Sonicccouture has made their popular VA Brush Kit product available for free download. The 150mb Drum kit features mixable direct and ambient microphones, Drum roll emulation via the Roll Control KSP script, multiple velocity layers and articulations. The kit was recorded at Peter Gabriels Real World Studios in Bath, England.

Brush kit is available in Kontakt 2 + 3, Battery 2 + 3 format, and is taken from the larger VA Drums drum library.

X-ISM is a state of the art VST/AU plug-in which can interpret inter-sample peaks, allowing engineers to make informed judgements about the resultant sound quality of the mix.

There is currently a trend in the in the audio industry known euphemistically as 'The loudness war' in which the engineering process is driven to produce a product which is as loud as is technically possible within the constraints of the medium. Debate rages as to whether this produces problems that degrade and distort the audio. One reason for this distortion is often blamed on the presence of 'inter-sample peaks', where signals that are usually missed by the Fs sampling of DAW meters, may actually exceed 0dBfs in reconstruction from digital to analogue domain in some Digital to Analogue Converters (DACs).

X-ISM uses significant processing to provide a combination of up-sampling and filtering that mimics the operation of an oversampling DAC's reconstruction process. The result is a meter that shows inter-sample errors and provides a useful tool that most DAW metering misses.

The plug-in is available in VST, AU and RTAS formats making it compatible with virtually all audio software currently available on both PC and Mac.

Pettinhouse has announced DirectGuitar 2.0, a new version of the first guitar sample library direct recorded for amp simulators. Highlights include new articulations (Slap, Palm Muted, strum, Metal and more), Round Robin up/down strokes, key switching (Slide Up/Down, Blues, Jazz, Rock Licks; Trill; Harmonics; Chords; Strum noises), and new release noises (Pick noises, Hand noises).

Works with Mac OSX and Windows XP operating systems, and NI Kontakt 2.2 sample format.

Scarbee today released Red Bass, a sample library made for N.I. Kontakt 2.2. Red Bass is built on the samples of J-Slap'n Fingered, but has been reprogrammed to take advantage of Scarbee's highly advanced scripting technology originally developed for Black Bass. Three pick-up settings: Bridge, Both and Neck have all been recorded in both a fingered and slapped version—without the use of compression, tubes or EQ to ensure maximum flexibility in the sound production. Red Bass was designed to be very easy to play live. Almost all articulations can be triggered without any keyswitches.

Features :

- More than 6000 samples
- Real-time playable
- A powerful user interface pushing the Kontakt user interface to its limits: a fretboard display gives an overview of the playing position and f ...

TC Electronic has announced a new member in the PowerCore family, boosted with 8 DSP processors, the PowerCore X8 is twice more powerful than any other member of the existing line.

It includes the v3.0 software, with an improved design and features of 6 out of the 14 audio treatment pluggins : Chorus-Delay, Master X3, Master X5, Mega Reverb, PowerCore Compressor/Limiter and VoiceStrip. The 24/7-C, Dynamic EQ, Filtroïd, PowerCore CL as well as the PowerCore 01synth have now an external sidechain circuit.

The PowerCore X8 (price to be announced) is planned to be released in next november, in addition of all pluggins in the pack it will also include a voucher of 500$ to get optional pluggins.

Note that PowerCore 3.0 system software will be available as a free download in october for the registered users.