PC and Music News

Here it is, our last review for January!

"This update is more than essential" says our reviewer, -i snor

To know why, read his words, see his screen captures and listen to his sounds, in this complete review of the 7.4 update.

McDSP will be running a special on the Classic Pack HD and Native bundles for the month of February. Classic Pack HD will run for $995 and Classic Pack Native will run for $495. The Classic Pack includes Analog Channel, CompressorBank, MC2000 and FilterBank.

For more information, please visit their web site.

NUSofting has just released Broken Drum Machine (BDM), a virtual instrument inspired by a combination of several old school beat boxes and the circuit-bending culture around the "toy" Casio and Yamaha keyboards of the 80s.

BDM is a plugin instrument designed for the musicians who love chaos and usually find the unpredictable behaviour of an uncontrollable sound machine stimulating and inspiring. It offers four drum pads in the style of an old beat box- one each for Bass Drum, Snare, Hi-Hat and Stick. Each pad features the usual suspects for shaping the synthesized sound, including tone, decay, pitch, pan and gain.

On top of the standard controls comes the broken factor - each pad features its own sliders for chaos and chance. Chaos sets the amount of variations to the original sound, and chance is the probability algorithm for the chaos to occur. By varying and automating the chaos and chance sliders, you can achieve an infinite range of wild and unpredictable sounds, similar to creating glitches and bleeps by manipulating an analog circuit.

BDM is available for Windows as a VSTi. Until the 15th of February, 2008, BDM can be purchased at the special introductory price of $44.90.

Story & Clark Pianos announced that it's all-new acoustic piano line would come standard with PNOscan , which features MIDI and USB ports, effectively creating a bridge between the world of traditional acoustic pianos and today's leading-edge technologies.

PNOscan, the only retrofit optical recorder on the market, was introduced last fall. Providing full recording and playback capabilities, it uses 88 optical sensors to track the movement of every key as it is played and translates the sound for output via MIDI and USB ports.

For more information, please visit the link below :

Manytone Music has just released ManyBass, a bass guitar sample based synthesizer. Designed and built in collaboration with AraldFX, ManyBass comes with 2,4Go of samples and includes a large choice of amp simulators , speakers, and FX rack with choices from phaser to compressor, chorus, flanger and delay. On top of that ManyBass will allow you to load up to 4 different articulations of an instrument and switch between these articulations using simple Keyswitching or Midi cc.

ManyBass is available for $139.95 (introductory price of $119.95) in PC VSTi format and Mac AU and VSTi formats (Universal Binary).

Peavey has just acquired Alien Connections and its ReValver plug-in and unveiled ReValver Mk III.

Features :

- 15 amp models, including Peavey 6505, JSX, Classic, ValveKing and Triple XXX.
- Modules in amp head, preamp and power amp formats.
- Two operation modes, with 64-bit and oversampling in HQ mode for hi-fi fanatics.
- FFT based convolution reverb, including sampled spring reverb.
- More than 150 speaker samples using real-time convolution and membrane modeling.
- Algorithm improvements from Mk II to enhance realism, especially in the tube and transformer simulation.
- Standard Tuner and Simul-Tuner with six independent tuners for tuning to presets.

ReValver Mk III will be available for Mac OS X and Windows in VST and AU formats with an MSRP of $299.99.