PC and Music News

TC Electronic unveils Level Pilot, a stylish, high-resolution volume solution that fits into any active speaker set-up quickly and easily and with a minimum of clutter and wires.

Features :

- High-resolution analogue volume control - Level Pilot uses a renowned Bourns potentiometer to ensure accurate, high-resolution analog control over your monitors at all times.
- Exceptional clarity in the signal path - it uses components and circuitry that optimize signal-to-noise ratios. There are no buffers, batteries, transistors or other tone-sucking components in there.
- Compact, sleek and sturdy design - it comes with a brushed aluminum finish to give it a premium look and a smooth, ergonomic feel.
- Computer-independent operation
- Balanced and unbalanced compatibility
- 'Slip-free' rubberized base plate
- Quad-core fully balanced XLR connectivity - Level Pilot comes with its own discrete quad-core cabling to ensure perfect stereo imaging and left-right tracking - with no messy cabling to clutter up your workspace.

Level Pilot will be available next month for a fee of €99.

The SAE (School of Audio Engineering) has launched the SAE Store, a new service for their students. They've have teamed up with manufacturers such as Apple, Digidesign, Focusrite, McDSP, Propellerhead, RME, Ableton, BIAS, FadFilter, and more to enable students to get big discounts on hardware and software.

The SAE Store is open to students worldwide, and can be accessed through the following url where they'll be asked for their student ID and their birth date upon login.

MellowMuse has announced the availability of the EQ1A Equaliser, CP1A Compressor, IR1A Convolver and Mellowhead guitar and fx modeling plug-ins for Mac OS X in AU format.

CP1A Compressor ($59) is an all purpose stereo/mono compressor, capable of subtle dynamics taming to creative drum shaping. The CP1A utilizes a feed forward design with multi stage level detection/reduction to minimize distortion at extreme settings. Controls have been kept to a minimum for ease of use. The "Mix" control allows easy parallel compression of drums, by enabling the compressed signal to be mixed with the original.

EQ1A Equaliser ($49) is a smooth analog-style program EQ, with Hipass, frequency sweepable Low/High Shelf and variable frequency/Q Low/High mid controls.

IR1A Convolver ($69) is a general purpose convolution plug-in that can load 16-/24-bit mono or stereo AIFF or WAV files. Great for reverb, natural room ambiences. IR1A comes with a selection of IRs, including reverbs, room ambience and guitar cabinets, as it loads standard AIFF/WAV files its easy to create your own IRs or take advantage of the many free IRs available for download.

Mellowhead ($69) is a versatile tube amp and cabinet guitar-sim. The emphasis here is on creating the raw organic sound of a mic'ed tube amp. There are 10 convolution based speaker cabinets and 10 different pre-amp/tone settings, ranging from clean to brutal distortion, as well as 3 band tone controls.

MellowMuse has also announced that Auto Time Adjuster is now available as a native RTAS plug-in for Windows and Mac OS X and the VST version has been discontinued.

Danfield Audio unveils a new monitor controller and its remote called monitor2 and monitor2 remote respectively.

monitor2 features :

- 7 balanced inputs and outputs, with adjustable gain trim and status indication.
- 2 independent cue buses with TB level control and cue - dim level adjustment.
- Isolate button allows cue bus to be floated from the monitor buses so independent monitoring set-ups can be created for the control room and ––studio-areas.
- Adjustable second reference monitor level and studio master dim levels.
- Meter follow monitor allows external meter to follow EXT inputs or monitor outputs.
- AutoCue system allows dynamic control of the studio talkback when recording. Cuts when tracking and in play – TBk switches on when recorder has stopped.
- Balanced Ins and ...

Univers Sons/Ultimate Sound Bank announces Electric Toy Museum library. This is certainly the most insane sound library in the market: 97 vintage musical toys were carefully sampled in the very best conditions, 24 bits/96khz quality, most of them recorded with the best microphones and preamps.

With more than 1000 presets and 14 000 samples, it's like having all these toys right under your fingertips. Every aspect of each machine has been captured : multi-sampled instruments with release samples for every note, rhythms converted into sliced loops, GM drumkits created, FX and speech voices carefully organized in 10 categories: Children, Developed, Drums & FX, Mini Sampler, Musical Toys, Organ Basic, Silly, Small, Speech & Style-o-phone.

Electric Toy Museum is now available for $249, and includes the full version of UVI Workstation.

Goldbaby has released SP1200 Vol 1 for Guru and Sample Pack (Battery 3 and ReFill versions coming soon). Here is the description found on their website :

"What do12 bit drum samples sound like when put through an analogue filter. If you have a SP-1200 or SP-12 then you already know the answer. Some would say dirty and warm, some also say it sounds like old vinyl...

The SP-1200 is a legendary drum sampler. Used by many artist from Roni Size to Daft Punk. Hip Hop legends Pete rock and J Dilla were also notible users.

Not everyone can get there hands on one of these machines. So I thought I better help out. I got the SP-1200 and the SP-12 and started sampling. I sampled an 808, 909, 606 and LM1... also some real drums... plus some vinyl hits... and just for good measure I have included the SP-12 presets and some groove templates..."

Also released is a FREE samples pack : The SP1200 vs MBase1 sample pack and SP1200 groove templates.

For more information, please visit the link below :