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.”

They also discuss other recent improvements such as the Time Trimmer for on-the-fly timestretching, and the Beat Detective LE audio quantisation tool — “perhaps the coolest addition” to Pro Tools M-Powered. On the downside, Pro Tools M-Powered is limited to 32 simultaneous audio tracks — in the old days this was ample, but these days some musicians may find 32 tracks inadequate.

Overall they are excited by the features and stability of this package. Digidesign also point out that there is another benefit — the experience you gain working with an inexpensive Pro Tools M-Powered system will be very useful when looking for work in the music industry, where Pro Tools has long been an industry standard. The review concludes positively: “There’s no question that Pro Tools M-Powered lives up to Digidesign’s reputation. I’ve always said that choosing a DAW is a matter of preference and comfort. Now, with Pro Tools M-Powered on the scene, excluding Pro Tools because of budget concerns is a thing of the past. I am a bit disappointed that M-Powered doesn’t come bundled with as many extras as LE, but the good news is, the company didn’t skimp on the application itself, as it is just as powerful as LE.”

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.

As they say, “now you can sound like all the voices in your head.” The website has details on the full package. They write: AVOX is a suite of five new state-of-the-art vocal processors that give you the power to create stunning vocal tracks in any musical style as well as design unique vocal effects for audio post-production applications. AVOX includes:

THROAT Physical Modeling Vocal Designer — a radical new vocal tool that, for the first time, lets you process a vocal through a meticulously crafted physical model of the human vocal tract.

DUO Vocal Modeling Auto-Doubler — using a simplified version of THROAT’s vocal modeling, along with variations in pitch, timing and vibrato depth, DUO automatically generates a doubled vocal part from an existing vocal with unmatched ease and realism.

CHOIR Vocal Multiplier — actually turns a single voice into up to 32 distinct individual unison voices, each with its own pitch, timing and vibrato variations.

PUNCH Vocal Impact Enhancer — as its name so ably implies, PUNCH gives your vocal more dynamic impact, allowing it to cut through a dense mix with clarity and power.

SYBIL Variable Frequency De-Esser — tames vocal sibilance with a flexible compressor and a variable highpass frequency to match any vocal performance.

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.

As they point out, the saxophone is a very difficult instrument to sample properly because it has such a wide palette of sounds. “Candy certainly has plenty of inspiring sounds, but it still appears that sampling alone struggles to capture the range of timbres and effects saxophones can produce.” So if you really want to explore the saxophone in your computer-based music, maybe Candy isn’t for you. However, it sounds as if it could be useful for more experimental use, since there are a number of effects included: “The effects, although not chromatic, cover an assortment of squeaks, pops and squeals, and could be a great source of material for abstract sound designers.”

Despite its limitations, they give it a good 8 out of 10, citing its transparent editing of complex multi-samples, good-quality sound, and range of instruments and styles included. They call Candy “a significant leap in comparison to many existing sax samples” but suggest that there is room for improvement. I like the name, anyway.

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.”

This is a very different approach to something like VSTunnel. It’s weirder (which is good), and probably slightly less flexible. On the other hand, it’s available for Linux as well as MacWindows, and… it’s free.

NINJAM is probably better for live improvisation rather than highly polished pop songs. And it sounds like a lot of fun “Part tool, part toy, NINJAM is designed with an emphasis on musical experimentation and expression.” And isn’t that what it’s all about?

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.”

The review is quite detailed in its descriptions of Live 5’s new features. Two of the effects in particular get a mention: “Live’s new Flanger makes the cut and then some. I found it to be as addictive, if not more so, than Beat Repeat. … Almost equally impressive in my book to the Flanger is the new Phaser. … I simply love these two new effects.” They also describe the upgraded Simpler sampler , saying that it’s now more powerful yet still as easy to use as the name suggests.

Overall, they say that Ableton Live 5 is both stable and efficient, with excellent-quality new effects and top-notch time-stretching tools. Importantly, it’s still simple to use. “It’s a great program that, like a good bottle of vino, just keeps getting better with age. Best of all, despite all the new features packed in, Live retains its simple-to-learn and super-user-friendly UI. Version 5 is stable, efficient and a ton of fun to work with.”

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.

Once you’ve got the song just how you like it, you can even pay some money and download your personal mix of the song, with customised artwork to match. Whether you choose this or not, it’s a really nice interface — I like the emphasis on high-level qualities like “warmth” rather than boring technicalities like “reverb” or “panning”.

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:

Portable recording specialist HHB Communications has developed the FlashMic DRM85 — the world’s first professional Digital Recording Microphone. Perfect for all voice recording applications, in particular broadcast and press interviewing, the FlashMic combines a high quality Sennheiser omni-directional condenser capsule with 1GB of flash recording memory to create a convenient, durable and portable recording device that’s extremely easy to operate.

With no fiddly cables and connectors to worry about, journalists can be recording instantly with just a single button-push. Either .Wav linear or MPEG 2 encoded audio files can then be transferred quickly and easily via USB to Macintosh or PC computers and laptops for editing and onward transmission. A Date/Time stamp is stored along with the file, with the internal real time clock-set/synchronized automatically by the host computer.

The FlashMic is powered for more than six hours by a pair of standard AA batteries (either primary or rechargeable cells can be fitted), with the remaining battery power displayed along with time, level and status information in a backlit LCD on the microphone body. In addition, a visual low battery warning alerts the user to the imminent need to change batteries.

Users can operate the FlashMic straight out of the box using default settings, or create and store nine custom configurations using the straightforward Mac/PC GUI software supplied. Parameters including Audio Mode, AGC (Automatic Gain Control) On/Off, Record Level, Pre Record Buffer (0 – 10 seconds) and HPF (High Pass Filter) On/Off can be individually adjusted to create the optimum configurations for a particular operator’s typical applications. In addition, an ‘Expert Mode’ allows all variable parameters to be accessed directly from the FlashMic body.

With a frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz and less than 0.1% Total Harmonic Distortion at 16-bit/48kHz, FlashMic makes recordings of the very highest quality. Recordings can be played back under independent level control on headphones connected via a socket on the base of the unit.

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.

Details from the website: Didj’tizer is a VST effect plug-in that can emulate the sound of a didjeridoo (or didgeridu), the traditional wind instrument of the Australian Aborigines of northern Australia, that is sometimes described as a natural wooden trumpet or “drone pipe”. Didj’tizer can process your voice (or every audio source you will choose as its input) and make it sound like it is passing through a didjeridoo. It is particularly suitable for creating rhythmic parts and pulsating drones. Features:

• Tuning (from C0 to B3)
• Tube resonance
• Brightness
• Hardness
• Harmonic Balance
• Input and output level control

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.”

Everything you need to create, record, edit, master and burn is in the box, including:
Cakewalk SONAR LE – Audio/MIDI Production
Steinberg Cubase LE – Audio/MIDI Production
Ableton Live Lite 4 for E-MU Systems – Audio/MIDI Production
Steinberg WaveLab Lite – Audio Editor
IK Multimedia Amplitube LE – Guitar Amp & FX Modeling Plug-In
IK Multimedia T-RackS EQ – Mastering EQ Plug-in (some bundles substitute Minnetonka Audio Software discWelder BRONZE – DVD Audio Authoring)
SFX Machine LT – Audio Multi-effects Plug-in
E-MU Proteus X LE – Desktop Sound Module

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.

The included manual is apparently a must-read (unlike many manuals): “This unit also comes with an excellent manual, available in both hard copy and PDF forms. I’ve heard of many people taking pride in not reading manuals, but in my opinion, there are two different types of engineers: those who know what they are doing and those who hope they know what they are doing.”

The review gives a very detailed description of the device. They like the Talkback feature, which lets you talk to players through their headphones, but found that it was a bit noisy. Other than that, they found the feature set to be excellent, and the effects to be very good. They were impressed with the built-in EQ, and also liked the compressor: “Once again, I was pleased with the tone. Further experimenting with all types of equalizer amounts, I found that even at extreme settings, the unit performed extremely well.”

Their conclusing is overwhelmingly positive: “The philosophy behind the T.R.I.O. was to incorporate all of the essential features required in a typical home-recording setup into one unit. For slightly more than $500 retail and housing a studio-quality channel strip, zero-latency monitoring, multiple speaker outputs and a Talkback section, this single box is a wonderful thing. I have to agree that MindPrint has really covered all of the bases with the T.R.I.O., and I would definitely recommend this piece for any home-studio owner.”