You never really know what MOTU is going to do next. Out of the blue today they announced Digital Performer v7.2, and it's got three interesting new features:

1. Themes - pimp your editing and mixing environment with all sorts of colours and appearance options

2. Live searching in list windows to let you quickly locate stuff by name

3. Right-click contextual menus

Interesting stuff - we'll see how it works out in practice. Now just to let my download finish....

Some news coming out of the 2010 NAMM show is an updated version of MOTU's Ethno sound library. Apparently it has a larger sound library, and supports microtonal tuning, so you can draw on a variety of non-equal-tempered and non-Western scales.

For me the bigger news, though, is that it's got the slicker interface of the current UVI Workstation, which only Electric Keys has taken advantage of - albeit in a rather cut-down form - so far. It demonstrates that some fundamental development of MOTU's add-on instruments is indeed still taking place.

I sincerely hope that MOTU can update their whole range of UVI-driven instruments soon, and most of all give us a shiny new version 3 of MachFive - if ever a software instrument needed a shot in the arm it's that one... And how about a MachFive 3 Lite, with a 'production' sound set, bundled with Digital Performer 7? Come on MOTU, you know it makes sense!

Many of you will have visited this site after seeing it publicised in the December 2009 edition of Performer Notes, in Sound on Sound. Others may have heard about it from posts I made to the motu-mac email list and MOTUnation forum.

What I wrote in those posts, and what was implied on this website until today, was that Sound on Sound had dropped the Performer Notes column from the magazine. This was incorrect information, and I'm sorry to have mislead anyone.

Sound on Sound today made a statement about the situation on their website, and at MOTUnation, and I'll quote it again here for clarity:

Sound On Sound would like to make it clear, in response to recent questions and speculation in this forum and others, that it has NOT discontinued its coverage of MOTU's Digital Performer software.

We made no statement to that effect and that was never our intention.

For several years now we have run a series of monthly software workshops for Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, Digital Performer and Sonar, alongside bi-monthly or quarterly coverage for several of the other leading software recorders/sequencers. Recently, after a review of the relative user numbers for these packages, we decided that Propellerhead Software's Reason/Record programs now warranted monthly coverage, and reluctantly took the decision that Digital Performer should no longer be guaranteed a monthly slot. In an ideal world, we would have been able to keep both as monthly columns, but unfortunately we inhabit a world in which magazine pagination and editorial budgets cannot be infinitely large.

The DP technique column will therefore appear in future as one of the rotation columns and we are delighted to be able to confirm that it will continue to be written by Robin Bigwood. We will also continue to give full reviews to new versions of DP, MOTU hardware, and other MOTU instruments and plug-ins. Full details of this adjustment were communicated to MOTU themselves well in advance.

Digital Performer remains a significant DAW with an influential professional user-base and Sound On Sound has, we believe, served it well, with over eight years worth of dedicated monthly technique columns (see http://www.soundonsound.com/articles/DigitalPerformer.php ). We intend to continue to give it appropriate coverage as we are sure that the barrage of vitriolic and abusive emails that the SOS editorial staff have received over the last few days is in no way representative of the views of the vast majority of Digital Performer users.

I'm looking forward to writing more Performer Notes articles for Sound on Sound, and as I do so I'll keep the subject index at www.performernotes.co.uk up to date, and aim to keep adding to the site in other ways too.

A little while back I was introduced to a new dynamics plug-in, Dynamic Spectrum Mapper, developed by a British company, Pro Audio DSP. It's a kind of multiband compressor - but it's a completely different beast to your MW Compressor, Waves C4 or whatever. First you have to 'capture' a frequency vs level signature for your material. Then it's able to provide astonishing amounts of compression while somehow preserving apparently natural-sounding dynamics. It's incredible on a full mix, but could also work wonders on complex piano or guitar parts that might otherwise be really hard to compress. The developers also say it's good for de-essing and audio restoration, and some of their video demos of these things are impressive. Check it out - it challenges your preconceptions, but for many projects I'm finding it invaluable. And it works just great in DP.