Mac and Music News

Mawzer will ship their MIDI controlers in January '06 for early customers, press and exhibitions. They also will open their web shop in first quarter of 2006. Mazwer is a new modular MIDI controller allowing an infinite customizable combination of controls. You can cange the configuration in seconds to adapt your studio project or live situation, day afer day, just by pluging Mawzer Modules in the Backplane, assign midi controls in your favorite software, and you're ready to play !

The very new synth Blue by Rob Papen has been updated to version 1.1. This release includes new HipHop and RnB banks, updates the dynamic oscillator screen, and fixes several minor bugs. Blue features FM Synthesis, Phase Distortion Synthesis, Wave Shaping Synthesis and Subtractive Synthesis, and contains six oscillators, two analogue style modelled stereo filters, ten LFOs, 32 step mono sequencer, nine envelopes AHDSFR type, and 16-voice polyphony.

Moog Music informed MacMusic that Cyril Lance is the new head of Moog Music products development. it seems that Cyril Lance was personally selected by Bob Moog before he passed away in August. Cyril Lance works in music and engineering for over 20 years. He also worked in developing optical electronics used for upper-atmospheric experiments, and on US military project HARP (Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) which was jointly funded by US Air Force, Navy, and University of Alaska.

Cyril Lance is also a musician, songwriter and producer. He also works on building custom instruments for academic and consumer applications.

New JazzMutant web site has just been launched! In addition to its really slick design and global revamping, the main new feature of that web site is certainly its Workshop section. Workshop : You will find in that new section a collection of essential tutorials and examples to get the feel of your new Lemur in a couple of hours while using your favorite software. Already available tutorials: "Surround Panning Strategies" with Cubase SX ; "Exploring Granular Synthesis" with Max/MSP and a Lemur project template destinated to control the most popular loop-based sequencer: Ableton Live 5.

Behringer has released the FCA202, a new low-cost and compact FireWire audio interface. The FCA202 includes two 1/4 inch connector inputs and outputs, 24-bit A/D and D/A converters offer 96 kHz sampling frequency, and volume-controlled headphones output. This new interface comes bundled with Ableton Live Lite 4 Behringer edition, Kristal and Audacity applications.

The FCA202 will be available in the 4th quarter 2005 for $100.

PrintMusic, Finale's little brother, is now available in version 2006 and inherited several features from Finale 2006 : Setup Wizard, input via midi keyboard, mike, mouse, keyboard, scan. Includes sounds of the Software Synthesizer & marching percussion by Row-Loff; Human Playback & Band-in-a-Box Auto-Harmonizing.

PrintMusic costs 69,95 $.

Wwaym announces the release of the Mac OS X version of their virtual analogue VSTi synth, nWSynth. This synth features 2 filters, 2 oscillators with various modulation options, unison, portamento, distortion, echo, presets (with 2 additional preset banks), and full MIDI automation with MIDI learn.


nWSynth costs 95 euros and a demo version is available.

 

CDxtract has released Samplit, a new solution for recording and converting your MIDI instruments to sampler instruments. Samplit sends the midi notes to the midi hardware, records all the individual sounds and create ready-to-play Sampler instruments with a few mouse clicks. Samplit can also be used to record non-MIDIfied sounds such as real instrument, human voice, special effects, noise, etc. Samplit has already been used to record the Bösendorfer piano included in the MOTU MachFive standard library.

Samplit is available for Mac OS X (multi-format version $239, mono-format version $99). Demo versions are available.