PC and Music News

The Filter, a personalized content filtering system which had been hanging around in beta status since sometime in 2006 has finally opened its doors to everyone and officially launched. The service was pioneered by musician Peter Gabriel and, at its beginning, was not much more than a playlist creation tool for iTunes. Today, The Filter has morphed into a larger recommendation system that finds not just music, but also movies, TV, and internet videos, customized to your personal tastes.

Some systems make recommendations based on your actions and history where others leverage the power of the crowd to find the best content, but The Filter combines both methods and uses data learned in one area to augment the other.

When you first sign up at The Filter, you begin by stepping through a brief profiling wizard in order for the site to establish an initial set of recommendations. As you begin to use the site, you can continue to personalize your recommendations in a way that's very much reminiscent of Amazon's "Recommended for You" section. On Amazon, items are rated with starts but The Filter uses a + / - sliding scale instead. However, like Amazon, you can mark items you own so they won't be recommended to you again while also helping the system get to know you better.

A second part to discovering your personalized tastes comes from "The Filter" which you download. This tool is a plugin application that works with either Windows Media Player, Winamp, and, of course, iTunes. Unlike other music player plugins like iLike, this piece of The Filter's system is not designed for social sharing, but actively collects data from your computer and sends it back to The Filter's servers. Where iLike uses the data it collects to help you discover friends of similar taste, The Filter solely uses that data for the purpose of improving recommendations.

Softube has just announced the release of Metal Amp Room, a new vrtual guitar amps plug-in designed "to bring you the most brutal, evil and aggressive sound that is possible to squeeze out of your DAW".

Focusing on usability and sound quality, this is a plug-in that is proud not to include a gazillion amps, effects racks, patch cords, or a blow-dryer. Just two channels, two cabinets, two mics per cabinet, and a wickedly fast noise gate for palm mute galore.

Features :

- Program-dependent guitar noise gate.
- Two cabs with two mics per cabinet.
- Easy to use balancing stereo mic preamp for balancing the two mics.
- Flexible & continuous click-and-drag mic positioning.
- Fully automatable parameters.
- 3-D rendered photo-realistic user interface.
- Compatible with all effects that work with real amps.

Metal Amp Room is available now for Mac OS X and Windows in VST, AU and RTAS formats at a retail price of $179 (excl. VAT). Note that a fully-functional 10-day demo version is also available for download.

Toontrack has just announced that its long awaited Superior Drummer 2.0, Vol.1 of the "New York Studio Legacy Series", can now be pre ordered from the Toontrack Music webshop or from any of the Toontrack distributor, sub-distributor or dealer sites listed below.

Superior Drummer 2.0 is due to ship at the end of June.

The much-anticipated and much-talked-about Moog Guitar will debut at Summer NAMM in Nashville.

According to Moog Music President Mike Adams, the Moog Guitar opens the guitarist to a whole new musical vocabulary: "It's not a guitar synthesizer; not a MIDI guitar; not an effects processor," Adams said. "The guitarist is intimately connected to The Moog Guitar because it works its magic on the strings themselves."

The Moog Guitar offers three unique modes...Sustain, Mute and Controlled Sustain. In the Sustain mode, it provides infinite, powerful sustain on every string and at every fret position; Mute removes energy from the strings, resulting in a variety of staccato effects; Controlled Sustain allows the musician to play sustained, single-note or even polyphonic lines with strong sustain and effortless clarity. In this mode, the Moog Guitar sustains the notes being played while actively muting the notes not being played.

For the month of June, McDSP offers a great special on the all new FutzBox Native to any and all users for $295. FutzBox is a distortion and noise generator plug-in for creating low fidelity versions of audio signals. The McDSP Native product line supports RTAS and AudioSuite formats, and operates on Pro Tools HD, LE, and M-Powered.

McDSP FutzBox Native special is offered only for the month of June. Please note that FutzBox HD is also available individually for $495 and in the Emerald Pack HD bundle. Apart from the June Special, FutzBox Native can only be purchased within the Emerald Pack Native bundle.

IK Multimedia is proud to announce the release of the StompIO upgrade, a reduced price, hardware-only version of StompIO available to all registered users of AmpliTube 2, AmpliTube 2 Live, Ampeg SVX, AmpliTube Jimi Hendrix or AmpliTube Metal. Thanks to the included AmpliTube X-GEAR in StompIO upgrade, these "Powered by AmpliTube" users will be able to immediately control their software live and in the studio.

Together with the launch of the StompIO upgrade, an enhanced assortment of software has been bundled in the full version of StompIO that now includes all five IK "Powered by AmpliTube" software packages out of the box : AmpliTube 2, Ampeg SVX, AmpliTube Jimi Hendrix, AmpliTube Metal (formerly only for previously registered AmpliTube 2 users) and AmpliTube X-GEAR (for over $1,400/ € 1,000 worth of software included).

The new StompIO upgrade costs €599.99 / $799.99 (exc. taxes). Note that for a limited time only, customers who purchase the StompIO upgrade will also receive a free downloadable version of AmpliTube Metal (worth $269.99/ € 199.99), the newly released metal distortion powerhouse.