Click here to go to Rax's new home
Audiofile Engineering are now responsible for any future Rax development. We believe they have the passion and ability to build upon Rax, whilst maintaining its ethos of powerful, yet simple-to-use, software for musicians. We are super happy in our decision to hand Rax over to such a competent team.
For all Rax support queries, please contact Audiofile Engineering via their helpdesk here.
To all existing Rax users, we thank you for your support and understanding during this transfer process.
Cheers, The plasq Crew
The Virtual Rack
Rax is streamlined, intuitive virtual rack software. It enables performing musicians to easily organize and control their virtual 'rack' of Audio Units.
See the difference
The new hi-contrast user interface makes it easier to see and control Rax from afar, whether thats while leaning over a MIDI keyboard or guitar. Each knob now features a pop-up 'value bezel' which makes it easy to see the precise values of each parameter.
Keeping it organized
An intuitive and familiar interface now allows you to organize your racks into songs, and your songs into sets. Version 2.0 of Rax adds a new model for building and organizing setlists, with Remote control via MIDI and the Apple Remote further streamlining this workflow. This setlist feature, in combination with OnStage, allows the performer to easily step through songs remotely, at a glance. Enter the new OnStage window and you can step through the set in a performance with no squinting, and no other visual distractions from other apps.
Going OnStage
OnStage makes the important stuff big, and hides the rest. View and move through your setlist, preview your selected visualizer, keep an eye on MIDI and audio in+out, CPU and audio levels. You can move from rack to rack as you move song to song, via your MIDI keyboard or even an Apple Remote! A reliable Panic mode also lets you quickly jump out and tweak, and jump back into the OnStage View.
Seeing the music
Rax also boasts new Visualizer support - allowing you to assign and control a visualizer for each song in your set using MIDI and audio within Rax. You can use the low-CPU, hi- quality visualizers supplied with Rax or make your own using the Free Quartz Composer application included with OS X 10.4 - which is the engine powering Rax's visualizers. Leverage the power of your GPU, which up until now has been sitting on the side bench, getting paunchy as you flex your CPU on audio. Now you can create amazing visuals on the same machine that you are performing with - ready to plug into your venues digital projector.
Please Note: Core Image Accelerated Mac highly recommended for visualizers.
Looking New
Apple has for some time supplied some very high quality Audio Units bundled with every copy of Mac OS X 10.4; plasq has taken this opportunity to create powerful and intuitive interfaces for the majority of Apple's plugins. Another new nicety is Song Notes, allowing you to remember to play the Ace solo in the bridge. You can also now include MIDI files in your set, for 'backing-tape' type playback.
Seeing the light
Rax is now a Universal Binary and is designed to take advantage of the computational power in the new CoreDuo based laptops. With two cores working independently on visuals and audio, you could say MacBooks were made with Rax in mind.
The Rax 2.0 upgrade is Free for all existing paid Rax users.
