PC and Music News

An old friend returns. Propellerhead Software's legendary Techno Micro Composer has been resurrected and made available for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch.

ReBirth faithfully emulates dance music's three backbone devices: The Roland TB-303 Bass synth and the Roland TR-808 and 909 drum machines. Combine these with FX units, fully featured pattern sequencers and a quick-acting, scalable iPhone interface and you'll soon be making techno on the train, trance on the tram or beats on the bus.

Voxengo Elephant update version 3.6 is now available for download. Voxengo Elephant is a mastering limiter plug-in for professional music production applications, available in AudioUnit and VST plug-in formats, for Mac OS X and Windows computers.

Changes :

• Real-time gain reduction and waveform graphs implemented.
• Mid/side and side-chain routing presets now appear dimmed to reduce confusion.
• Parameter automation on AU Mac OS X now shows real parameter values.
• Preset "update" function implemented in the preset manager.
• The "VST Function Sync" global switch was added that fixes crashes in some hosts (i.e. Tracktion).
• "Density mode" implemented in level meters.
• Occasional extreme CPU overloads eliminated at the expense of average in ...

FXpansion is proud to present Himalaya: Antiquity, a DCAM: Synth Squad Preset Pack produced by Electric Himalaya. The scope of Antiquity's chunky, vintage sounds is breathtaking, and its musical character will keep you playing for hours.

Highlights include fat, lush OB-style brass sounds and classic analogue leads and basses of all kinds, full of weight, vibe and inspiration. Deep, evolving pads, shimmering bells, funky arps, powerful keyboard and polysynth sounds and too much more to list. As well as evoking the heavy physics and playability of old-school analogue subtractive and FM sounds, Antiquity brings new dimensions to these classic tones with Synth Squad's modern luxuries like precise tuning, tempo-synced LFOs and envelopes, and advanced mod ...

Elysia has announced the release of niveau filter, a new plug-in that provides the niveau filter section from elysia's mpressor plug-in as a separate, free, plug-in.

Add punch to muffled snares, reduce the harshness from active pickups, create some wonderful Dub and LoFi sounds... there are so many ways to benefit from this little tool.

This filter is a specialist in changing the overall sonic character of a signal with ease. It features two comprehensive controllers and is capable of producing convincing results in no time at all. Whenever a classic shelving filter would be too limited and a fully parametric filter would be too much, the niveau filter is the perfect tool.

Its main function is to change the proportions between high and low frequencies. The principle is quite simil ...

Toontrack announces the Music City USA SDX for Superior Drummer 2.0. Here's what they say about it :

"Like it, love it or leave it, Nashville Tennessee is Music City USA. With more labels, publishers, writers, producers, musicians and artists per capita than any other city in North America, Nashville knows a thing or two about great music, and more importantly - great sounding music.

With the city's history & culture so steeped in the art of making and recording music, the team could think of no better place on earth to record a library of drums that would be at home in music ranging from rock to reggae, metal to gospel or punk to polka. Oh yeah... they're good for country & rock too!

Introducing the Music City USA SDX , the newest library of drum samples and MIDI grooves for our award winning, industry standard drum production platform, Superior Drummer® 2.0.

Much like its sibling, the Nashville EZX®, the Music City USA SDX found us working with Harry Stinson and Chuck Ainlay, two of the best, most experienced players and producers in the business."

The Music City USA SDX will be available May 2010 at a price of £119.00 / €139.00.

XILS-lab announces that a dongle free demo version of their polyKB virtual synth is now available.

The polyKB is a recreation of a very rare, very powerful polyphonic synthesizer released in the 80's by a french company. It is a polyphonic substractive synthesizer based on two waveform morphing, aliasing free oscillators and a self oscilating 4 poles low pass filter.

One of its features, never heard on other analog synthesizers, was the continuously modulated waveform, sort of a modulated waveform morphing. Recreating this feature in the digital domain, without aliasing was a very big challenge.

Features :

• two aliasing-free morphing oscillators: from triangle to pulse, through saw.
• one 4 poles low pass self oscillating filter
• two envelope generators ...