Mac and Music News

Sonicccouture has made their popular VA Brush Kit product available for free download. The 150mb Drum kit features mixable direct and ambient microphones, Drum roll emulation via the Roll Control KSP script, multiple velocity layers and articulations. The kit was recorded at Peter Gabriels Real World Studios in Bath, England.

Brush kit is available in Kontakt 2 + 3, Battery 2 + 3 format, and is taken from the larger VA Drums drum library.

X-ISM is a state of the art VST/AU plug-in which can interpret inter-sample peaks, allowing engineers to make informed judgements about the resultant sound quality of the mix.

There is currently a trend in the in the audio industry known euphemistically as 'The loudness war' in which the engineering process is driven to produce a product which is as loud as is technically possible within the constraints of the medium. Debate rages as to whether this produces problems that degrade and distort the audio. One reason for this distortion is often blamed on the presence of 'inter-sample peaks', where signals that are usually missed by the Fs sampling of DAW meters, may actually exceed 0dBfs in reconstruction from digital to analogue domain in some Digital to Analogue Converters (DACs).

X-ISM uses significant processing to provide a combination of up-sampling and filtering that mimics the operation of an oversampling DAC's reconstruction process. The result is a meter that shows inter-sample errors and provides a useful tool that most DAW metering misses.

The plug-in is available in VST, AU and RTAS formats making it compatible with virtually all audio software currently available on both PC and Mac.

Pettinhouse has announced DirectGuitar 2.0, a new version of the first guitar sample library direct recorded for amp simulators. Highlights include new articulations (Slap, Palm Muted, strum, Metal and more), Round Robin up/down strokes, key switching (Slide Up/Down, Blues, Jazz, Rock Licks; Trill; Harmonics; Chords; Strum noises), and new release noises (Pick noises, Hand noises).

Works with Mac OSX and Windows XP operating systems, and NI Kontakt 2.2 sample format.