PC and Music News

The Miniak is the first synthesizer from Akai Professional developed in partnership with the Alesis synthesis team. The Miniak brings together Akai Professional's control feel with powerful DSP sound-generation technology.

The Miniak enables users to create programs with up to eight multi-timbral voices, each with three oscillators. The user can create interesting and unique sounds and take advantage of the synthesizer's more-than-600 preset sounds. Users can create complex and refined sounds using the Miniak's two multimode filters, three envelope generators, two LFOs, stereo effects and 40-band vocoder with gooseneck microphone. The Miniak also has a comprehensive sequencer with step and dynamic real time phrase sequencing, a drum machine/rhythm sequencer and an arpeggiator.

User ...

112dB has updated Redline Monitor, its high-quality near-field monitor simulation for headphones, to version 1.0.3.

New :

• Dim attenuation switchable from -3dB (as in previous versions) to -6dB to prevent clipping.
• Additional Easier Readability skin for visually impaired users.
• Option to disable popup tooltips.

Fixed :

• Pro Tools compare functionality didn't work.
• Plugin crash when deinserted on some setups.
• Fixed loading problem in Live 8 on Vista.
• Numerical value entry slowed down or hung some Vista systems.

SoundsDivine has released "New Retro", a bank of 128 presets for FXpansion's D-CAM:Synth Squad Strobe featuring vintage-style keyboard sounds, rhythmic pads, arpeggiated synths and organic textural sounds.

New Retro is available now at a price of $25.

JoeCo announces the release of its Blackbox Recorder, a high performance multi-track capturing device designed for the 21st century.

Aimed primarily at the live music market, it records 24 channels of hi-res audio directly to a USB2 drive. It can be plugged directly into the insert points on any console and can also provide Virtual Sound Checking facilities. Recording to standard external USB2 disks formatted with FAT32 in Broadcast WAV file format (BWAV), any material can be instantly used in a studio Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) without any need for time-consuming file conversions or transfers.

Features :

• 24 track audio recorder
• Virtual Sound Check Facility
• 24bit/96kHz conversion
• Simple User interface
• Keyboard input for naming tra ...

AcousticsampleS releases SmallDrumKits.

- The SmallDrumKits are 3 different Drum Kits, each has two toms, a snare, a
ride, a hihat and a bass drum.
- 506Mo of samples recorded at 24-bit/44.1kHz (kitA:149Mo, kitB 61Mo,
kitC:295Mo).
- Custom mapping, you can assign every element to any key from the
interface.
- Mappings presets: GM, V-DRUMS, IMAP, NSKIT (NDK) or default one.
- cc# controlled Hihat that features automatic closing sound.
- Cycle round robins (4 for kit A and C and 2 for kit B).
- Sensitivity button to adjust the response.
- Detailed instruments: up to 10 velocity layers per round robin.
- Kontakt 2 and 3 format to benefit from the interface and the custom
mapping. Easy to use Kontakt interface.
- Priced at €34 and as the summer sale is going on, you can get it for €22 until august 31.

You can find audio and video demos on the website.

Univers-Sons / Ultimate Sound Bank announces the release of a brand new UVI Soundpack, Italian Grand Piano. Here is what they say about it :

"After popular demand from the UVI community, our great sound designer team was back to work. The goal: find and record the best model of the Italian manufacturer Fazioli. We did choose a superb sounding F278 model, in our opinion, better than the usually sampled model F308.

For that kind of unique instrument, we did choose a very unique gear: the microphone set-up was a matched pair of Neumann M150 and the preamp/converters were the ones from the acclaimed Nagra D2. A unique combination of exceptional gear for the first time in sampling a piano library.

The UVI philosophy regarding pianos is to propose truly musical and excellent sounding pr ...