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MOTU's Digital Performer Strikes Again! The Mark of the Unicorn people recently blew our socks off when they dropped by to give us a first look at their latest update of Digital Performer Version 2.1. Wow! These guys have been busy. The best part of MOTU's demo was that a huge shipment of Digital Performer 2.1 software arrived at our warehouse the very same morning, ready for us to ship to you on a moment's notice! We're not talking about vaporware here: Digital Performer 2.1 ($795 list/$295 list upgrade) is shipping right now!
MOTU representatives showed us awesome new capabilities in 2.1, including some we've never seen before. We've all been very impressed with the amazing strides the software has made in recent years, For starters, Digital Performer can now record and play back digital audio tracks on a Power Mac without any extra audio hardware. That's right. If you've been dreaming of having the power and flexibility of hard disk recording at your fingertips, you can now do it without purchasing expensive audio cards. All you need is Digital Performer 2.1. MOTU reports that a fast Power Mac (200 MHz or better) with a fast hard drive can play up to 40+ tracks of audio! The MOTU reps did their entire demo for us using only a PowerBook 3400c which was cranking out over 20 tracks of 16-bit, CD-quality digital audio - along with real time, 32-bit effects processing on all the tracks! Effects include reverb, parametric EQ (up to 40 bands per track!), dynamics (compressor, expander, limiter, gate), chorus, echo, flanger, phase shifter and more. MOTU soloed a female vocal track in their mix and demoed the effects one at a time so we could really listen to the quality of each effect. We were impressed! MOTU explained that the effects processing is done by the native PowerPC chip with 32-bit floating point calculations. That's 8 bits better than the 24-bit processing found in some hardware-based hard disk recorders. MOTU also showed us a new Performance Monitor window in the program that tells you, by percent, how much of the computer's processing power you are using at any given time. You can clearly see how much bandwidth you have available so that you can make intelligent decisions about applying effects and managing your CPU resources. Unlike other programs, Digital Performer is meticulous about notifying you when your computer can't keep up with all the tracks and processing you are asking it to do. If your computer can't play as much as one sample, 2.1 produces an alert dialog notifying you, along with suggestions for reallocating your computer's resources. Digital Performer's new native audio capabilities also include an impressive virtual mixing environment that is identical to the one you see in Digital Performer when running on a $10,000 Pro Tools III/TDM system. In the audio track assignment menus, you see inputs, outputs, audio voices, and a configurable number of "virtual" busses. Version 2.1 was running with 32 voices on the 3400c with 48 busses! Each audio track has 4 sends (pre and post fader), and any bus can be routed to any audio track, including automatable aux tracks and master faders. In addition to support for Digidesign's entire line of hardware up to Pro Tools III/TDM, MOTU reports that by the time you read this, Digital Performer will also support Korg's new 1212 I/O card and Audiomedia II and III cards under the new MOTU Audio System engine. Very slick! Next, MOTU had a Kurzweil K2500 sampler connected to the PowerBook via SCSI. They opened the new Samplers window and voila: there were all the samples currently loaded in the 2500's RAM listed right on the Mac's screen! They dragged a sample from the Samplers window into the Soundbites window and Digital Performer converted the sample into SDII format, then played the sample (now in the form of hard disk audio) directly from the Mac hard drive. After applying some DSP processing to the sample, they dragged the sample back into the Samplers window, which transferred it back to the K2500. Finally, they triggered the newly processed sample from MIDI notes in a MIDI track. Wow! The worlds of samplers and multi-track hard disk recording are now united. MOTU wrapped up their demo by showing us a host of other cool new features, like support for Adobe Premiere plug-ins and the new Bounce to Disk command, but you'll have to get further information from your Sweetwater Sales Engineer or on our Web Site (at www.sweetwater.com/products/motu/digital_performer.html). We are genuinely impressed with Digital Performer 2.1. MOTU is putting a lot of effort into this software and the effort is paying off in a big way. We strongly suggest that you call us right away to get your special low price on Digital Performer. If you have another sequencer, we have competitively priced upgrades in stock now that can be on your doorstep tomorrow. Master Index | Sweet Notes Index | Home | Back Page | Next Page |
with its ground-breaking PureDSP pitch-shifting and time stretching, 100% PowerPC native speed, background audio file processing and many other innovations. But their demo of Version 2.1 just put it right over the top.