PC and Music News

Waves Audio announces the latest in its series of educational events, a tour featuring appearances by Tony Maserati, a GRAMMY® Award-winning, multi-platinum producer/engineer/mix engineer for countless R&B, hip-hop and pop hits. The tour, entitled "In the Multi-Platinum Mix with Tony Maserati," will offer an intimate face-to-face with Maserati, where he'll be sharing his studio techniques and approach to mixing. Throughout the spring, the tour will take Maserati and the Waves crew to several cities across North America, including an appearance at L.A.'s historic Village Recording Studios.

Over the course of his career, Tony Maserati has been behind the board for some of the biggest names in pop, hip-hop and R&B. With over 250 releases under his belt, he is widely regarded as a primary architect of the sounds associated with New York R&B production since the mid-90s. His resume is extensive: Beyoncé, Black Eyed Peas, Jason Mraz, Mary J. Blige, David Bowie, 2Pac, Britney Spears, John Legend and many more have all turned to Maserati for his magic touch. With the "In the Multi-Platinum Mix" tour and The Tony Maserati Collection of Waves plug-ins, users and attendees are given a fast track to Maserati's hit sound.

Together with Waves Product Specialists, Tony will demonstrate his use of Waves plug-ins, including The Tony Maserati Collection

Trinnov Audio has introduced Optimizer ST, a stereo loudspeaker processor featuring exclusive Trinnov digital room correction technology. This new loudspeaker processor can be used to optimize the monitor's behaviour in any room in order to achieve accurate sound reproduction, and consistent mixes from one room to another. Optimizer ST will be showcased at this year's Musikmesse in hall 5.1 stand D58.

Optimizer ST uses exactly the same "digital acoustics engine" that has established Trinnov's reputation as helping sound engineers to achieve translatable mixes in 5.1 control rooms and post-production theatres around europe. It combines automatic and manual room equalization with impulse response acoustic measurements and cutting-edge time-frequency analysis.

The Optimizer ST not only offers unique room EQ features such as target curves and automatic phase optimization. It includes all the functionality that you expect from a loudspeaker processor, such as delays, gains, crossovers and manual EQs (graphic and parametric)

For 2-way and 3-way systems the Optimizer's automatic crossover alignement functionality ensures unmatched sound performance while dramatically reducing the effort required to setup gains and delays on each way. The integrated Bass Management automatically adjusts delays on each satellite to ensure optimal overlapping with the subwoofer. Last but not least, a best-of-breed monitor controller can be built by connecting third party volume knobs and/or touch-screens to the Optimizer ST.

Technical specifications in brief :

- 2 balanced analog in/out via XLR + optional 4 balanced analog out via TRS jacks
- 2 AES/EBU in/out via XLR
- 2 ADAT in/out via toslink
- 2 SPDIF in/out via coaxial or optical
- 2 processing channels
- 96kHz, 64-bit floating point processing
- supports 44.1kHz, 48kHz, 88.2kHz and 96kHz sampling frequencies
- user interface is fully accessible from a connected monitor or from a VNC client (PC or Mac) through the network.
- silent 1.2U frame with external power supply.

Optimizer ST will start shipping on April 3, 2009 with a MRSP of €2950 ex VAT.

QuikQuak has updated all its plug-ins to fix VST-RTAS wrapper compatibility.

The updates include :

- Frozen interface fix for all six plug-ins (Mac & Win).
- Rayspace: Mono to stereo crash fix in Logic AU.
- Pitchwheel: Pointer reset on sequencer play.

WaveMachine Labs is proud to introduce its first official Drumagog sample library. Created by the same people who developed Drumagog, Percussion eXtras is a GOG-format collection of percussion instruments from around the world. Use them as stand-alone replacement sounds, or mix them with your existing drums for unique sonic combinations. From delicate triangles to the thunderous low-end of an 18" Djembe, Percussion eXtras offers new artistic flavors to the Drumagog user.

Produced by WaveMachine Labs and John Emrich, Percussion eXtras contains 44 individual GOG files, with 78 different positional groups. All together the library contains over 1600 individual percussion samples, each performed, recorded, and edited by John Emrich.

$59.95 retail price, available for both Mac and Windows in GOG-format only.

For more information and audio demos, visit here:

CME has announced that the Neosynth24 expansion board for their keyboards (UF and VX series) is now shipping. It provides high quality audio instruments and effects and adds great sonic possibilities to CME keyboards.

NeoSynth24 features a built in sound bank (64 MBytes/256 Mbits) that can be updated at your convenience. All instruments can thus be updated in order to create completely new sounds from the same keyboard. Various sound banks are available (General MIDI standard instruments set, Grand Piano style, Hip Hop style, Techno/House style, R&B style and much more …), these multiple sound banks are available on SD Cards that can be ordered separately. These SD Cards are then used to upgrade the on board instruments, once upgraded the SD Card can be removed from its slot. All available sound banks are high quality sampled instruments, from 16 to 24 bits resolution, up to 96 kHz sampling frequency. NeoSynth24 on board powerful DSP allows up to 124 voices of polyphony.

Features :

- MIDI / USB expander
- Up to 124 voices of polyphony
- Built-in FX engines
- Up to 64 MB sound bank
- Updatable sound banks from SD Card
- Various music styles available
- USB MIDI class compliant (no driver)
- 24 bits / 48 kHz audio paths
- Main stereo audio output (24bits D/A)
- Auxiliary stereo audio output (24bits D/A)
- Headphones output
- Analog stereo audio input (24bits A/D)
- S/PDIF stereo audio input/output
- Available for both UF & VX keyboards
- Large MIDI implementation

Blue Cat Audio has announced a massive update of all its commercial EQ plugins. The new versions are now available for Mac in VST and Audio Unit formats, and also bring multiple improvements to the existing Windows plug-ins. The Liny EQ series have been completely redesigned for this new release.

The Blue Cat Audio EQ plug-ins include the Liny EQ series (linear phase graphic equalizers), Parametr'EQ series (digital and analog parametric EQs) and the Triple EQ plug-ins (semi-parametric visual EQs). They all come in three flavors, offering a wide variety of capabilities. In particular, the Widening versions propose mid/side processing for frequency selective stereo narrowing or widening.

New for all plugins :

- Mac Audio Unit support.
- Mac VST Support.
- New Windows installer (you should uninstall any previous version before installing this new one).
- New documentation.

New for the Liny EQ series :

- New user interface design.
- The plug-in now offers two types of EQ curves.
- EQ range is now customizable.
- Undo/Redo support.
- Preset import/export in a host independent format.
- Window opacity control for plugin transparency.

The plug-ins are available in several bundles or separately, with a temporary special offer on bundles. Existing customers can update most plug-ins for free, except the Liny EQ series for which a special upgrade price is available.

Pricing :

- Blue Cat's Liny EQ Pack (3 Plug-ins) : €99.96 (instead of €119) or $133.56 (instead of $159)
- Blue Cat's Parametr'EQ Pack (3 Plug-ins) : €99.96 (instead of €119) or $133.56 (instead of $159)
- Blue Cat's Triple EQ Pack (2 Plug-ins) : €42.14 (instead of €49) or $59.34 (instead of $69)