Since the terribly dull and disappointing NAMM show in January nothing much has woken from its winter slumber in terms of computer music technology. Everyone is probably having too much fun in the snow. There's some hope that the Musikmesse show at the end of March will reveal some interesting new products or developments but before then let's scour around to see if we can find anything remotely exciting in the last couple of months that's worth writing about........ hopefully.




Well there's a bunch of new synths and plug-ins, mostly from independents and cheap as chips - here's some:

• The Moog Little Phatty soft synth - http://www.xhun-audio.com
• Osiris Polly 8 synth - http://sites.google.com/site/osirissynths/Home/synth-page (needs to work on his web skills)
• Autotalent - freeware pitch correction a bit like Autotune - http://www.olilarkin.co.uk
• BassBomb monophonic bass monster - http://www.delamancha.co.uk/ 
• AcmeBarGig Shred 1 guitar amp models for the heavily inclined - http://www.acmebargig.com/ - this actually looks quite good and i might do a bit of a review if i can find the time.
• Yedey TranceDrive synth for trancing - http://www.yedey.com/
• Tonebytes Vocotron sampler and vocoder - http://tonebytes.com/vocotron/
• Mokafix Audio Distortion Plug-ins - http://www.mokafix.com
• Sound Provocation Ethnic Bagpipe - http://www.soundprovocation.com/creative_tools.html
• Blip2000 Matrix Sequencer - http://www.service-1.de/music/html/blip2000_matrixsequencer_vst.html
  

Other news:

Fxpansion Releases the BFD2 Heavy Expansion

For all your metaling needs Fxpansion gives you two Yamaha birch kits, immaculately recorded. The all-time classic birch kit comprises 2 powerful kicks, played with
felt and wood beaters, alongside 4 toms featuring superb attack and
sustain, and played with sticks. The Birch Custom Absolute, meanwhile,
is the culmination of Yamaha's 25 years of experience in crafting birch
shells. Offering a great alternative to maple, birch shells feature
excellent mid and low end, with a sharp and vibrant attack. The 5 toms
are played with sticks and mallets, while the kick is provided in wood
and felt beater versions. The best thing is that it's a download and only costs 35 quid - nice one.

IK Multimedia Amplitube 3 - "The King of Tone"

Never very shy about singing the praises of their own software IK have unleashed Amplitube 3, heralding it as the King of Tone. They've dug up another 30 bits of old gear from somewhere, they've got new effects, new stomp boxes, movable microphone positions, a true stereo signal path and a four-track audio recorder/player. Most excitingly for me is a new preset management system, which is exciting only because the old system was awful. It has twice the stuff as version 2 so there's loads to play with. I hope to get my hands on a copy pretty soon and will do my best to give a good going over. One thing i'd like to see which i don't see so far is some sort of looper effect where you can layer up riffs and stuff - in a Line6 DL4 or JM4 kind of way - especially as it's now two channels so you can run your vocals through as well. We shall see :) http://www.amplitube.com

Waves SoundGrid

An interesting alternative to the usual DSP based plug-ins. Waves SoundGrid is going to use regular computers to host their effects and then access them via a network. So rather than using proprietary hardware or a DSP card like UAD/Powercore you could actual have a little farm of PC's attached to your main recording PC running all the effects. Potentially each time you upgrade your PC you create a new SoundGrid host with the old one - maybe. Not sure how it's all going to work but we should see more information coming soon. http://www.waves.com

Katapult for Launchpad

I love the Novation Launchpad and i wish i could spend more time fiddling with it. A bunch of people who do have the time have come up with Katapult which is a MIDI re-mapping of the Launchpad to allow to do pretty much anything with anything. You can store up to 16 pages and either change them with pads or page +- or in software. The control is completely bi-directional so you can have MIDI messages flowing back and forth keeping everything sync'ed and allowing for spectacularly colourful feedback on the Launchpad. $24 - awesome. http://www.midikatapult.com/

Codeorgan

Onto the slightly weird where someone has created an online music generation machine that plays web pages. Stick in your url and it generates music according to characters on your page. It uses some clever algorithms and stuff but invariably comes up with something kind of odd but cool. Give it a whirl.
This is what pc-music.com sounds like - http://www.codeorgan.com/?url=pc-music.com bonkers.


Well, as i said, slim pickings :)
Musikmesse is just around the corner and although i'm expecting a new baby the same week i'll do my best to point out the interesting stuff as it comes in. http://musik.messefrankfurt.com/frankfurt/en/besucher/willkommen.html