EastWest announces the availability of URBAN ELEMENTZ by Zero-G, over 1350 samples and 1.5GB of the coolest, freshest hip hop and R&B in the business - direct from NYC developed and recorded in cooperation with Xfonic. URBAN ELEMENTZ is a brand new collection of East Coast Hip Hop and R&B loops and samples crammed full of earth-breaking beats, cool keys, pimpin' basses, slinky guitars, synths, strings, licks, fills, percussion, fx and much, and much more. There are 35 full construction kits with BPMs ranging from 65-114, plus hundreds of scratches and a bonus section of drum hits making this the current definitive sound of R&B and HipHop.

Urban Elementz will cost $99.95 and will ship next week.

Nomad Factory announces the release of four new products :

- The Limiting Amplifier LM-662 is a recreation of the classic Fairchild 670 limiter.
- The Program Equalizer EQP-4 is a full range stereo channel unit, featuring low and high cut, low and high frequency boost and attenuation.
- The Studio Channel SC-226 is a stereo channel recording plug-in, featuring four band equalizer, an analog "signature" optical compressor and at the heart of the shelving and bell filters, a tube simulator and Brick-Wall peak limiter.
- The Nomad Factory BlueVerb DRV-2080 is a vintage-style world-class recording studio reverb.

These products are available in RTAS, VST and Audio Unit formats, for Mac OS X.

Every week in the run up to the Frankfurter Musikmesse Native Instruments is featuring one of its new Kore system's central aspects. This week NI focusses attention to the way in which the sounds themselves are handled within Kore. The new KoreSound format enables you to find sounds and presets based on their musical attributes and also allows you to create new sounds based on multiple instruments and effects.

Full details about KoreSound are available in the "Kore Chapter Two" from the Natice Instruments web site...

Cakewalk has announced that Rapture, its new wavetable synthesizer designed to produce pop, dance and electronic sounds, is now shipping worldwide. Rapture combines an advanced modulation system with an non-aliasing wavetable resampling engine. It features 40 Envelope Generators, LFOs, and Step Generators per patch, and comes with more than 500 programs including Basses, Leads, Pads, Arpeggios, Textures, Electronic Percussion and Sequences.

Rapture ships (AU, RTAS, VST) for $259,00.

Quikquak has udated RaySpace to version 2.2.1 VST . This version now features : Patches from RaySpace 2.0 and 2.1 now working and upgraded, A new EQ display that can also be directly adjusted on the graph, for much easier editing, Vertex editing of walls, for quick adjustments, Mirror mode for creating symmetric rooms quickly, Undo now works on whole edits at a time.