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Adaptec Inc. plans to offer OEMs an add-in card that offers an SCSI connector and a 1394 interface before July, MULTIMEDIA WEEK has learned. Lee Caswell, director of strategic development for Adaptec, confirmed the company's plans and said the product is expected to sell for about $500. (Adaptec 408/945-8600.) Warner Bros. Records Inc. will release three DVD titles on March 24 that have been remixed using 5.1-channel audio and expects to release five additional music titles throughout the year. The initial titles are Eric Clapton-Unplugged; Madonna's The Girlie Show-Live Down Under and R.E.M.'s Road Movie. The company plans to merchandise the titles in major markets alongside movie releases from Warner Home Video. Apple Computer Inc. made its first Macintosh DVD-ROM prototype demonstration at MILIA 97 last week and expects to deliver a Performa with the technology in late '97. The company expects to build the drive into PowerBooks in early 1998 as well. In other Apple development news, the company is reaching out to developers in Japan with a CD-ROM featuring the latest authoring tools for the Power Macintosh. A pre-release version of Vertigo Technology Inc.'s Vertigo 3D Dizzy will be among the applications on the CD-ROM. Apple intends to distribute the CD-ROM to 100,000 users in Japan. In Europe, Apple is bundling Equilibrium's DeBabelizer Toolbox with the company's Web- authoring suite. (Equilibrium, 415/332-4343; Vertigo, 604/684-2113.) In a cost-cutting move, Thomson Consumer Electronics intends to close its TV assembly and warehouse operations in Bloomington, Ind., and relocate manufacturing to Mexico by April 1, 1998. The move is expected to affect more than $1,500 employees. Thomson has no plans, at this time, to relocate the corporate offices. The restructuring follows the departure of executive Joseph Clayton (see MMW, Dec. 2) who left Thomson last December. Clayton was strongly against moving manufacturing south of the border. Knowledge of the restructuring, as reported by MMW previously, was said to have been a major reason for Clayton's resignation. The hard drive industry will get a boost in the second quarter when Western Digital Corp. {WDC} begins manufacturing CD-ROM drives with Storage Data Acceleration technology. (SDA). The new interface will enable CD-ROM data to be cached on a hard drive for faster performance. Western Digital executives believe SDX can increase CD- ROM performance by as much as 100 percent. (Western Digital, 714/932- 5000.) MetaTools Inc. plans to acquire Fractal Design Corp. next quarter in a merger to create a combined visual graphics company that earned $65.2 million last year. Should the merger be approved, Mark Zimmer, Fractal's CEO, will become the company's chief technical officer. (Fractal Design, 408/430-4000; MetaTools, 805/566-6200.) Kip Kokinakis, Aureal Semiconductor Inc.'s president and CEO, attributed the company's $17 million loss for the most recent fiscal year to costs of product development. Clearly the company's financials are headed in the right direction because for fiscal 1995 Aureal had a loss of $103.8 million. The company's focus this year is licensing its A3D Interactive PC audio technology, which is being used by Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. and several semiconductor companies. In mid 1997, Aureal will ship a single-chip Dolby Pro Logic virtual surround processor. (Aureal, 510/252-4245.)