Apple announced that Soundtrack, the royalty-free music productiontool previously available only with Final Cut Pro 4, will be availablein August as a stand-alone product for $299 (U.S.).
Soundtrack includes more than 4,000 royalty-free, professionallyrecorded audio loops and sound effects. Soundtrack scales to meet theneeds of audio producers, DJs and remix artists who start theirprojects in Soundtrack and then migrate to a digital audio workstation,such as Logic or Pro Tools, for the rest of their work.
“Soundtrack is a huge hit with Final Cut Pro 4 users and hasenabled video editors without music backgrounds to save time and moneyby producing their own high-quality, royalty-free music scores,”said Sina Tamaddon, Apple’s senior VP of applications.“Customers tell us the need for producing original, royalty-freemusic is everywhere, and we think that other creative professionalssuch as Web developers and DVD authors are going to find Soundtrack theeasiest and most affordable tool for musicians and nonmusiciansalike.”
“Soundtrack is so intuitive and powerful that within minutesof sitting down on a plane, I created temp tracks for some upcomingprojects that would have otherwise taken hours to do in astudio,” said recording artist and producer, BT (aka BrianTranseau). “Soundtrack is already one of my most important audioproduction tools and is set to become a staple for serious composersand hobbyists.”
“I’m totally blown away by the extreme music-creationabilities of Soundtrack,” said Charlie Clouser, producer,keyboardist and remixer for artists such as Nine Inch Nails, DavidBowie, The Deftones and Rob Zombie. “From the way itautomatically blends musical elements on-the-fly to itssuper-intelligent loop searching, Soundtrack is more powerful than anyother loop-based audio software out there.”
Within Soundtrack, each loop is treated as an audio building blockthat users simply drag and drop into a composition. Regardless of themusical key or tempo in which the loop was originally recorded,Soundtrack will match the audio loops and sound effects within acomposition in real time. Soundtrack’s search engine gives usersthe means to quickly locate desired sounds by instrument, genre ormood. This advanced search engine works with a new open audio formatcalled “Apple Loops” or any .AIFF, .WAV and Acid formataudio files.
Soundtrack also ships with over 30 professional, high-quality audioplug-ins from Apple and Emagic. Plug-ins like Platinum Verb,SpectralGate, Multiband Compressor and AutoFilter allow users tocombine effects with individual tracks. Also, Soundtrack’ssupport for Mac OS X’s Audio Units plug-in architecture allowsusers to further expand their capabilities with additional third-partyaudio effects developed through Apple’s open-standard plug-informat.
Full system requirements and more information on Soundtrack can befound at www.apple.com/soundtrack.
Note: Photo courtesy of Apple.
