October, 2005 archive

Korg brings a heightened level of realism and feel to its line of portable digital pianos with the new SP-250. It provides an expanded range of expression and performance with an outstanding new stereo piano sound, which is matched to the company’s newest RH3 keyboard action.
The SP-250 features all-new piano PCM with velocity switched stereo [...]

Propellerhead Software has announced the release of the Reason Drum Kits 2.0 ReFill, a collection of drum kits for Reason 3.0 that goes far beyond traditional professionally sampled drum libraries.
Utilizing Reason 3.0’s new Combinator device, RDK 2 captures in single patches the sound, the room, EQ, effects, signal routing, the player’s feel and multiple output [...]

Epiphone has announced the highly anticipated E Series guitar amplifier line, a follow up to the highly successful Valve Series of amplifiers. E Series amplifiers were first unveiled at the 2005 Musikmesse trade show in Frankfurt, Germany.
“With the E Series, we wanted to create a great sounding line of amplifiers with meaningful, not complicated, features,” [...]

Bremmers Audio Design has released of the 4.0 version of MultitrackStudio, the audio / MIDI multitrack recording program for Windows.
MultitrackStudio, first released in 2001, has been designed with tape-based recording in mind, making it easy to learn, yet powerful. The 4.0 release focuses on working faster, easier and with more power.
Offline mixdown has been added [...]

Prominy has released the LPC Electric Guitar Libraries, capturing the sound of Gibson Les Paul Custom and including over 60 Gigabytes, approximately 150,000 samples, in Kontakt 2 format.
Included are:

Over 7,200 .nki files – Single note, 5th-dyad chord, 4th-dyad chord, mute (tight, medium, loose), octave, vibrato (single note, 5th-dyad cord, 4th-dyad chord, octave), single bend, unison [...]

WWAYM has released NWSynth for OS X, a virtual analog synth with powerful filters.
It includes 2 filters, 2 oscillators with a many modulations, unisono, portamento, distortion and echo and a lot of useful presets. There is also full MIDI control and automation with MIDI learn.

Features:

2 Filters
2 oscillators with various modulation options
Unison
Portamento
Distortion
Echo
Full MIDI automation with MIDI [...]

Here’s something to keep in mind next time you’re thinking about how much the latest music gadget costs: A lifetime of music will set the average person back $37,000. (And that’s the average cost – music freaks will spend even more!)
Research by Prudential in the UK shows that people spend a massive $37,000 (UK £21,000) [...]

Griffin Technology has introduced the new iMic USB audio adapter, an updated version of its USB audio adapter. iMic allows you to connect virtually any microphone or sound input device to your iBook, PowerBook, PowerMac or other Mac or PC systems with a USB port.
iMic supports both mic and line level inputs via a selectable [...]

Ilio has announced a PC version of Ivory, Synthogy’s piano plug-in. The pristine sound of the German Steinway D 9’ Concert Grand, Bosendorfer 290 Imperial Grand, and Yamaha C7 Grand Pianos can now be heard in VST and RTAS environments, both under Windows XP and Mac OS 9 or OS X.
Besides porting their custom-built piano [...]

AES Update: Novation has introduced the ReMOTE 25 SL USB MIDI controller keyboard. It features featuring conventiently-placed pots, encoders, sliders and buttons, along with two brightly backlit LCDs to display 16 different parameter names and values at any one time.
The keyboard controller has several interesting new features. The first improvement shines a new light on [...]