New York, NY. As expected, IMA Expo’96 in New York is turning out to be the venue of choice for a number of major audio software introductions.

Leading the parade today was Apple Computer Inc., which announced its Interactive Music Toolkit. Music Toolkit is a set of software tools for creating “Blue Book” enhanced audio CD’s (ECD’s). It is designed to allow audio producers, developers and artists to create multi-session ECD’s that can be played on both Mac and Windows platforms.

“Apple has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to working with developers and artists,” said Leo Rossi, technical advisor for the EMI Record Group and principal of Highway One Media Entertainment. “The Music Toolkit allows the professional recording artist and developer to take the creative process to a new dimension.”

Music Toolkit ECDs are 16-bit audio CDs with added multimedia content. The multimedia materials can include graphics, pictures, lyrics, and QuickTime movies. The key component of Music Toolkit is a music engine for the Apple Media Tool. Media Tool is a high-end multimedia authoring environment which is used to assemble the interactive portion of the ECD. Also included is the Lyric Synchronizer utility, which synchronizes lyrics to the music.

In keeping with the corporate mandate to tout Internet applications before all else, Apple has focused attention on the Music Toolkit’s capability of creating “Virtual CD’s” (VCD). A VCD contains multimedia content without the audio. Users download a VCD from the Internet, put the appropriate audio CD in their computer’s CD-ROM drive, and the sound and multimedia content will play back simultaneously. Record companies can now add interactivity to audio CDs without having to produce a new version by posting the VCD file on their website.

The VCD feature is reminiscent of (but not identical to) a technology called CD-Link™ that multimedia publisher Voyager has been promoting for more than a year. CD-Link allows a downloadable file from the Internet to control playback of an audio CD, so that artists and end users may create edited versions of existing audio and synchronize the edits with web page text and graphics.

The Apple Interactive Music Toolkit is available for free download immediately at Apple’s web site. Also available there is the beta version of the AppleCD Player, which is required for playback of ECDs created with the Music Tool Kit.

The Toolkit requires a Mac, Power Mac or PowerBook computer with a 68030 processor or higher, running Mac OS 7.1 or later. 5MB RAM required, 12MB RAM recommended, and 10MB available disk space.

Ottawa, Canada. International Datacasting announced today that they have been selected to supply a satellite digital audio system to Sky Radio Network of Sydney, Australia. Sky Radio Network is Australia’s largest affiliated commercial radio network.

The contract is valued in excess of $300,000 (US). It includes addressable QPSK satellite receivers, uplink equipment and customized head-end control software. The customized software allows Sky Radio Network to interface its existing program scheduling system with International Datacasting’s head-end Network Control Processor.

Sky Radio Network will use International Datacasting’s FlexRoute satellite digital audio system to distribute network programming to 140 radio stations throughout Australia and New Zealand. The new digital audio system replaces the sub-carrier above video system the company had been using. Sky Radio’s digital services are uplinked from Sydney by four SCPC QPSK carriers on the Optus satellite.

“This contract affirms International Datacasting’s position as the preferred provider of satellite digital audio systems for Australia’s broadcasters,” commented Hugh Mullington, President and CEO of International Datacasting. The Australian Broadcasting Corp. and other regional networks in Australia have previously acquired International Datacasting systems.

International Datacasting has over 15,000 satellite digital audio and data broadcasting earth stations installed worldwide.

Guildford, U.K. Kinetix, the new multimedia business unit of Autodesk, today announced the immediate availability of an updated release of its 3D Studio MAX. Autodesk claims that Release 1.1 of Studio MAX is the most fully featured 3D modelling and animation package available for PCs.

Lending some weight to that claim from an audio developer’s point of view is the inclusion of a novel feature: four new animation controllers for using WAV audio files to drive animation parameters directly. Other new features of the version upgrade include Windows ’95 compatibility, and a number of new renderers and modelling modifiers.

The new version will be shipped free to all registered 3D Studio MAX customers.

Sausalito, CA. Java™, the cross-platform programming language developed by Sun Microsystems, has been the biggest buzz in the web developer community for about a year. But until now, the the interest has focused on putting Java to work on animation, user interface, and transaction-processing applications.

Audio has been left out in the cold, mostly because there have been no convenient tools for accessing Java’s audio capabilities. And perhaps also because support for audio in Java is somewhat limited: for example, it currently supports nothing but 8 kHz mono sound files.

Bay area start-up InWorld VR Inc. has just started shipping a package of Java tools that could turn things around in a hurry. InWorld’s “Automatic Audio” is a bundle of sixteen pre-built Java audio applets (small programs that download and run automatically on any Java-enabled browser, such as the current versions of Netscape Navigator™ and Internet Explorer™).

“I’m a composer and a sound designer, not a programmer,” says InWorld Sound Designer Frank Still. “If I can get Java sounds onto a web page with our product, any audio engineer or professional will be able to do it too.” The proof that Still can cut it is found on InWorld’s demo pages.

The Automatic Audio package allows the web audio developer to embed sounds on a web page that will play automatically when the page is accessed, loop in the background, play when the user clicks on a graphic or hot spot on the page, or when she moves the mouse over a graphic. Some of the applets also combine audio with simple animation: for example, moving the mouse over a page element might cause an animation to run, accompanied by sound.

The development process is straightforward. Create a digital sound file using any familiar tool, such as a workstation or a PC with a sound card. Convert the file to 8-bit, 8 kHz mono in “.au” format (the generic Unix/Sun audio standard). Then put define a few parameters calling the InWorld applet and the sound file in the HTML code of your web page.

From a professional audio standpoint, the major limitation for InWorld’s technology is the low standard of audio supported. “That’s a problem with Java, we can’t do anything about it right now,” explains Still. “But Sun has said that they will add a range of audio formats to Java by the end of this year. We’ll be upgrading our applets as fast as Java lets us. But with careful design, you can get pretty decent results from 8-bit 8 kHz right now.”

The major advantage of Java applets over other technologies for implementing sound and music on web pages, such as streaming audio (RealAudio™, StreamWorks™) and MIDI players (Crescendo™, MIDPlug™) is that the user doesn’t have to obtain and install additional software. “If the user has a Java-enabled browser, they’ll get the audio, it’s as simple as that,” says Still. “Of course you still have bandwidth concerns, you have to keep the audio files as small as possible. But our applets are very low overhead, the code is really compact.”

Interest in the product has been running about 50/50 so far between skilled audio developers and general web practitioners who just want to get some sound effects onto a web page. For those who don’t have a way to create their own audio, InWorld will be marketing packs of sound clips and effects, with the first due for delivery next week.