasing it without the overseas shipping will find it at their online store and ready to ship. I purchased copies for under $30. The same price is on their online store!

I also attended most of the Users Conferences that pertained to music. One really invaluable bit of information was passed on by David Mash from the Berklee college of music. If you have used the new Audio MIDI Setup utility, you're probably wondering how to customize icons in the MIDI setup. David Mash presented one version, however I've made a slight change with the following criteria that must be met in order to use custom instrument icons: