PC and Music News

Driven by iZotope’s award-winning visual selection technology, iZotope Iris is a groundbreaking sample-based synthesizer that harnesses the power of both your eyes and your ears.
Key Features of Iris

Discover what’s inside any sound: Load audio into Iris™ and explore spectral details that a regular waveform locks away.

Highlight what intrigues you: Extract and isolate the most interesting sonic components with a full suite of visual selection tools.

Combine the unthinkable: Layer completely diverse sound sources into totally unique combinations - what do a tattoo needle and a swamp bird and a slot machine sound like together?

Stay musical: Rely on automatic root note detection to help shape musical material from noise, ambient textures, soundscapes…even mistakes!

Enhance and invigorate your sound: Apply world-class iZotope reverbs, distortions and delays, then take advantage of extended synth features like amp envelopes and LFOs

Get amazing sounds immediately: Spark your imagination with over 500 patches by world-class sound designers, or design your own with Iris’s 4 GB library of diverse sound samples

Throughout November, Iris is available for the special 20% off price of £119.00 / €139.00.

2konkret Live Pack is the second installment of a series of otherworldly textures, transitions, impulses and ambiences that have their origin in our daily surroundings.
As a starting point for further explorations 2konkret delivers 104 Instrument Racks that are specifically designed around a variety of found sounds.
If it's a windmill and its associated transformer station that delivered a fascinating duet of hum and phasing sounds. Or a barrow loaded with bricks as a perfect starting point for the creation of impacts or low end drones. Then there's the sound of a heater core filled with water and a little too much air, several body noises, animal sounds, machines and engines just to name a few.
The library is organized into 14 categories:
Alarm / Animal / Body / Diginoise / Garden / Heater / Impacts / Tuned Keys / Machines / Passes / Spikes / Synked / Textures / Weird

specifications
- Format: Ableton Live Pack, Live 8/9
- Instruments: 104
- Samples: 104
- Disk space: 290 MB

2konkret Universal library contains 119 sounds recorded in the field and is organized into 41 categories. Each sound comes with dedicated loop points and loads immediately into any DAW or sample editing app.

specifications
- Format: WAV (with loop points)
- Samples: 119
- Disk space: 350 MB

2konkret is available to purchase as download for 9.00 Euro.

AudioThing has released Halloween Pumpkins for Native Instrument Kontakt.
Halloween Pumpkins features samples and unusual sound design experiments with traditional Halloween pumpkins. You will find spooky bowed textures, creepy hits, plucked rubber bands, a fake transistor organ and of course an experimental impulse response of the inside of a large pumpkin.

Specifications:
- 12 Kontakt Instruments (.nki).
- 5 Kontakt Multis (.nkm).
- Up to 6 Round Robin samples.
- 1 Custom Pumpkin IR.
- 76 Samples (44.1kHz / 24-bit).
- Size: 76 MB.
- Formats: Kontakt and WAV .
- Sample sets including: bowed textures, hits, plucked rubber bands, fake transistor organ.
- Native Instruments Kontakt 4.2.4 or 5 full version required

Full Price: €5.

Halloween Sale: until November 1st, 2013, you can use the discount code hallow13 to get a 10% off storewide (where the total in the shopping cart is more than €5).

Radial Engineering Ltd. announce the availability of the Voco-Loco, a combination microphone preamp and effects loop insert that enables a lead vocalist, brass instrumentalist or harmonica player to incorporate guitar effects pedals into their signal path.

Just like an electric guitarist adds effects for soloing such as delay, reverb or distortion, this option is now available to anyone's performance by engaging a simple footswitch.

Circuit bending is a creative medium that combines technology, sonic artistry and creativity. By altering the internal circuitry of electronic devices such as keyboards, drum machines, and children's toys, circuit benders are able to produce new sounds not intended in the original design.

In celebration of this creative curiosity that fueled a young Bob Moog and all of those that follow in his footsteps, Moog is sponsoring its 4th annual circuit bending contest.

This year, Moog’s circuit bending contest is challenging entrants to take a battery powered device and circuit bend it into an instrument capable of creating new and unique sounds for a total budget of $70 or less.

Entrants will create and post videos on YouTube featuring their completed instruments and documenting the process of their creation. Moog will select three finalists and invite them to showcase their creations at Moogfest in April of 2014 where Moog’s judges and the general public will decide a winner of the contest.

Grand Prize: Moog Sub Phatty & Two Passes to Moogfest 2014
2nd Place: Moog Slim Phatty & Two Passes to Moogfest 2014
3rd Place: Moog Minitaur & Two Passes to Moogfest 2014.

But the MicroBrute Analog Synthesizer is actually anything but basic. For starters, just like its big brother, the OSCILLATOR that beats at its musical heart features SAW, TRIANGLE, and SQUARE waveforms that are all mixable to help shape the resulting sound without the limitations imposed by comparable contemporary and vintage synths alike. Additionally, the new Overtone oscillator generates additional harmonic content, ranging from one octave down to a fifth above the base OSCILLATOR pitch, while the Sub > Fifth control can continuously sweep spectrum. Moreover, Metalizer adds complex harmonics to the TRIANGLE waveform for creating harsh, harmonically-rich sounds, while Ultrasaw adds a lively and bright ensemble effect to the SAWTOOTH waveform — perfect for crafting sounds suited to dance anthems. And let’s not forget the all-important Pulse Width control for creating nasal-thin tones or rich square sounds. Simply speaking, never before has such a small, single-oscillator synth sounded so big!

Of course, filtering helps shape any analogue synth’s sound — be it big or small, and here the MicroBrute does not disappoint. Indeed, its distinctive-sounding Steiner-Parker FILTER plays a big part in helping give the MicroBrute a unique sound — again, just like its big brother. This filter design dates back to the Steiner-Parker Synthacon, an analogue monosynth built by the namesake Salt Lake City-based synth manufacturer between 1975 and 1979. Its HP (high-pass), BP (bandpass), and LP (lowpass) modes make for far more filtering flexibility than that found in synths many times the price! €329.00 EUR/$349.00 USD