Olympus adds another member to the portable recorders family (see our news on the Marantz PMD620 or the Edirol R-09), for example).

The Olympus LS-10 allows you to record in 24bit/96 kHz linear PCM, and supports Wave, WMA and MP3. It has a built-in 2 GB memory, SD slot, mic amplifier,2 cardioid mics, line and mic inputs, headphones output, USB connection, etc.

It is powered by 2 AA batteries (up to 12 hours of recording capability).
It is bundled with Cubase LE4 and has an estimated street price of $399.99 and should be available these coming days.

Kurzweil should make its (big ?) come-back at Winter Namm 2008, with the PC3x, their newest performance controller, offering a huge collection of over 800 sounds combined with comprehensive real-time controller functions.
Among other things, their Classic Keys ROM, a large vintage keyboard rig, is included, as well as the VA1 analog synth architecture (for free til Feb 15th 2008), coming from their never issued analog modeling supermonster synth (remember Winter Namm 2004 ?), or the famous Kurzweil Triple Strike Piano.
And Dynamic V.A.S.T. is said to "pick up where the K series left off. Having up to 32 layers per program means that emulations of real instruments can be extremely detailed and accurate, while the synthesized sounds can be extraordinarily large and complex."
A few ...

The Sound Guy, Inc. has announced new MacOS X UB updates of their audio effects plug-ins, SFX Machine RT, SFX Machine Pro and Backwards Machine.

The new updates allow the software to work with Pro Tools using the FXpansion VST to RTAS Adapter (available from fxpansion.com).

U-he releases version 2.0 of its excellent More Feedback Machine (Win, Mac UB, VST & AU).

More Feedback Machine offers ultra flexible delay effects ranging from bread & butter stuff to weird rhythmic deconstructions.
The idea behind MFM is to give the musician as much control over 4 separate delay lines as possible (each with panning, filter, output level and lots of feedback options), and having them interact, as well as having means to modulate delay parameters in realtime.

MFM2 costs $79. The update from MFM1 to MFM2 is free for registered users. A demo is available.

New to version 6.4.1 :

Improved Leopard (OS X version 10.5) compatibility.
Keyboard window fully supports note entry via the Macintosh keyboard, mouse wheel support for modulation, multiple velocity entry methods and more. Also useful for step entry.

Duplicate command. Copies and pastes data without using the clipboard.
Support for note nudging in the graphic editor when in average velocity view.
The drum view of the graphic editor now defaults to using note names and displays them in decreasing pitch order.
Recent file menu has been increased from 35 to 75.
Support for shift-tab when entering chords to go backwards.
Support for Shift-[ and Shift-] to extend the selection and include the previous or next note respectively.
Support for the Esc Key to deselect note events in the ...