GOOD AUDIO IMPROVES any multimedia title or presentation. Now two new tools from InVision Interactive and Macromedia make Mac audio sound better.
CyberSynth
With QuickTime 2.0, Apple put a MIDI synthesizer into every Mac, but the quality is frankly less than professional. InVision, the sound-design firm behind Seinfeld's catchy bass riff, replaces the QuickTime Musical Instruments extension with its own MIDI synthesizer, which features 500 professionally produced sounds. The library includes the standard 128 General MIDI instruments, a host of drum and rhythm loops, and realistic sounds. The software can play back any MIDI or QuickTime MIDI track and ships with a simple yet complete MIDI sequencer. CyberSynth supports the OMS (Open Music System) driver, for hooking into sequencers such as Studio Vision Pro. Any of the 1,000 sounds in InVision's library can be plugged into CyberSynth. $249. 415-812-7380.
SoundEdit 16 v. 2
Macromedia has responded to the needs of multimedia and sound professionals with version 2 of SoundEdit 16, which offers a batch-processing application and supports AppleScript, to automate sound-file conversion and compression. Newly supported audio formats include Sun .AU, popular on the Internet, and QuickTime 2.1's IMA format, which compresses 16-bit audio to a quarter of its original size. SoundEdit 16 ships with three Xtra plug-ins for CD-audio import, loop tuning, and multitap preverb. Audio plug-ins that support the Adobe Premiere plug-in format also work in SoundEdit 16. $399. Upgrade, $129. 800-288-4797 or 415-252-2000.
