Native Instruments announces that Synthetic Drums 2 is now available in stores. Synthetic Drums 2 is the latest addition to the NI soundline range is loaded with 36 drum kits that offer material for all contemporary and upcoming styles of electronic music - including various flavours of techno and house,hiphop, R&B, ambient, two-step, drum&bass, tech funk, IDM, breakbeat, electro, industrial,electronica, big beat, downbeat, experimental and avantgarde.

Synthetic Drums 2 (Battery 2 and Kontakt formats) is available for a suggested retail price of $119 or 99 Euros.

Prosoniq today announce the immediate availability of SonicWORX Artist, Studio and PowerBundle along with all bundled SonicWORX plug ins as a free download. SonicWORX is a versatile sound editing program for MacOS 8 and 9 and Classic in OS X up to 10.2.8 which has been discontinued on January 1st, 2004. The software is now obsolete and will no longer be updated or ported over to MacOS X.

SonicWORX is available as a free download from the Prosoniq Downloads-Freebies web page.

Wavemachine Labs unveils Drumadog version 4 for Macintosh. This famous Drum replacer plugin now features : advanced triggering mode, live triggering mode, a new pitch change algorithm, new favorites, auto-align mode, adjustable phase control, a built-in synthesizer, filter and synth presets, automation support ans support for plug-in delay compensation.

Drumadig 4 is available (OS 9 - OS X) in both RTAS, VST and Audio Units formats and is compatible with Pro Tools, Logic and Digital performer. A demo version is available as download.

MacMusic is proud to present you, in its article section, Dominique Bassal's study on "The Practice of Mastering in Electroacoustic Music". Today we propose you the third and final chapter of this article: "The Practice of Mastering : The Position of Electroacoustics."

Enjoy your reading !

Nomad Factory announces a free plugin bundle available as a download. This pack bundles a Phaser plugin, a Sweeper, and a Tremolo plugin. This free bundle is available as HTDM, RTAS,Audio Units and VST for Mac OS X 10.2 on the Nomad Factory web site.

Muse Research released the version 1.2 software update for its hardware VST plug-in player, Receptor. This new release adds new features including Adat output support (increasing the number of outputs to a total of ten), new MIDI mapping features (with flexible support for keyboard zones and layers), and a new "Z-Load" technology, which speeds plug-in loading.

Plogue announces an update to version 0.8001 for Bidule. This new release adds a peak meters and clip indicators, adds an option to save to multiple mono files, features faster loading of bigger files, and fixes several bugs.

Yellowtools annouces Candy, an extensive soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass saxophone collection.if all available playing techniques and their dynamic layers and variations are used, your performance will select from 30 different samples per note,or even more. In addition, the instruments were sampled playing their maximum dynamic range. This variety makes possible saxophone performances of such high quality that they can be used in the most demanding, professional contexts. Candy is not hard to use, though, the MVI engine remains nevertheless intuitive and easy to play. The 4 different variations of the same tone of a note can be selected during the performance automatically.

Digidesign announces that the OS10.4 Tiger compatible version of Pro Tools TDM will be available 4 or 6 weeks after Tiger release, therefore probably in June. Pro Tools LE software (Digi 002, Digi 002 Rack, mBox) and Pro Tools M-Powered software (M-Audio compatible interfaces) will be available 8 or 10 weeks after the release of Tiger, so probably arround June/July.

Apple just released a fix for the broken Java after the 10.3.9 update. This time, not only you have some stuff to download but there's some command line to type (SIGH!). The good point is, it's only for users who happen to have multiple Java apps open simultaneously. You have then to restore the Java Shared Archive. The steps, different if you're using Java 1.4.1 or 1.4.2 are detailed in the following link at Apple website.

It seems Apple has put together as quick a fix as they could, as the Terminal work necessary for a full restore is not as elegant as usual. Now, I've got some command line (ooch) to do, I must leave you ;) lpm