PC and Music News

Antares has announced the availability of Harmony Engine Evo, the next generation of its tool for vocal harmony creation.

Building on the power and ease of use of the original Harmony Engine, Harmony Engine Evo incorporates Antares' Evo Voice Processing Technology for faster, more accurate pitch detection, smoother, artifact-free pitch shifting, and seamless, natural-sounding throat modeling. And with the addition of 5 channels of Antares' unique CHOIR Vocal Multiplier, Harmony Engine Evo allows the creation of huge vocal ensembles from a single vocal line.

With four independent harmony voices, a variety of powerful harmony generating modes, humanization features for natural sounding performances, and a flexible real-time preset system for harmony and vocal type, Harmony Engine Evo provides easy-to-use tools to quickly produce virtually any vocal arrangement one can imagine.

Harmony Engine Evo is available for RTAS (Mac OS X and PC), VST (Mac OS X and PC) and Audio Units (Mac OS X) at a U.S. MSRP of $249.00.

Featured by the Urbanic Series, the Finest R&B by Ueberschall is an all new massive release which includes 16 Construction Kits providing 2.7 GB of smooth high quality R&B Music. Including tempos between 61—84 BPM, you'll find primarily slow and calm Kits with applicable accents, which are perfect for creating love tunes, ballads or even melancholic/moody tracks.

All Construction Kits are filled with extraordinary samples, beatz, guitars, Rhodes, pianos, basslines, synths, pads, fx sounds and a whole bunch of Drum and Percussion sounds. Every sample on The Finest R&B is labeled with BPM information and root key (key signatures).

Furthermore, the kit contains up to 4 sub-kits and a drum single sound folder, material is organized as follows :

• Main Kit — Includes the main them ...

Steinberg is pleased to announce that its much-anticipated major update to The Grand is now shipping to resellers worldwide.

The Grand 3 offers the sound of three legendary concert grands, as well as leading electric and upright pianos, all recorded in outstanding quality with two microphone positions in up to 20 velocity layers. Additional features include onboard equalization tools, a full tuning editor, a range of technologies to enhance computer resource efficiency as well as a stand-alone mode.

The Grand 3 supports VST3, VST2, AU and ReWire and runs on Mac OS X, Windows XP and both Windows Vista 32- and 64-bit versions. The Grand 3 costs €349.00/£291.00. Video and audio examples are available at :

Hal Leonard Books has published a new book called "In The Studio With Michael Jackson".

No one was closer to Michael Jackson at the height of his creative powers than Bruce Swedien, the five-time Grammy winner who, with Jackson and producer Quincy Jones, formed the trio responsible for the sound of Jackson's records.

Friend, co-creator, and colleague, Bruce Swedien was already a seasoned recording engineer — plucked from a job at legendary Universal Audio in Chicago — when he began working with Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones on the soundtrack to The Wiz, and he was the master technician who gave the records their sound as the trio progressed to Jackson's greatest triumphs, Off the Wall, the iconic, history-making Thriller, and beyond,

Part technical guide, part anecdotal narrati ...

Digidesign is proud to announce the availability of MassivePack 8 and MassivePack 8 Pro – the next level of professional plug-ins for mixing and sound processing available from the leader in Audio. These special plug-in bundles will be available for a limited time from July 21st, 2009 through December 22nd, 2009

Designed exclusively for Pro Tools|HD, the new MassivePack 8 features a revered set of plug-ins used by leading studios and pros to create mixes for albums, TV, and film. The bundle includes 11 of the top Pro Tools Development Partners plug-ins, plus your choice of 12 more from Digidesign®, at extraordinary savings of up to $11,105 off retail (when purchased separately).

Need more processing power ? MassivePack Pro 8 provides even greater value, offering a performance-boosting PCIe HD Accel card (worth $4,995 just on its own!) and the same set of MassivePack 8 plug-ins at savings of up to $13,900 off retail (when purchased separately).

MassivePack 8 and MassivePack Pro 8 are available for a limited time through Pro Tools|HD dealers worldwide for $1,295 and $3,495, respectively.

Wanna learn more about this great deal, then visit the following link :

TransAudio Group has announced the immediate availability of ATC's most reasonably-priced reference monitor — the SCM11 two-way passive speaker. The newest studio monitor in the ATC lineup is the passive version of the SCM16A.

The speakers feature an innovation called Constrained Layer Damping (CLD): two lightweight driver cones sandwich a constrained damping layer. CLD is dramatically more efficient than conventional damping because of the way it shears when the cone flexes. The shearing causes unwanted vibration energy to dissipate as frictional heat, instead of as acoustic distortion. Thus, ATC's CLD design reduces harmonic distortion between 300Hz - 3kHz, creates an extended resonance-free axial frequency response, improves the off-axis frequency response, and, if all that weren't e ...