PC and Music News

Akai Professional announces the immediate availability of the SynthStation music production app in the iTunes App Store. SynthStation transforms an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad into a portable music production studio. While the SynthStation app is powerful enough for professional musicians, virtually anyone can use it to easily create music. Built around Akai Professional's history in synthesis and drawing on the company's newest MINIAK synth, the SynthStation app sounds great and offers wide-ranging sonic flexibility with its virtual analog synthesis. The app gives musicians three synthesizers for creating melodies, chords and bass lines. For creating melodic and accompaniment parts, the SynthStation contains an on-screen keyboard complete with an arpeggiator and an XY control interface for ...

Zoom takes its R16 and turbocharges it with a sampler and drum machine, 8 additional recording tracks and 6 channels of phantom-power on the all-new R24. The R24 combines four production tools into one versatile device. In addition to 24-track playback and 8-track simultaneous recording using SD memory cards, the R24 is a digital multi-track recorder, an audio interface, a control surface and a pad sampler.

The R24's new sampler function consists of 24 built-in voices that can be triggered using 8 pads and 3 bank keys to assign sounds to each track and create loops. Also, you can use the unit's drum machine and its 400 rhythm patterns to create original backing beats, or simply output a metronome for tempo control. More than ever before, you have all the tools necessary to create studio ...

Telefunken Elektroakustik is introducing at Summer NAMM 2010 the new MkII version of the R-F-T AK-47, one of the company's most popular and affordable microphones. Featuring a dual-sided, gold-sputtered capsule and a NOS (New Old Stock) TELEFUNKEN EF-732 vacuum tube, the new AK-47 MkII includes a transformer upgrade to the historic BV8 found in the U-47 and U-48 microphone classics of the past.

Telefunken has conducted extensive research in the historic design and transformer-manufacturing source for their BV8 output transformers. These BV8 transformers are then meticulously manufactured to these exacting historic specifications dictated by Telefunken's extensive library of historic technical documents.

Through continued research, the AK-47 MkII's new amplifier better employs the ext ...

Clavia have released an OS updates that enable the Nord Stage Classic and the Nord Electro 3 to benefit from the v5 platform, with the new great v5 Piano sounds, the new Sound Manager 5.30 and the v3.00 Windows Hardware Quality Labs certified USB driver.

The 5.30 Sound Manager is required to be able to load the v5 Piano sounds. The Windows version of the Manager also has a self-contained installer for a new WHQL certified USB driver. The installer automatically checks your computer for installed drivers, and replaces these with new version if necessary.

Combining drums, bass and lead instruments with drag and drop, REX and MIDI support, plus a variety of functions and features, Beatstation is your companion for quickly getting tracks up and running. Beatstation's core content library is divided into three distinct categories - Lowbit, Synthetix and Organic. There are thousands of MIDI grooves, REX loops and drum/bass/lead instrument presets created from a massive collection of one-of-a-kind, rare, vintage, modern and custom instruments – all meticulously multi-sampled by Toontrack. Do you already have Toontrack EZX or SDX expansion packs? These can be combined and edited inside Beatstation too.

Furthermore, record your own sounds using the built-in recorder and easily drag and drop them on to the Beatstation pads, mixing and matching t ...

Mutools has released version 3.1 of MU.LAB, a hi-quality music application for Mac OSX and Windows, transforming your computer into a complete music studio. MU.LAB does not overwhelm you with a complex feature set, in which you can get lost, on the contrary, MU.LAB is a user-friendly yet rock-solid musical tool designed to create, finetune and play Your Music !

New features include:
- Multi track audio recording
- Record audio from any point in the audio signal flow
- Extreme flexible use of your audio device's inputs and outputs
- Automatic, non-destructive resampling of audio files with a differing samplerate
- New "Audio To Note Gate" module
- New "Note Key Splitter" module
- New and skinnable position line
- Many important workflow improvements