SoundsDivine has released "New Retro", a bank of 128 presets for FXpansion's D-CAM:Synth Squad Strobe featuring vintage-style keyboard sounds, rhythmic pads, arpeggiated synths and organic textural sounds.

New Retro is available now at a price of $25.

JoeCo announces the release of its Blackbox Recorder, a high performance multi-track capturing device designed for the 21st century.

Aimed primarily at the live music market, it records 24 channels of hi-res audio directly to a USB2 drive. It can be plugged directly into the insert points on any console and can also provide Virtual Sound Checking facilities. Recording to standard external USB2 disks formatted with FAT32 in Broadcast WAV file format (BWAV), any material can be instantly used in a studio Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) without any need for time-consuming file conversions or transfers.

Features :

• 24 track audio recorder
• Virtual Sound Check Facility
• 24bit/96kHz conversion
• Simple User interface
• Keyboard input for naming tra ...

112dB has updated Redline Monitor, its high-quality near-field monitor simulation for headphones, to version 1.0.3.

New :

• Dim attenuation switchable from -3dB (as in previous versions) to -6dB to prevent clipping.
• Additional Easier Readability skin for visually impaired users.
• Option to disable popup tooltips.

Fixed :

• Pro Tools compare functionality didn't work.
• Plugin crash when deinserted on some setups.
• Fixed loading problem in Live 8 on Vista.
• Numerical value entry slowed down or hung some Vista systems.

The Miniak is the first synthesizer from Akai Professional developed in partnership with the Alesis synthesis team. The Miniak brings together Akai Professional's control feel with powerful DSP sound-generation technology.

The Miniak enables users to create programs with up to eight multi-timbral voices, each with three oscillators. The user can create interesting and unique sounds and take advantage of the synthesizer's more-than-600 preset sounds. Users can create complex and refined sounds using the Miniak's two multimode filters, three envelope generators, two LFOs, stereo effects and 40-band vocoder with gooseneck microphone. The Miniak also has a comprehensive sequencer with step and dynamic real time phrase sequencing, a drum machine/rhythm sequencer and an arpeggiator.

User ...

Clavia has annonced that the Nord C2 Combo Organ is now shipping.

Features :

• Pipe Organ
• New keyboard action
• Improved output routing capabilities
• Monitor input
• Percussion controls moved to the "classic position"
• Vibrato and chorus controls moved to the "classic position"
• Enhanced click
• Drawbar Preview

Audio examples are available at :

Univers-Sons / Ultimate Sound Bank announces the release of a brand new UVI Soundpack, Italian Grand Piano. Here is what they say about it :

"After popular demand from the UVI community, our great sound designer team was back to work. The goal: find and record the best model of the Italian manufacturer Fazioli. We did choose a superb sounding F278 model, in our opinion, better than the usually sampled model F308.

For that kind of unique instrument, we did choose a very unique gear: the microphone set-up was a matched pair of Neumann M150 and the preamp/converters were the ones from the acclaimed Nagra D2. A unique combination of exceptional gear for the first time in sampling a piano library.

The UVI philosophy regarding pianos is to propose truly musical and excellent sounding pr ...

AcousticsampleS releases SmallDrumKits.

- The SmallDrumKits are 3 different Drum Kits, each has two toms, a snare, a
ride, a hihat and a bass drum.
- 506Mo of samples recorded at 24-bit/44.1kHz (kitA:149Mo, kitB 61Mo,
kitC:295Mo).
- Custom mapping, you can assign every element to any key from the
interface.
- Mappings presets: GM, V-DRUMS, IMAP, NSKIT (NDK) or default one.
- cc# controlled Hihat that features automatic closing sound.
- Cycle round robins (4 for kit A and C and 2 for kit B).
- Sensitivity button to adjust the response.
- Detailed instruments: up to 10 velocity layers per round robin.
- Kontakt 2 and 3 format to benefit from the interface and the custom
mapping. Easy to use Kontakt interface.
- Priced at €34 and as the summer sale is going on, you can get it for €22 until august 31.

You can find audio and video demos on the website.

The new Minimal Electro Soundset for Waldorf Largo from german sounddesigner Holger Steinbrink is now available in the Waldorf Webshop.

The soundset contains 128 single programs, created especially for the needs of electronic music producers. It was designed to provide crying leads, pulsating arpeggios and fat bass sounds for todays music production. The download package contains the soundset as FXB bank as well as all single sounds in FXB and AU preset format. VST3 presets for Steinberg Cubase 4 and 5 are also included plus a documentation sheet.

The Minimal Electro Soundset is priced at €30.

PreSonus has just released a demo version of its long-awaited new music creation and production application for Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista : Studio One.

This version will allow you to try Studio One Pro for a period of 30 days, after which the software will require purchase and activation to continue running. You will not be able to save documents or export audio in the Demo version. Otherwise, you will be able to explore all of the features Studio One Pro has to offer.

Please note that Studio One is still unavailable for purchase. You can make a request for the Demo version at :

"Ethnic Horns" by Soundprovocation is a sampler instrument, made from sampled full set of ancient wooden Lithuanian horns. The main goal was to recreate natural sound and subtleties of these instruments.

The idea was successfully realized by recording 225 different samples total.
Each note of two recorded octaves has 9 variations of around five-second sample. Every time you press a single note, you will hear a different variation. This gives natural feel of the instrument.

"Ethnic Horns" is dedicated to movie, theatre soundtrack producers and composers with special needs to add something unordinary and extra natural to their creations.

"Ethnic Horns" is available for samplers EXS24 and Kontakt at an introductory price of €9.99 instead of €14.99. This offer is valid until the end of September.

Allen & Heath is proud to be shipping the new Xone:22, a 2-channel analog DJ mixer offering high quality audio and a professional feature set at a price of $399. The smallest and most affordable Xone mixer to date, the Xone:22 is equipped with Allen & Heath's characteristic sound and build quality, plus professional-grade features that would normally be found in the booth of a top-rated club.

At the heart of the feature set is a "lite" version of the analog Voltage Control Filter (VCF) system offering low-pass and high-pass filters, frequency sweep and 'mild to wild' resonance control. There is also a soft-switched effects loop to bring in external effects, which are routed back in through the filter system.

The new mixer has two stereo channels with dual phono/line inputs, and th ...