Fresh from Precisionsounds comes Dusty Electric MKII. Formatted for HALion and Kontakt the 24 bit samples are taken from a well tuned 1980 Rhodes Stage Piano Mark II (Seventy Three). Weighing in at a respectable 235MB, each of the 520 Mono Wav files has been looped to maintain realism while not being too resource hungry. For a true representation of the original instrument you get up to 5 velocity layers and 3 velocity release layers.

Prices start a $63 USD for a downloadable version.

Steinberg released Cubase System|2, an integrated music production system, featuring M 2, a 2-channel USB Audio and 16-channel MIDI interface, and Steinberg's sequencer Cubase SE with 5 virtual instruments (The Grand SE, D'Cota SE, Virtual Guitarist EE SE, Groove Agent SE, HALion SE).

Cubase System|2 for Mac OS X is expected end of june for 419 euros.

MPCsounds.com announces the debut of "Orchestral Percussion", a new sound library for the Akai MPC1000/2000/XL/3000/LE/4000 drum machines.

Full "Orchestral Percussion" instruments list: Drums (concert snare and piccolo snare, concert bass drum, concert toms, tympani), Cymbals (crash cymbal, piatti cymbals, splash cymbal, ride cymbal, tam-tam gong, and automobile brake drum), Tuned percussion (glockenspiel, marimba, xylophone, and orchestral chimes), and Orchestral percussion (claves, woodblock, castanets, jam block, tambourine, agogo bells,
sleigh bells, slapstick, bell tree, vibraslap, temple blocks, cowbell, cabasa, and shakers).

The "Orchestral Percussion" library is available on MPC CD-ROM, Zip disk, Floppy, or as Downloadable sets. Prices start at $29.95.

A new demo to test Storm 3 (soft producer from Grenoble / France). A lite one and an heavier one ((111Mo). The difference comes from the amount of samples and functionalities available. In this new version : ergonomy improvements, piano roll edition, import and export midi files, better mixing functionalities and GM synthesizer included (to read midifile).

Unchanged price (and special price for teachers)
Storm is threatenin'...

Apple just posted a press release to announce that its iTunes Music Store is now available online in United-Kingdom, Germany and France. The ITMS features more than 700.000 songs for euro 0.99€ or 0.79 pounds per song and 9,99€ or 7,79 £ per album.

Features and capabilities in the iTunes Music Store are the same as its U.S. counterpart, with identical Digital Rights Management (DRM) capabilities.