Awhile back, we reviewed Wave Editor, and deemed it one of our favorite audio editors for Mac OS X. Our friends at Audiofile Engineering have ushered in the holiday season with a complete site redesign and numerous application updates, including the highly anticipated Wave Editor 1.3, and Leopard-ready updates to apps across the board.

You may also recall that Audiofile Engineering recently rescued the excellent instrument and effect host, Rax - formerly developed by our friends at plasq. It is clear that Apple borrowed heavily from Rax’s design choices and intentions with their new MainStage application (bundled with Logic 8) but with its impressive features, custom interfaces for audio units, cool visualizer support, and active development, Rax is still the application to beat in this domain.

Competitive upgrade, crossgrade and educational pricing, sleek new icons, one of the finest audio application suites in the industry (and did we mention a simple, non-draconian form of authorization?) - Audiofile Engineering has definitely brightened the days for Mac users this season!

Rax, the clever audio effect and instrument host for Mac, got a major update last year with performance rigs, custom visualizer support, and a slick UI designed by plasq. It’s an ideal tool for loading up some instruments and effects and playing on your Mac, especially if you want software that gets out of your way while you play another instrument or sing and don’t need a full app like Logic or Live onstage. But it never caught on with Mac users, even after I wrote a glowing review in Macworld. And it has certainly been overshadowed by more popular plasq products for the general Mac market, like Comic Life and the upcoming Skitch. So it was clear this unknown gem needed a new home.

Happily, Rax has now changed hands to another of our favorite small developers, Audiofile Engineering. Their Wave Editor has won over CDM’s game composer / contributor Brent, so we’ll be curious to see how they handle Rax. They’ll be supporting existing customers (few of them as there are out there, I expect there’s a good chance they’re reading this). Their 2.1.0 update is a minor release to bring Rax into the AE fold:

From my review for Macworld.com:

Rax 2.0, a music utility from plasq, the creators of Comic Life, brings the same kind of easy access to virtual musical instruments and effects plug-ins that Apple’s Front Row provides for music, videos, and photos. With a virtual mixer, a facility for creating custom songs and sets, and a full-screen OnStage mode with support for live visualizers, this radically redesigned new version makes playing live music with your Mac easier than ever before, for both the casual musician and the gigging professional. It acts as a digital hub for instruments, effects, and visuals in the studio and on stage.

Macworld Review: Rax 2.0

Quartz Composer is a fantastic tool for interactive visuals, and it’s free with Mac OS X (you’ll need to install the developer tools). With MIDI and audio inputs, you can hook custom visuals up to your musical performance. But the program has some limitations: mapping MIDI is generally slow and arduous because of limited MIDI input tools, and there’s no easy way to line up a set of visuals and move through them over the course of a performance.

That’s where plasq’s Rax 2.0 comes in. As we saw earlier this week, Rax lets you build set lists for performance, with different software instruments and effects loaded for each song. Here’s the cool bit: Rax also lets you load Quartz Composer visuals. Since you can load different visuals for each song, you can use Rax to easily switch between QC compositions. (In fact, if visuals are what you really care about, Rax could even be thought of as a MIDI and audio-savvy VJ hosting application.)