Apogee is pleased to announce Duet compatibility with GarageBand 5.0, included in Apple's iLife '09 package released today. Experience GarageBand's new Lessons, Guitar and Magic GarageBand Jam features to their fullest with Duet's world class mic pres, legendary conversion and intuitive ease of use.

Ueberschall announces three upcoming releases :

- Synthlines : a Liquid library which comes with over 1000 bass and lead phrases
- Electrolines : another Liquid library featuring 78 themes and over 1000 analog synth sequences
- Dancehall Madness Vol. II : an Elastik Soundbank described as "the easy way to create any synthetic dancehall riddim you want" with the help of its 34 Construction Kits

Each product has an MSRP of $119 / €99 / £69. The included Liquid / Elastik Players are available for Mac OS X and Windows in AU, VST and RTAS plug-in formats.

Spectrasonics has released updates for Omnisphere :

- Omnisphere Software v1.0.3f
- Omnisphere Patch Library v1.0.3
- Omnisphere Soundsource Library 1.0.2

The good news is that it adds over 2000 brand new patches with :

- Lots of new aggressive and punchy synth sounds
- Added "Dance" genre to the entire factory library
- Hundreds of evocative new 'Psychoacoustic' and "Hybrid Organic" patches
- Traditional and Vocal/Choral patches greatly expanded
- Created by the renown international sound designers (Diego Stocco, Scott Frankfurt, Ignacio Longo, John Lehmkuhl, Tobias Marberger, Stéphane Bonvallet, Hans Jörg Scheffler, Tolga Gurpinar and Eric Persing)
- Total Omnisphere factory patch library now over 4000 Patches

Of course this is free for all registered customers.

Fostex is proud to announce the new LR16 Live Recording Mixer which is a 16/4/2 live mixer with built-in 16-track recorder.

Main Features :

- Connector Box (recorder + I/O) and Controller (mixer section) can be flexibly separated via off-the-shelf CAT5 cable up to 50m. Just one cable from I/O box on the stage to the F.O.H. mixer controller instead of heavy and expensive snake cable.
- Intuitive analog-like mixer operation in digital domain with 16 inputs faders + 4 bus faders + master fader.
- Built-in 80GB HD for approx. 16 hours of 16-track uncompressed digital recording (16bit/44.1kHz) or 9 hours at superior digital quality of 24bit/48kHz.
- One hit of "REC" button starts 16-track recording immediately.
- Multitrack and Stereo Mix can be recorded simultaneously creating 16 x mono wave files plus 1 x Stereo wave file on the HD.
- Choice of MTR-like stand-alone integration or separated rack mounting.
- FAT 32 formatted HD can be mounted on PC or Mac via USB.
- Digitally controlled TRIM with LIMITER on all the 16 channels.
- 3-band EQ on all the 16 channels.
- Built-in Master Effects (Reverb/Delay)
- USB Host connector to dump recorded data to USB flash memory for easy data transfer to PC or Mac.
- 10 keys on the recorder panel for instant playback.

The LR16 will carry an MSRP of $2199.

Blue Cat Audio has released Blue Cat's Protector 1.1, a new version of its stereo brickwall limiter plug-in. The plug-in is now available for Mac in VST and Audio Unit formats and includes several improvements and fixes to the PC VST and DirectX versions. It offers simple controls and yet provides a wide range of sounding capabilities, from very transparent limiting to heavy distortion, with no latency.

What's new in Blue Cat's Protector 1.1 :

- Mac Audio Unit and VST support.
- New Windows installers (much faster install, improved upgrades).
- Automation output can now be disabled for hosts that do not propose automated parameters choice.
- (Bug Fix): fixed MIDI learn issues.
- (Bug Fix): window opacity is now properly reset when selecting factory presets.

Blue Cat's Protector can be purchased alone or within the Blue Cat's Master Pack plug-ins bundle. A demo version is available for download and the product can currently be purchased at a special introductory price of €53.10 (instead of €59) / $71.10 (instead of $79).