It’s official – the BIGGEST gold medal is being awarded to Germany during the Olympics, solely because of Peter Neubäcker, a music software engineer. You might remember Melodyne – a pitch correction patch.

Well, during the downtime in his day job of hogging sunbeds, Neubäcker has created a program called Direct Note Access (What, like DNA?).

DNA can dissect a chord into it’s individual parts so that it can be manipulated and reconstructed into……

Anyone?

Anyone?

Anyone?

Yes – Plug at the back. A different chord.

This is a really handy tool for Producers, musicians who write music on the computer, and for anyone mixing a band that doesn’t know its own songs.

This sounds like a really useful tool, but obviously if used in moderation.  What we don’t want is a severe drop in recording quality. I mean, I still blame Autotune for the revival of Cher The Mummy.

There’s a tidy little video just here too. http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna_interview

Direct Note Access is due for release in Autumn as part of the Melodyne 2 plug-in. Should be about $400

SFX 6 is the new version of Stage Research Inc’s ‘live entertainment sound playback software’. The sessions, for live audio engineers, are to take place on January 29 and 30, 2008 at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Digital Content Producer report:

More than just an update of the popular application, SFX 6 has been rewritten from the ground up and boasts an array of new features. Among the most important changes are:

• An ASIO sound playback engine, which supports 16-bit or better WAV, MP3 or WMA audio files.

• Cues output to a true matrix with virtually any number of inputs to any number of outputs.

• Audio cues can contain mono, stereo and even more channels. Users can even drag-and-drop multiple sound files to create a multichannel, synchronized sound cue from existing mono and stereo sound files.

• Fades are now called Volume Changes, and Volume Change curves can be completely customized. Curves can be assigned on a per crosspoint level.

• Revamped user interface.

• Undo/Redo functions.

• Two new windows are now available. Transport Window shows/controls the execution of cues. Active Matrix gives users control of all the volumes of the standby and playing cues right in front of them and on the fly.

• Collapsible Cues. Cue sequences connected by Waits and Autofollows can be collapsed into one line.