Didn’t mommy always tell you to play nice and share? Then take this glorious app out on a test drive. Drumbeat lets you share images, documents, movies, and (of course) music with the hundreds of thousands of other users on the OpenNap Network. Preview files before you download them and play movies and music directly in the browser, too. Requires a Power Mac, Mac OS 8.1 or later (an OS X native version should be available by the time you read this), 48MB RAM, 8MB free hard disk space, and an Internet connection.
Why clutter your small home studio with hardware samplers and synthesizers—not to mention all those tangled cords that you’ll undoubtedly trip over at some point—when you can get the same sounds from software on your Mac? If you’re familiar with BitHead’s virtual synthesizer and sampler apps (Retro AS-1 and Unity DS-1, respectively), Unity Session combines both programs and integrates them into one environment, giving you the functionality of hardware samplers, analog synthesizers, and physically modeled instruments. Need a wicked violin solo but don’t have the instrument or capable hands? With Session, you can modify the physical sound characteristics of a bowed string model and play it directly from the virtual keyboard. You can also create your own sounds and instruments easily. So get busy! Requires a G3 333MHz or faster Mac (G4 recommended), Mac OS X 10.1 or later, 128MB RAM, 400MB free hard disk space, and a minimum 800 x 600 screen resolution.
