Stan's List

AppleInsider heard from resellers that “Apple will no longer offer its Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion, and DVD Studio Pro audio and video applications as standalone products, and come March will choose instead to sell them exclusively as part of the $1299 Final Cut Studio production suite.”

The iLife ‘06 DVD is dual-layer, making it impossible for some users (without dual-layer drives) to burn a backup copy of the disc.

Claiming the first true Windows emulation capabilities — with “nearly native” speeds — under Mac OS X for Intel-Based Macs, OpenOSX has shipped WinTel 2.0 as a Universal Binary application.

A statement says:

“Our WinTel product built for the new Intel based Macs runs Windows within Mac OS X offering performance we have always dreamed of: nearly native.

“Experience full-compatibility with x86/Pentium(R) processors, disk images, CD-ROM support and much more on your Mac.

“WinTel is our popular Cocoa graphical user interface used to control the included powerful underlying open-source ‘Bochs’ x86 emulation software (Bochs is pronounced as Box). We now include both PowerPC and Intel optimized binaries.”

Single of the Week

It’s hard to imagine that Rahsaan Patterson was once on a major label only to be dropped after two releases. His independently released album, After Hours, displays the unique talents that place Rahsaan amongst the best of today’s most-recognized R&B icons. His sound is best described as a mix of the slickness of Babyface and the late night soul of Maxwell. The single Burnin is his exemplary track and it’s also the iTunes Single of the Week.

Discovery Download

The singularly named Cuban vocalist Haydee started her musical career in a traditional jazz quartet. Her respect for these forms comes through on Tu y Yo, a track from her self-titled debut. The track, our “free” Discovery Download, is a breezy, soulful melodic song ripe with touches of western familiarity.

The proof is starting to come in.

MacBidouille reports that the MacBook Pro is a quick machine in real-world testing, and this is without optimization of OS X for Intel.

A poster on AppleInsider forums reported their results. Encoding an audio track to AAC (a processor-intensive task) using iTunes saw the MacBook compress at 20x, a G5 Dual 2.0GHz (the original highline PM G5) at 25x and an AlumBook at 15x.

The MacBook could also play 720p and 1080p video at full speed, without dropping frames, something an AlumBook, which played the clip at 8fps, could not do.