While Macs have been great sound machines ever since 16-bit audio ports were added in the PowerPC line, at that time they languished a bit compared to Windows systems when it came to pro-level music synthesis software.Then a Mac-first software company, BitHeadz, started to come out with great products that took advantage of all the PPC had to offer. BitHeadz' first product, Retro AS-1, a wonderful analog synthesis emulator, was soon followed by Unity DS-1.
Unity merges sample based sound production with computer based editing ease. You can add MIDI interfaces, keyboards, better audio cards (up to the current fave 24-bits/96kHz!) and your Mac can become a fully functional sampler/wavetable synthesizer.
Once installed, which is an easy process, Unity can function as a wavetable synth (similar to a Proteus/M1) with extremely competitive specs which include support for up to 64 voices, DSP, parameters galore and the ability on pre-USB-only Macs to use the serial ports as a direct MIDI connection for the fastest possible response. You can also use Unity to replace the standard QuickTime General MIDI sounds and get an immediate sound upgrade to QT MIDI playback.
As a sampler, Unity can perform all the expected tricks and reads industry standard AIFF, WAV, SDI/II, CD audio as well as other formats. It can also pull tracks from CDs as well as going through any other Sound Manager source.
An additional format that Unity supports, which provides a modicum of poetic justice, is their support for Emu Sound Fonts 2. Since Emu in the recent past has refused to support the Mac with their PCI-bus sound cards, thanks to Unity a Mac user can now read all SF2 files (available free on the web or $29.95 on CD-ROM from Emu) without having to buy a single Emu hardware product.
Unity resides in the Mac OS in an almost invisible fashion as an extension that is only activated by musical instructions. There was never a stability issue after installation and it was almost flawlessly compatible, save for two things: it doesn't like virtual memory but will run adequately with it, and it wants to be the lowest level software running. It's interesting to note that the only real conflict I encountered with Unity was early on when it refused to run if MacsBug is loaded.
Unity is organized like its own OS. First there's the audio synthesis kernel or sound engine at the root of it all that looks like a standard extension. A control panel configures Unity for CPU and RAM usage while a status window shows you what's going on. There are four major applications, or modules, which use the engine: a screen based keyboard, an editor, a MIDI processor and a mixer. BitHeadz has designed the user interface to be as intuitive as possible; it looks like a console, acts like a console but takes advantage of computer based gestures where appropriate.
Unity supports all the de rigeur software standards like Opcode's OMS or Mark Of The Unicorn's FreeMIDI (MIDI standards) as well as ASIO, ReWire and MAS (Audio standards), and with every revision they add more and more support to converse with other products. It does require a bit of tweaking for runtime optimization when it's run in conjunction with other software, but the manual and web FAQs are helpful with that process.
The modest screen keyboard is a fast way to audition sounds, and while it cannot register velocity it can be used in conjunction with the computer's ASCII keyboard to get several notes playing at once. There are all sort of tricks like auto-chord play, and on the whole its a handy application until the real keyboard gets hooked up either through the direct serial drivers, OMS or FreeMIDI. With the screen keyboard a PowerBook or iBook would make a great sound source for portable music production.
The editor module is well designed and allows sound designers to tailor existing and newly sampled sounds to create instruments. While the editor is not meant to compete with or replace packages like Bias' PEAK, you can indeed accomplish quite a bit with it since it focuses on ease of use. It also boasts enough other features that most sound tweakers will be very happy with what they get out of it.
The MIDI processor module is not meant as a sequencer but as a performance tool for sound layering within Unity, transposition, and is the most impressive feature of a powerful arpeggiator that can easily synch up to external MIDI clock signal. This is perfect for techno, progressive rock, and Giorgio-Moroder-isms galore.
The mixer is where the many possible DS-1 voices are processed with DSP like reverb, delay, and echo as well as EQ and filtering. It looks like a real mixer and thankfully the DSP effects sound quite good. The mixer is where most users will spend time configuring the DS-1.
BitHeadz includes a nice collection of ready to go sounds and samples on the CD-ROM and should be commended for the wide variety and overall quality of what they ship standard; everything from prog-rock polyrhythmic trap drums to techno filter sweep shards to ethnic instruments to orchestral samples. Of course, other libraries can be loaded but there are enough to start using right away regardless of musical style/preference.
BitHeadz also sells a new set of highly optimized grand piano sounds as a separate product ("Black & Whites") for those who want their Mac to emulate a Steinway or Boesendorfer. An extensive array of additional drum sounds are available in "Steve Reid's Percussion Kit". A separately marketed utility called "Osmosis" allows the conversion of the vast library of Akai and Roland sound CDs into Unity format.
Of course, the fundamental question about Unity that remains is "How does it sound?". Even on standard Mac audio hardware it sounds really good: crisp, clean and noise-free. It is certainly good enough for web audio work or even demos. In an external mix with other instruments almost no one would know that it wasn't a hardware box doing the sounds. Given the new array of cheap, greater-than-16-bit audio cards that can be added, Unity can be indistinguishable from dedicated sampler hardware as far as fidelity is concerned at far less cost (assuming you already have a Mac).
The only drawback is that products like Unity eat up processor resources and the 64 voices mentioned is really only an ideal figure, especially when the synth software is run in conjunction with sequencers and/or hard disk recording software.
When I tried to pry some information out of BitHeadz about the future it seems that Unity and its brethren will be G4 optimized, be able to multiply the polyphony, and that there may be even other hardware ways to extend Unity. At the last AES convention they boasted that a G4 Mac could do at least 128 stereo voices 'conservatively'! They also implied that they will be extending the sorts of synthesis performed to emulate even more advanced products in the near future.
BitHeadz is providing tools that begin to break one of the long held MIDI music source precepts that dedicated hardware can never be surpassed by a computer and software. When you realize that hardware wavetable synths and samplers are usually microprocessors with attached audio IO running a ROM-based application you see how natural a product software synthesis can be.
If I were Apple, I'd yank the mediocre Sound Canvas stock sounds from Quick Time and replace them with a mini-Unity for General MIDI when OS X Client comes out. Until then, music generation folks really should check out Unity before shelling out for a hardware MIDI module and have some real fun!
