Spring has (sort of) sprung, and with its opening month comes a raft of fabulous new music technology products. Here are our top picks…

Avid Eat The Apple

They’ve taken their sweet time over it, but at long last, Avid have updated Pro Tools for native Apple Silicon-compatibility, enabling owners of M1- and M2-powered Macs to finally unlock the full performance potential of their computers when running said DAW. Huge speed improvements (on Apple Silicon) are claimed with Pro Tools 2023.3, the most notable of them being 80% faster application launch times and 150% better plugin CPU performance – although the second of those comes with the caveat that your third party plugins also have to have been made Apple Silicon AAX-compatible to even show up, which many still haven’t. Happily, one key developer that has stayed ahead of the curve is FabFilter, who added native Apple Silicon support to all their AAX instruments and effects only last week.

On top of that, Pro Tools 2023.3 adds a good number of functional improvements and new features, including zplane’s elastique PRO V3 timestretching algorithm, bouncing to Apple’s M4a AAC file format, and a new sample-based virtual instrument in the form of PlayCell, which will see new content regularly added for Pro Tools subscribers. Fire up Avid Link now to get the update.

Hush Audio Get Your Head Out Of The Cloud

There are a fair few excellent audio restoration and clean-up tools on the market, but Hush Audio’s new entrant is aimed specifically at getting rid of background noise and reverberation in recorded speech through the entirely local deployment of “state-of-the-art AI”, and results of our early testing are certainly favourable.

A Mac-only application (with an Audio Units plugin slated for possible release at some point), Hush literally does all the work for you, offering just a single parameter – dry/wet mix – for human adjustment. Everything else – broadband noise reduction (wind, fans, hum, etc), reverb reduction and removal of transient interruptions (birds, dogs, car horns, etc) – is taken care of under the hood, without the cloud uploading required by other AI-driven alternatives. Single or multiple files can be processed at once, and the sample rate, bit depth and format (WAV, AIFF or FLAC) of the output files can be maintained or converted. The app also takes full advantage of the Neural Engine in Apple Silicon Macs for dramatically faster processing on those machines than their Intel equivalents, and other input source types are on the roadmap to be added in the future.

Hush is only available via the Apple App Store, and is, it must be said, a bit of a steal at just 50 quid.

Dolby Pull It All Together

The middle of March brought a victory for common sense in the release of Dolby Audio’s Dolby Atmos Renderer, combining the company’s Atmos Production Suite and Atmos Mastering Suite in a single application. As well as the obvious benefit that this heady fusion brings – end-to-end mixing and mastering in multi-channel formats up to 9.1.6 – the new all-in-one solution introduces native Apple Silicon compatibility (including Dolby plugins, Atmos Music Panner, Binaural Settings and LTC Generator), 96kHz ADM support, Room EQ, Array Mode, 5.1.2 re-renders, and a swanky new GUI. Windows users will also be delighted to hear that it works with their chosen operating system, which was previously only an option for Dolby Atmos Mastering Suite – although they do have to run the app on a separate computer to their DAW, routing audio between the two via physical interfacing, as the Dolby Audio Bridge connection software still only runs on Mac.

Dolby Atmos Renderer can be yours for $299, and owners of Production Suite and Mastering Suite can upgrade for $50. 

HAL Make The Cut

Oscar-winning French audio post-production company HAL introduced a nifty new tool for sound-to-picture producers in March with their Cut-it tool for Mac and PC. Designed to make light work of spotting video cuts in any (AAF-compatible) DAW, this straightforward application automatically finds cuts in an imported video, then spits out an AAF file with markers at every cut and/or a cut track containing an empty audio clip aligned with every shot. A wide range of video formats is supported; the Video Start Offset parameter allows for entry of the timecode at which the video starts; and timecode In and Out numbers can be entered for analysis of a specific section of video.

As a glance at the interface makes clear, operation couldn’t be more simple, and at just €39 (€29 until April 9), Cut-it looks like a utility that anyone seeking to streamline their video sound production workflow will want to get involved in.

RME Relight The Fireface

The Ides of March (or thereabouts) saw revered manufacturer RME launch the successor to their top-end Fireface UFX+ audio interface. Connecting to the host Mac or PC via USB 3.0 (class compliant, so no driver required), the Fireface UFX III serves up a jaw-dropping 94 inputs and 94 outputs via four XLR/TRS combi mic/line inputs, eight balanced line ins and outs (two of them on XLRs for monitor output), two headphone jacks (doubling up as unbalanced stereo outputs when required), two sets of ADAT I/O, AES/EBU I/O and 64 bi-directional channels of optical MADI I/O, all at up to 24-bit/192kHz. It also features RME’s handy Direct to USB Recording (er… DURec, apparently) system, enabling up to 80 inputs and outputs to directly address any front panel-connected USB storage device for recording and playback, as well as all the good stuff for which the UFX+ was already known, including top-class AD/DA converters, utra-low latency, SteadyClock FS digital clocking and jitter suppression, onboard mixer DSP and the TotalMix FX and TotalMix FX for iPad controller applications, TotalMix Remote for networked operation, and full standalone functionality without a computer in sight.

In terms of purely qualitative upgrades, the newly designed digital and analogue circuitry inside the Fireface UFX III is said to deliver improved THD+N values, and given the stellar performance of the previous model, that’s going to amount to some very low numbers indeed.

The Fireface UFX III is out now, priced £2727.

What new goodies got your music production pulse racing in March? Let us know in the comments.