PC and Music News

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 ...

Clavia has annonced that the Nord C2 Combo Organ is now shipping.

Features :

• Pipe Organ
• New keyboard action
• Improved output routing capabilities
• Monitor input
• Percussion controls moved to the "classic position"
• Vibrato and chorus controls moved to the "classic position"
• Enhanced click
• Drawbar Preview

Audio examples are available at :

PreSonus has just released a demo version of its long-awaited new music creation and production application for Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista : Studio One.

This version will allow you to try Studio One Pro for a period of 30 days, after which the software will require purchase and activation to continue running. You will not be able to save documents or export audio in the Demo version. Otherwise, you will be able to explore all of the features Studio One Pro has to offer.

Please note that Studio One is still unavailable for purchase. You can make a request for the Demo version at :