PC and Music News

Here it is, the first review of 2008: WOW, the multimode filter made by Sugar Bytes.
Words, pictures and sounds.
You'll find everything in our review to form your opinion on WOW.

SE Electronics have announced that they are producing a brand new range of Rupert Neve signature series mics under the sE stable for 2008.
(picture is Rupert Neve and Siwei Zou)

The first of several mics will be an active Ribbon mic with revolutionary performance, provided by discrete circuits and purpose designed transformers by Mr. Rupert Neve.
The capsule and manufacturing are being controlled by sE, whilst the electronics, and of course the transformer, are being taken care of by Mr. Neve.

Following mics will be a large diaphragm tube mic, and a solid state condenser. "The first three mics " say sE "are beautiful, the packaging will be second to none, and their performance will set new standards in the high end microphone market".

Will this new range of products be the next big hit ?
And isn't "high end" often synonymous with "high prices" ?
At least, this is a very exciting announce.

McDSP will introduce three new plug-ins at the Winter NAMM show held in Anaheim California, January 2008. Thesse plug-ins are the DE555 de-esser, the FutzBox signal distorter and noise generator, and the NF575 noise filter.

The DE555 is a new generation of de-essing technology, providing transparent, precise de-essing with unique flexibility. FutzBox is a distortion and noise generator plug-in for creating low-fidelity versions of audio signals. The NF575 noise filter is a high-resolution filter set designed to remove a wide variety of noise types from audio.

These new plug-ins will only be available to owners of the McDSP Emerald Pack HD and Emerald Pack Native bundles as an upgrade ($195 HD / $95 Native for owners of Emerald Pack version 2). The new Emerald Pack bundle (version 3.0) will retail for $2795 for the HD version, and $1495 for the Native version.

Taking advantage of modern technologies together with a handcrafted and tested approach, JZ Microphones introduces the new multi pattern studio microphone: The Black Hole.

Main characteristics :

- Multi — pattern condenser: cardioid, omni, figure-8
- Class A discrete amplifier circuit
- Two (!) opposite placed, independent, large, true electrostatic capsules inside the compact head
- New special capsule with single, less centre tap diaphragm and adjustable backplate.
- Patented variable sputtering of diaphragm, using specially mixed alloy for coating
- Integrated capsule shockmount.

The new product is already available in the USA through Full Compass. Everyone is welcome to hear it at NAMM Show 2008 — booth 1897, hall E.

Rain Recording has announced StormDrive TERA, a high performance versatile and extremely portable RAID storage solution designed around the eSATA platform for the fast streaming and backup of up to 2 Terabytes of data.

StormDrive TERA offers a cost effective, fast and portable storage solution that gives you up to 2 Terabytes of space and lots of options for using it. Configure your drive to operate in RAID-0 mode combining the performance of both drives to make one super drive. Or, you can choose RAID-1 which makes a full copy of your data to two drives simultaneously. So if one drive fails, you already have a complete backup. And StormDrive TERA is hot-swappable so you can replace the failed drive without interrupting your data flow.

Hardware Specs :

- Storage Size: 2x500GB, 500GB (RAID-1) or 1000GB (RAID-0)
- Cache: 32MB
- Average Latency: 4.16ms
- Spindle Speed: 7200RPM
- Bus Interface: eSATA /USB2.0 Type A
- eSATA: 3,000 Mbps Data Speed
- USB 2.0: 12Mb/480Mbps Data Speed
- LED: Power on/Access/Rebuild/Error
- Acoustics: Idle=2.7bels, Seek=2.8bels (Quiet seek specification)
- Power Supply: 12V/2A, 110~240V AC/DC adapter
- Dimensions: 8.66" x 3.34" x 5.11" (L x W x H)
- Weight: 5lbs


Price from $679.95 (£249 UK).

As you can see, Winter NAMM is coming, and the whole team is ready to get down to work !
From January 17 to January 20, every name that counts in the audio world will be there, to present to you all the latest musical products from around the world, those you'll maybe use tomorrow.

Solid State Logic will showcase a new plug-in for the Duende DSP powered DAW plug-in platform at the NAMM show.

X-EQ is at first glance a 10 band parametric EQ, but each of the 10 EQ bands can be selected to provide a different type of EQ, making X-EQ a vast range of different EQ processors in one package. Bands 1 and 10 are High and Low Filters, each of which can be set to employ one of five different Filter topologies with five very different tonal characters. Bands two and nine are shelving EQ's with a Q range that extend right up to 10.3 and a degree of undershoot and overshoot at higher Q settings that give a unique tonal character. The remaining six bands are all Bell EQ's with a choice of nine different EQ types providing a comprehensive range of response curves. All Shelving & B ...

After their release of Stylus RMX Expanded, Spectrasonics has announced a new product, and they will show it at Winter NAMM.
Hope it's a final product, ready to ship, and not only a pre-release...

The long awaited update of the most user friendly score editor is finally here.
Just think that the v4.6 hasn't even pass the stage of beta testing, and you'll understand why copyists, composers and arrangers are happy !
A this time, only the Mac version is available. PC version will be shipping in February 2008.
If you want to download the full version, it will cost you $399,99, if you only need the update, it is $129,99 (add $10.00 s&h for CD version).

Prima is a virtual female vocalist modelled on the voice of a professional soprano singer, using Vocaloid 2.

Whether it's soaring leads, harmonies or backing vocals, Prima can sing any word from the English language (and other languages too with a little work).
Prima is also very well suited if you want to be adventurous and experimental, since her voice can be easily modified and shaped in many ways.

In addition to singing any words or combination of syllables or phonemes you can imagine, Prima will spread any sustained vowel (or voiced consonant) across as many notes as you like, with perfect legato. You can select from several different natural vibrato types and drag'n'drop your chosen type to any note or notes, and control the time-position and amount of the vibrato.

You have ...

Sony Creative Software has updated Sound Forge Audio Studio to v9.0c.

Version 9.0c adds support for LPEC files imported from Digital Voice Editor software. And also support for WAV files up to 4 GB. Select the Allow Wave renders up to 4 GB check box on the General page of the Preferences dialog to enable support.
Some Key shortcuts have been added : you can now hold Ctrl while dragging in a data window to switch to the Magnify tool temporarily. Select the Allow Ctrl+drag style zoom in data windows check box on the General tab of the Preferences dialog to enable this behavior.

Each of the following iZotope Mac and PC plugs have been updated : Trash and Spectron to v.1.13, and Ozone to v.1.14.
Performance and stability have been improved (especially in Pro Tools) and Mac OS X Leopard is supported.

Antares releases maintenance updates for Auto-Tune 5 AU and TDM (Mac) and VST PC are now available.
The AU version provides improved compatibility with Apple Logic 8. In addition, all three releases squash a few minor bugs. These are free updates for current Auto-Tune 5 owners.

While the release of Independence Pro delays for a few weeks to January 2008, Independence Basic, Freedom v2.0 and Origami v2.0 are shipping.

Independence Basic comes with the same audio engine as Independence 2 and is fully compatible with Independence Free and Independence 2. Apart from the ability to load 3rd party VST effects and VST instruments - which is not enabled in Independence Basic - the user has access to the same software features as Independence 2.

Freedom 2.0

All insert filters and effects of Freedom 2.0 are fully surround compatible up to 8.1. The format of surround files is recognized automatically and Freedom 2 assigns the respective channels accordingly. Freedom 2 offers a new FX Bank Browser, and automation features include minimum and maximum values (use the ...

Best Service releases Chris Hein-Bass, a bass guitar sample library powered by Kontakt 2 Player (12.7 GB, up to 4,089 samples per patch). Chris Hein has produced this collection including a Musicman Stingray picked & slapped, a LeFay fretless bass and an upright bass with three sets of strings: steel-strings (classic jazz sound), nylon-strings (high-fidelity sound) and gut-strings (40s swing sound).

All nuances of bass playing techniques are implemented, thanks to Kontakt scripting abilities. It offers 112 MIDI controllable features including things like repetition-hotkeys, keys-vibrato, fall-control, bridge/center playing, pickup micro-blending, expression-samples, pinch-harmonics, automatic-mode, slide-mode, chord-mode and much more.

The included IK Multimedia Ampeg SVX Uno (virtual bass-amp) adds more sound variations to the natural, basic, bass instruments.