PC and Music News

Step into our time machine and explore musical heritage like never before. For over 500 years this instrument has been an essential musical ingredient in music styles across Europe, Eurasia and large parts of the Middle East. Forming a base of harmony and rhythm and a solid musical environment for melody instruments to perform in, spreading its sound from the early medieval inns, taverns in the Golden Age to the festive Hobbit scenes of the Lord Of The Rings movies. This versatile and distinctive sound instantly triggers the imagination and lingers on to colour the musical picture the composer tries to paint.

The first version of BS.1770 relied on ambiguous speech detection, which can have unexpected consequences trying to control the level of commercials or programs of certain genres. The improved 1770-2 recommendation incorporates a clever relative gate, making the measurement well-defined and practical to use, also across genres.

Now, TC Electronic updates its radar loudness meters in System 6000 MKII (v. 5.11), DB4 (v. 3.20), DB8 (v. 3.20), DB4 MKII (v. 3.20), DB8 MKII (v. 3.20), LM2 (v.1.11), TC TouchMonitor TM7 & TM9 (v. 1.14) and for ProTools HD (LM5D version 2) to comply with BS.1770-2.

Ongcat Audio Technologies has announced today that they updated H3D, their 3D audio binaural plugin for Digital Audio Workstations, to version 1.1.2 on Windows and Mac OS X. This update adds ProTools (RTAS) support on Windows and and Mac OS X, supports samplerates up to 192kHz, enhances the H3D process transparency, and fixes general stability issues for both platforms.

Aimed at musicians, sound designers or podcasts producers, Longcat's H3D inserts in major audio software (such as ProTools, Logic Pro, Digital Performer, Cubase, Live, Pyramix or Reaper), and allows the user to create immersive 3D mixes for headphones, by visually animating a large number of audio tracks in a full-3D interface.

This library was born out of the want for a down and dirty guitar lib – one that can be loaded, and used quickly – no fuss, no hassle. And one that has a very small RAM footprint. Perfect for creating intricate guitar parts with alot of movement, or just doing simple sketches.

The Down & Dirty & Clean Guitar lib consists of two sections: distorted (mic'd w/amp), and clean. Both sections are mirrors of one another; both have single notes, and chords. The notes are 2 velocity layers, and either mono and round robin x2, or stereo, split l/r. 4+ octaves are covered – from the low B0, up to the highest E5. The chords as well are 2 velocity layers, and either mono and round robin x2, or stereo, split l/r. They cover an octave and a half, starting at the low B0, and working up to Eb2. Chords have two strumming patterns – fast and slow, and are both major and minor.

Celemony's new music restoration program Capstan is now available, a demo version online. Capstan removes wow and flutter from musical material of all kinds and commends itself therefore to professional restoration and mastering studios. The program runs as a stand-alone application under Windows and Mac OS and supports all common two-track formats.

Capstan is capable of removing wow and flutter from musical recordings – whether on tape, compact cassette, wax, shellac or vinyl. Capstan detects wow and flutter by analyzing the musical material itself, so the medium is of no relevance. In this, Capstan is clearly superior to solutions such as bias tracking, because Capstan still works even if the tape has already been copied several times or digitized only in low resolution.

Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH today announced the release of a fully functional Cubase Elements 6 trial version. Users with a MySteinberg account now can evaluate the comprehensive feature set of the smallest Cubase retail version for a full 30 days, immediately available as download from the Steinberg website.

Also available as native 64-bit version and cross-platform compatible with Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Cubase Elements 6 runs up to 64 MIDI tracks and 48 audio tracks in full 96 kHz/24-bit DVD quality.