The Filter, a personalized content filtering system which had been hanging around in beta status since sometime in 2006 has finally opened its doors to everyone and officially launched. The service was pioneered by musician Peter Gabriel and, at its beginning, was not much more than a playlist creation tool for iTunes. Today, The Filter has morphed into a larger recommendation system that finds not just music, but also movies, TV, and internet videos, customized to your personal tastes.

Some systems make recommendations based on your actions and history where others leverage the power of the crowd to find the best content, but The Filter combines both methods and uses data learned in one area to augment the other.

When you first sign up at The Filter, you begin by stepping through a brief profiling wizard in order for the site to establish an initial set of recommendations. As you begin to use the site, you can continue to personalize your recommendations in a way that's very much reminiscent of Amazon's "Recommended for You" section. On Amazon, items are rated with starts but The Filter uses a + / - sliding scale instead. However, like Amazon, you can mark items you own so they won't be recommended to you again while also helping the system get to know you better.

A second part to discovering your personalized tastes comes from "The Filter" which you download. This tool is a plugin application that works with either Windows Media Player, Winamp, and, of course, iTunes. Unlike other music player plugins like iLike, this piece of The Filter's system is not designed for social sharing, but actively collects data from your computer and sends it back to The Filter's servers. Where iLike uses the data it collects to help you discover friends of similar taste, The Filter solely uses that data for the purpose of improving recommendations.

Toontrack has just announced that its long awaited Superior Drummer 2.0, Vol.1 of the "New York Studio Legacy Series", can now be pre ordered from the Toontrack Music webshop or from any of the Toontrack distributor, sub-distributor or dealer sites listed below.

Superior Drummer 2.0 is due to ship at the end of June.

The much-anticipated and much-talked-about Moog Guitar will debut at Summer NAMM in Nashville.

According to Moog Music President Mike Adams, the Moog Guitar opens the guitarist to a whole new musical vocabulary: "It's not a guitar synthesizer; not a MIDI guitar; not an effects processor," Adams said. "The guitarist is intimately connected to The Moog Guitar because it works its magic on the strings themselves."

The Moog Guitar offers three unique modes...Sustain, Mute and Controlled Sustain. In the Sustain mode, it provides infinite, powerful sustain on every string and at every fret position; Mute removes energy from the strings, resulting in a variety of staccato effects; Controlled Sustain allows the musician to play sustained, single-note or even polyphonic lines with strong sustain and effortless clarity. In this mode, the Moog Guitar sustains the notes being played while actively muting the notes not being played.

Softube has just announced the release of Metal Amp Room, a new vrtual guitar amps plug-in designed "to bring you the most brutal, evil and aggressive sound that is possible to squeeze out of your DAW".

Focusing on usability and sound quality, this is a plug-in that is proud not to include a gazillion amps, effects racks, patch cords, or a blow-dryer. Just two channels, two cabinets, two mics per cabinet, and a wickedly fast noise gate for palm mute galore.

Features :

- Program-dependent guitar noise gate.
- Two cabs with two mics per cabinet.
- Easy to use balancing stereo mic preamp for balancing the two mics.
- Flexible & continuous click-and-drag mic positioning.
- Fully automatable parameters.
- 3-D rendered photo-realistic user interface.
- Compatible with all effects that work with real amps.

Metal Amp Room is available now for Mac OS X and Windows in VST, AU and RTAS formats at a retail price of $179 (excl. VAT). Note that a fully-functional 10-day demo version is also available for download.

MellowMuse has just released five new VST effect plug-ins for Mac OS X. (Demo versions are available)

CP1A Compressor ($59) is an all purpose stereo/mono compressor, capable of subtle dynamics taming to creative drum shaping. The CP1A utilizes a feed forward design with multi stage level detection/reduction to minimize distortion at extreme settings. Controls have been kept to a minimum for ease of use. The "Mix" control allows easy parallel compression of drums, by enabling the compressed signal to be mixed with the original.

EQ1A Equaliser ($49) is a smooth analog-style program EQ, with Hipass, frequency sweepable Low/High Shelf and variable frequency/Q Low/High mid controls.

IR1A Convolver ($69) is a general purpose convolution plug-in that can load 16-/24-bit mono or stereo AIFF or WAV files. Great for reverb, natural room ambiences. IR1A comes with a selection of IRs, including reverbs, room ambience and guitar cabinets, as it loads standard AIFF/WAV files its easy to create your own IRs or take advantage of the many free IRs available for download.

Mellowhead ($69) is a versatile tube amp and cabinet guitar-sim. The emphasis here is on creating the raw organic sound of a mic'ed tube amp. There are 10 convolution based speaker cabinets and 10 different pre-amp/tone settings, ranging from clean to brutal distortion, as well as 3 band tone controls.

Auto Time Adjuster ($29) is designed to ease workflow in ProTools LE when using plug-ins that generate significant latency. NOTE: FXpansion's VST-RTAS Wrapper is required.