Remix magazine reviews Pro Tools M-Powered by Digidesign and M-Audio. They note that this version makes Pro Tools quite affordable, and even the cut-down version included in Pro Tools M-Powered is still a powerful music production system. “In light of the new level of accessibility that Pro Tools M-Powered offers, those who may have overlooked Pro Tools in the past should consider giving it another look, especially if you already own an approved M-Audio interface. Even if you don’t make Pro Tools your primary sequencer, learning the software and having the application available make working on other people’s projects and remixes that much easier.” (more…)

AVOX is a new “vocal toolkit” from Antares that enables you to radically transform vocal tracks. Apart from the expected choir effect, de-esser and so on, this package lets you actually remodel a singer’s vocal path, from lungs to lips. The amount of control you have is almost grotesque: “THROAT’s graphical Throat Shaping display allows you to individually adjust the position and width of five points in the vocal tract model, from the vocal cords, through the throat, mouth and out to the lips.” You can be Dr Frankenstein in the privacy of your own laptop studio. (more…)

Music Tech magazine reviews Candy, Yellow Tools’ saxophone ROMpler. Yellow Tools have built their own sample playback engine, and in this case they use it to deliver 9GB of saxophone samples covering the spectrum of sax and reed types. (more…)

NINJAM (Novel Intervallic Network Jamming Architecture for Music) is another way of making music collaboratively (a fancy word for “in a group”) over the Internet. This looks to run as a separate application — route audio through it, and it collects the other participants’ audio and allows you to mix it in real time. I like the way it handles network latency — instead of trying to minimise it, NINJAM automatically increases the delay to the nearest whole measure. So, as the website says, “when you play through an interval, you’re playing along with the previous interval of everybody else, and they’re playing along with your previous interval. If this sounds pretty bizarre, it sort of is, until you get used to it, then it becomes pretty natural. In many ways, it can be more forgiving than a normal jam, because mistakes propagate differently.” (more…)

Remix magazine has reviewed Ableton Live 5 and say it’s the best version yet. The Track Freeze feature is an “absolute miracle,” and Clip handling also receives top marks for simplicity and usefulness. Even the included effects get a glowing description: “For all of you tweakers out there, Live 5 ships chock-full of fresh new audio effects: Beat Repeat, Auto Pan, Phaser, Flanger, Saturator, Arpeggiator (a MIDI effect) and an updated Simpler. To describe Beat Repeat, Ableton’s product information used the word addictive, and I couldn’t agree more.” (more…)

Here’s a fantastic interface for remixing a track. The pop group Erasure has put a version of their recent single Don’t Say You Love Me on the web in a remixable form. The interface is quite lovely — it reminds me of the fabulous Electroplankton music game on the Nintendo DS. The track is represented as a tree, with groups of leaves representing musical qualities like Warmth, Emotion, Heartbeats, Tears and so on. Click a leaf in each group to determine how to play each quality — so you can have Emotion “a la folie” and Skin “beaucoup” and change it on the fly as the track plays. Click the bird to randomise the settings and use this as a starting point to make your own mix. (more…)

The FlashMic DRM85 is a professional-quality microphone with built-in power and Flash memory so you can record without any extra hardware. This is probably out of the price range of the average Laptop Studio person, but a neat idea anyway, and sure to get cheaper in the future. Not much more I can say, so here are the full details from the makers, HHB: (more…)

The Didj’tizer from Virtuasonic is a VST plugin that emulates the sound of a didgeridoo. Very neat, and sounds pretty good too. It takes me back a few years to the Aphex Twin’s fantastic track Didgeridoo, which consisted of a drum machine and a didg sound generated by a homemade sound box. Now you can do it yourself in software, though it won’t be as good because you’re not the Aphex Twin. (more…)

E-MU have updated the software bundle that comes with their audio production hardware. Their Production Tools Software Bundle is an impressive collection of software, including versions of Ableton Live, Cubase, and Wavelab amongst others. It’s also available separately to existing owners of E-MU audio production systems. They say: “The new Production Tools Software Bundle is now shipping with all of E-MU’s Digital Audio Systems, as well as Proteus X and Emulator X Studio. This powerful software bundle includes a comprehensive collection of software — everything you need to create, record, edit, master and burn your music.” (more…)

The Mindprint TRIO is reviewed by Remix magazine. “The T.R.I.O. Total Recording Solution is designed to be the nerve center of your studio, as well as to eliminate multiple pieces of outboard gear, wall warts and a slew of messy cables. Essentially, it replaces a mixer’s input and monitoring section and adds EQ and dynamics.” The device under review is the original TRIO; Mindprint have since announced the TRIO USB, which goes one step further by using a convenient USB 2 interface instead of an audio interface. (more…)