Arturia recently announced their “10 Year Suite” which includes 8 of their software instruments. It’s seriously tempting me as I’ve always wanted a copy of their CS-80 emulation.

From their web site: “The 10 Year Suite brings you 8 software instruments Arturia has built over 10 years … The luxury box contains the highly awarded Minimoog V, Moog Modular V, CS-80V, ARP2600 V, Jupiter-8V ,Prophet V and Prophet VS. Also included are the innovative Brass and the powerful Analog Factory.”

This is a very impressive prototype for a multitouch string instrument which allows a user to create virtual strings on a screen and pluck them. The user interface looks beautiful. It’ll be interesting to watch the project for future development.

Here is the web page. Discovered via Matrixsynth.

Amazing looking arpeggiator / control surface from Mark Burton.

Ladyada of xoxbox fame has a new project using XBee wireless controllers to implement wireless bi-directional MIDI communication. Nice work as always.

http://www.ladyada.net/make/xbee/midibee.html

Met the Softube guys at NAMM this month. They were a really cool bunch of engineers from Sweden. Their plugs are definitely worth giving a try and they make more than just tube emulators although the name implies otherwise

MOTU has announced Volta, an audio unit plug-in that allows control of conventional analog synths via control voltage. The control voltages are generated by your audio interface…just as long as your interface’s inputs/outputs are dc coupled. AWESOME!

“Volta receives conventional virtual instrument input such as MIDI notes, MIDI controller data or even high-resolution audio track ramp automation and then responds by outputting a corresponding control voltage signal, which the host software then routes to the outputs of any DC-coupled audio interface connected to the computer. The resulting DC voltage can then drive a standard CV input, such as those found on classic modular synthesizers, modern analog mono synths and even popular effects processors such as Moogerfoogers”

Pure Data was developed by Miller Puckette as a fully open source version of the work that he originally did for Max while at IRCAM in the late 80’s and early 90’s. It is lesser known to some extent by musicians but definitely worth checking out. Max, now developed by Cycling ‘74, draws heavily from Pd.

from wikipedia:

“Pd is very similar in scope and design to Puckette’s original Max program (developed while he was at IRCAM), and is to some degree interoperable with Max/MSP, the commercial successor to the Max language. Both Pd and Max are arguably examples of Dataflow programming languages. In such languages, functions or “objects” are linked or “patched” together in a graphical environment which models the flow of the control and audio. Unlike the original version of Max, however, Pd was always designed to do control-rate and audio processing on the host CPU, rather than offloading the synthesis and signal processing to a DSP board (such as the Ariel ISPW which was used for Max/FTS). Pd code forms the basis of David Zicarelli’s MSP extensions to the Max language to do software audio processing.”

Photosounder 1.0 has just been released by Michel Rouzic.

from the site: “Photosounder is a one-of-a-kind image-sound editing program. It is unique in that it opens images and sounds indiscriminately, treats and processes them as images, and synthesizes them as sounds. Sounds, once turned into images, can be powerfully modified to achieve effects and results that couldn’t be obtained in any other way, while images of all sorts reveal the infinite kinds of otherworldly sounds they contain.”

An in depth review will be coming soon…