I’ve been impressed by Rax, the virtual effects and instrument rig for Mac, for some time. I marveled at its musician-friendly fullscreen interface and live visualizations in Rax 2.0, lamented its lack of popularity and eventual demise at developer Plasq, breathed a sigh of relief as it found a new home at Audiofile Engineering, and noted the unmistakable similarity of Apple’s MainStage. (MainStage, for the record, still doesn’t do a lot of what Rax 2 does.)

Now, Rax is due for a major update, and it’s getting one, in the form of a new UI, powerful routing, and clever MIDI mapping capabilities. It’s still not for everyone — there are other instrument/effects hosts, there are features in DAWs like Ableton Live’s Racks, and of course Kore. But it could be a worthy addition to your Mac arsenal, and it promises to fit certain production and performance jobs very, very well. Beyond Rax, the whole category, including those other tools, could use more attention and more active musicians. I hope the developers of those other tools have a good look at Rax 3, while they’re at it (or second look, in the case of Apple). More on this soon; in the meantime, here’s a preview video:

Rax 3 Sneak Peek from Audiofile Engineering on Vimeo.

Via primasluta on Twitter.

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: