PC and Music News

Best Service releases Chris Hein-Bass, a bass guitar sample library powered by Kontakt 2 Player (12.7 GB, up to 4,089 samples per patch). Chris Hein has produced this collection including a Musicman Stingray picked & slapped, a LeFay fretless bass and an upright bass with three sets of strings: steel-strings (classic jazz sound), nylon-strings (high-fidelity sound) and gut-strings (40s swing sound).

All nuances of bass playing techniques are implemented, thanks to Kontakt scripting abilities. It offers 112 MIDI controllable features including things like repetition-hotkeys, keys-vibrato, fall-control, bridge/center playing, pickup micro-blending, expression-samples, pinch-harmonics, automatic-mode, slide-mode, chord-mode and much more.

The included IK Multimedia Ampeg SVX Uno (virtual bass-amp) adds more sound variations to the natural, basic, bass instruments.

Tone2 has announced that Gladiator for Mac OS X is available now and that the Windows version has been updated to v1.1.


The Mac UB (AU and VST 2.4) version of Gladiator is available. Tone2 has enhanced some functionalities and fixed some behaviors :
- Drastically improved time for saving/loading songs in Cubase and other hosts.
- Opening the plugin is 250% faster. When the plugin is started for the first time it creates cache files (.1 .2 .3 .4) within the Gladiator_data directory. These cache files help to improve the performance.
- Drastically reduced the hard disc space for saving songs in Cubase and other hosts (previously 1.5 Mb per instance, now 850 byte).
- Removed a glitch after switching through presets.
- Slightly reduced memory usage.
- LFO1/2 "retrigger off" was rena ...

Olympus adds another member to the portable recorders family (see our news on the Marantz PMD620 or the Edirol R-09), for example).

The Olympus LS-10 allows you to record in 24bit/96 kHz linear PCM, and supports Wave, WMA and MP3. It has a built-in 2 GB memory, SD slot, mic amplifier,2 cardioid mics, line and mic inputs, headphones output, USB connection, etc.

It is powered by 2 AA batteries (up to 12 hours of recording capability).
It is bundled with Cubase LE4 and has an estimated street price of $399.99 and should be available these coming days.

Kurzweil should make its (big ?) come-back at Winter Namm 2008, with the PC3x, their newest performance controller, offering a huge collection of over 800 sounds combined with comprehensive real-time controller functions.
Among other things, their Classic Keys ROM, a large vintage keyboard rig, is included, as well as the VA1 analog synth architecture (for free til Feb 15th 2008), coming from their never issued analog modeling supermonster synth (remember Winter Namm 2004 ?), or the famous Kurzweil Triple Strike Piano.
And Dynamic V.A.S.T. is said to "pick up where the K series left off. Having up to 32 layers per program means that emulations of real instruments can be extremely detailed and accurate, while the synthesized sounds can be extraordinarily large and complex."
A few ...

U-he releases version 2.0 of its excellent More Feedback Machine (Win, Mac UB, VST & AU).

More Feedback Machine offers ultra flexible delay effects ranging from bread & butter stuff to weird rhythmic deconstructions.
The idea behind MFM is to give the musician as much control over 4 separate delay lines as possible (each with panning, filter, output level and lots of feedback options), and having them interact, as well as having means to modulate delay parameters in realtime.

MFM2 costs $79. The update from MFM1 to MFM2 is free for registered users. A demo is available.

Phaedra is a Kontakt Player 2 dedicated to analog synths, featuring over 4 GB of sounds, 20,000 samples and 720 patches (VST 2.0, DXi, ASIO, AU, RTAS, Mac & PC).

Producer Sam Spacey has constructed Phaedra with the same attention to detail as a huge orchestral sample library. Each of the 20,000 samples has been edited and looped by hand, with loops being very long.
Nearly every single preset has each separate note sampled so as to eliminate aliasing within the instrument's range.

Categories include : Synth 1, Synth 2, Bass, Leads, Pads, Sequences, FX, DnB, Synth Builder & Multis

Some synths used for Phaedra : Mini Moog D, Welsh Moog, Yamaha CS5, CS-15 & CS-30, Korg Monopoly & MS-20, Studio Electronics SE-1, Roland SH-101, Crumar Multiman, Akai AX-73, etc.

Recommended Retail Price:
$199.95 (169 euros/114.95 pounds sterling)