U&I Software has released MetaSynth 5, a composition and sound design program using a strictly visual interface, with customizable tunings and image synthesis.
MetaSynth is a revolutionary electronic music and sound design environment. It is not a soft synth but a full-fledged sound design and electronic music studio.
Changes in MetaSynth 5
- General 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.
- Add output device selection to Preferences.
- Files can be saved at up to 32-bit resolution.
- Much longer sounds can be loaded and created than previously.
- Sample Editor
- New Slide Selection Samples tool.
- New Swap Left/Right command.
- Record to the sample editor.
- Longer sounds can be loaded than previously.
- Direct loading of mp3 format files.
- Effects Room
- Render to disk.
- Convolution.
- Improved Graphic EQ crossfades.
- Image Synth/Image Filter
- 11 instrument modes and many new instrument capabilities added.
- New Drawing Tools.
- New Remap Colors mode.
- Support for importing most image types.
- Remove the 16 kHz limit for notes.
- Render to disk command/2X oversampling.
- Batch Render command.
- Fit Tempo command.
- New Play Selection button.
- New scales added to Fit To Scale.
- Automatic retriggering.
- Instruments
- 11 new multiwaves instrument modes.
- New Grain Synth (Granular Synth) modes.
- Sampler/MultiSampler attack mode filters.
- Sampler/MultiSampler new sample start time options.
- Envelope control of many MultiWave Synth parameters.
- Fine-tuning parameter implemented for the wavetable synth.
- WaveTable editor updated.
- Several new instrument effects.
- Allow instruments to have an attack of 0 ms.
- Many new attack mode filters.
- Live switching between presets with different instrument types.
- MultiWaveSynth Anti-aliasing.
- Velocity mapping.
- Many more improvements.
- Image Filter
- Improve behavior when opening different preset libraries in the Image Synth and Image Filter Rooms.
- Improve behavior when using different libraries for the Select Preset and Apply Filter libraries.
- Improve cross-fade with surrounding audio when applying image filter to a selection.
- Spectrum Synth
- Pitch-range selection.
- Time Blur command.
- Pitch Blur command.
- Amplitude Color Table.
- Montage Room
- 24 Tracks.
- New Apply Current Effect command.
- New track effects.
- VTrack/Montage Room communication.
- New mechanism added for resetting path of missing sounds.
- Display muted tracks with faded colors for clarity.
- Shift-key-volume change for global volume change.
- Default montage.
- New multipoint envelopes.
- Stereo recording enabled.
- Allow selection of audio device input channel for recording.
- Montage no longer pre-mixes tracks to disk when recording.
- Send sounds, spectrum sequences and sequences to the current montage.
- VTrack/Montage Communication
- MetaSynth can now communicate with VTrack 2.6 or later.
- When VTrack is open, setting the insertion point in a montage will cause VTrack to display the corresponding image in its preview.
- When VTrack is open, clicking Play in the MetaSynth Montage Room will cause VTrack to playback its montage in a floating mini-preview.
- Miscellaneous Improvements and Changes
- Numerous optimizations and performance tweaks.
- Improved color/black-and-white conversions.
- Render popup. Option-clicking on the render icon, pops up the Render Options menu.
- Improved Reso Sweep effect quality (Montage and Instruments Effect).
- Improved multisampler and sampler auto pitch mapping.
- Many new shortcut keys.
- Montage Room no longer requires that you render items when (or before) they are inserted in the montage.
- Montage Room now requires that sequences and spectrum sequences be located in the montage’s folder.
- Saving a sequence saves its instrument to its folder. This ensures that a sequence’s instrument can be found.
- Append flt when processed preference.
- Montage Effect and Instrument Effects can now be saved to disk so that favorite settings can be easily saved and reloaded.
- Scale files created with UNIX line endings now work correctly.
- Image Filter gain is slightly lower than in version 4.
- LR no longer added when saving AIF files.
- Removed Features
- Open IS Presets removed from Montage file popup.
- Support for MetaSynth 2.x files dropped.
- Support for dual mono (split stereo) files dropped.
- Mix 50% command removed.
MetaSynth 5 is available for Mac (Leopard-compatible) for $599 USD.
More information: U&I Software
