Kasper Jade
Apple's royalty-free music production tool, Soundtrack, has reportedly reached gold master status. According to reliable sources, the small team responsible for converting the Final Cut Pro ad-on into a standalone Mac OS X application completed the task during the last week of July.
The inaugural version of Soundtrack will mirror the functionality of the Soundtrack Final Cut Pro module, but will includes some last minute alterations and warnings. First off, the "Recording" pane of the preference window no longer includes a setting for maximum recording time. Instead, when recording a session or take, the recording will continue until the user clicks the 'Stop' button as long as available disk space is not exceeded.
In order to import or view MPEG-2 Movies, users of Soundtrack must have the QuickTime decoder included with Final Cut Pr 4 installed on their machines. Additionally, when importing a video file into a Soundtrack project, and the video file contains multiple audio tracks, only the first audio track is imported into the project.
The Soundtrack Late Breaking News document included with the release provides a handful of warnings to users. According to the document, adding or recording long audio files in excess of several minutes may cause performance issues. In the event, additional RAM is suggested but not guaranteed to solve the problem. Furthermore, projects exported to a QuickTime movie file will be limited to a bit depth of 16 bits even if the Export Bit Depth option is set to 24 bits. This, however, is due to a limitation in QuickTime.
Finally, Apple warns that when recording audio in a project that contains a video file, if the video file is located on a server, the video's audio may not be synchronized with the project while recording. Write errors may also arise. To avoid this potential issue, the company suggests downloading the video to a local disk prior to recording.
Soundtrack 1.0 is currently available for pre-order on the Apple Online Store for $299. Customers who have, or plan to place orders for the audio production software should see their orders ship sometime this week, sources said.
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Christine McKee
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