And Ableton Live 8 is officially out. Now, if Akai would just release the ACP40 everything would be right in the world. Slightly unrelated, but I recently picked up an M-Audio Solo for doing DJ type stuff. I wanted two audio outputs from the Macbook Pro so I could use one of them for cueing and the other for the main output. The Solo provides a single firewire output. To my shock and horror Ableton will only use one audio device at a time. I should have seen that one coming. I had basically given up when I came across a nice little feature in OSX: aggregate audio devices. In the Sound and Midi utility app (not control panel) you have the options for combining multiple audio devices into a singular virtual device. I have no idea if this is something available in other BSD flavors that Apple is just sticking a pretty front end on, but I suspect they have dug out the audio subsystem quite a bit and have redesigned it quite a bit. Anyway it goes, it's a very cool feature, and just one of many reasons Apple has always made OSes that have stood out for audio production. My days of using Windows for anything are long gone. Now if only the music production scene in Linux-land could do a little catching up.