Sagan Technology recently announced the release of Metro 6 LX, the middle brother in the company’s line of music-making applications. While Metro 6 is the full-featured big brother, Metro 6 LX is the middle child, offering less options but still more robust than its younger sibling, Metro 6 SE. Sagan notes that Metro “stands alone as a complete and integrated MIDI, audio and video production system.”
The LX edition offers 16 sections with up to 48 tracks each, 10 simultaneous audio tracks, 10 simultaneous real-time plug-ins, 3 synthesizer plug-ins, support for both VST and AudioUnit plug-ins, and more.
You can use Metro 6 LX to edit audio with drag-and-drop simplicity, compress audio files with QuickTime, use context-sensitive searchable online help to find answers, monitor audio and MIDI with its VU meters, review online tutorials to get you started, record at variable sampling rates up to 96kHz and sample sizes up to 16-bit, apply effects in real-time and make offline edits, and more.
Metro 6 LX also doubles as a jukebox for playing MP3s and other audio files and it includes a note pad you can use to make comments on each file, as well as a Note Spray tool that turns your music into art. Finally, its Rhythm Explorer allows you to experiment with a variety of rhythms in real-time.
Unlike the other Metro 6 applications, the LX version runs only in Mac OS X v10.2 (Jaguar) or higher. The rest of the system requirements call for a PowerPC processor running at 200MHz or faster, 64MB RAM, 10MB available hard drive space, and third party audio hardware for recording and playback at greater than 16-bit and 44.1kHz. Sagan strongly recommends a hard drive that spins at 7200RPM or faster. Metro 6 LX is available only as a download from the Sagan Web site for US$129.99.