Novation has announced that the XioSynth 49 is now shipping. So the XioSynth now has a big brother for anyone wanting the awesome sound and unrivalled feature set but with more freedom for hands to roam. The 49-key XioSynth provides Novation-class synthesis with seamless audio interfacing and MIDI controlling capabilities to boot.

For more information, visit their web.

Shuriken has released CopyShop which is a very simple but effective buffer chopping / FSU effect plug-in - it chops up the audio buffers and plays them back; you can choose the length of the piece of audio played back and when to apply it.

CopyShop is available for Mac OS X (Universal Binary) as a VST effect plug-in and it is Donationware.

Harmonic Sense has released ChordMate, a chord finder for guitarist with advanced features such as a powerful rule editor in order to fine-tune your search, or a chord symbol lookup tool. ChordMate displays the results of your search as a collection of beautiful diagrams which are customized based on the type of guitar: classical, acoustic, jazz, or electric.

ChordMate is available for Mac OSX (PowerPC or Intel processor). Note that a demo version is also available.

Garritan has announced Marching Band, a new Kontakt Player 2 based Marching, Wind and Concert Band Collection. Marching Band features Trumpets, Trombones, Marching winds, Euphoniums, Baritones, Saxophones, Sousaphones, Tenor Horns, Mellophones, Marching percussion (including drumline sounds from Virtual Drumline 2 by Tapspace), and more... with expressive control, Tongue/Slur Articulations, Intonation, Vibrato, etc. enabling you to create realistic-sounding Marching Band, Concert Band, Wind Ensemble, Brass Band, Drum Corp and other Band Arrangements quickly and easily. You can even build your own bands with Ensemble Building.

Marching Band includes Native Instruments' Kontakt 2 Sample Player and will thus be available for Windows and Mac OS X (Universal Binary) in VST, AU, DX, RTAS and stand-alone formats. Marching Band is expected to be released during January 2007 with an MSRP of $239.

Eliosound has announced their next plug-in, ELS Vocoder, which aims to faithfully reproduce the analog vocoder sounds that have been used by many artists in the electronic music history whilst also offering a wide range of new and innovative features.

Features:

* 22-band Vocoder.
* Input Gate.
* Pitch Extractor with retune on notes option.
* Voiced/Unvoiced detector.
* 2 VCOs (Oscillators).
* Noise generator.
* 2 LFOs.
* Frequency Shifter with source selector and advanced stereo settings.
* Slew/Freeze adjust.
* Level Slider and VuMeter for each band.
* Analysis to Synthesis matrix.
* Output Mixer.
* Advanced setting panels for each module.
* Keyboard with key hold.
* Presets & Banks with sorting options.

The ELS Vocoder will be available in early 2007 ...