Native Instruments, beside abusing of K letters in their product name, knows a thing or two about virtual instruments, I'm sure we can agree on that. Now, NI announced they've been working not only on some hardware, but:

- A universal controller for all your plug-ins.
- A universal VST and AU host on your computer (unified interface of plug-ins on the computer), itself a stand-alone or a plug-in.
- A universal sound database within the host (find your sound by attribute, and don't care if it's in a virtual sampler or a virtual synth or whatever).
- A unified file format, KoreSound, to store layers, routing, configuration and categorization data.

Behringer announced it will release a brand new range of controllers: the U-Control UM25, UMX49 and UMX61. They only differ by their keyboard size.

Features:
- USB controller/MIDI interfaces
- 25, 49 and 61 velocity-sensitive keyboard, full sized keys.
- 10 programmable MIDI controllers and 8 assignable switches.
- Assignable mod wheel, volume fader and pedal value.
- MIDI Out (NO MIDI in!)
- 6 free instrument plug-ins (50 for windows PCs… sigh) 4Front Epiano, Piano, and Bass Modules, Ultimatesoundbank Plugsound Free, AudioNerdz DelayLama, reFX Claw 1.0. (Well, you see…) And Ableton Live 4 Lite.
- Power from USB, batteries or AC adapter.

UM25 $129.99, UMX49 $159.99 and UMX61 $189.99

As a side note, the F-CONTROL AUDIO FCA202 firewire ($99.99), and the U-CONTROL UCA202 ($34.99) USB audio interfaces previously announced will be available this quarter 2006 as the UM-X range.

During the NAMM show, Apple was demonstrating the latest Logic Pro 7.2 on a MacBookPro. This demo cleary showed that Intel based mac are faster to run Logic than current G5 mac.

Logic Pro 7.2 will also feature integrated support for the new Apogee Ensemble interface; Digidesign Pro Tools HD 7 DAE support; Serato Pitch 'n Time support; Improved Rewire support; Enhanced Control Surfaces support; and 32-channel support for multi-channel Audio Units instruments; GarageBand 3 compatibility.

Logic Pro 7.2 should be available in february and should cost $49 for 7.1 users.

Taken from the OASYS monster flagship of KORG, the MMT (Multiple Modeling Technology) synthesis engine now will power the Radias synth in a more accessible way. It is a virtual analogue synth, with a maximum of 24 voices (depending of DSP use), available either in a rack format (Radias-R) or plain synth with a tilt pannel in a rather uncommon form. It smells technology that way, but I'm less sure of the reliability in the end, but the control panel is awesome. The Radias is composed of:

There's nothing like a inquisitive user, now, thanks to the PR department of MOTU (for the silence), we know (thanks to Unicornation!) that MOTU IS developing an PCI-e version of his 424 PCI card used by the likes of 2408, 24i etc. No release date is given but at least we know now there will be a time when we'll be able to use our latest G5s AND MOTU PCI-based interfaces, as we can/will be with Digidesign and Apogee products.

Price of upgrade and availability TBA sometimes.