Two long-standing favorites of the Mac creative community are finally coming to Mac OS X from U&I Software, the unique software developer founded by the creator of Bryce.
MetaSynth, an audio creation tool built around the premise of manipulating graphic pixels to produce sound, with appropriate painting and graphics tools, has driven sound from experimental music to The Matrix. MetaSynth is bound for OS X-native release in 2003, and promises not only native X support but lots of new features. In the meantime, the developers created a fix release that allows MetaSynth to run reliably for most users under Classic in OS X. Previous versions had erratic sound playback. [ Download ] Check out the tutorials to see what it can do.
Meanwhile, art generation software ArtMatic Pro has hit the big 3.0 and is OS X-native, available immediately. ArtMatic is even more difficult to describe than MetaSynth, but the short description is that, by creating a graphical interface for manipulating some very sophisticated mathematics, ArtMatic lets you automatically generate pictures, textures, animation and even sound with “fractals on steroids.” ArtMatic was originally created to generate images for MetaSynth to turn into sound (though it’s much more than that now); the effect can be heard in the recent movie The Ring. If you already use 3.0, there’s lots of new features to check out; if not, tours and demos are available on the site. Companion software VTrack does sequencing and compositing of video and is also now OS X native and significantly upgraded.
The amazing thing is U&I is basically just two guys: Edward Spiegel and Eric Wegner. They’ve created some amazing tools for artists; I’ve done a number of projects that would’ve been impossible without MetaSynth. You can join Eric and Edward and other users of the software in a new e-mail discussion list for their products.
