Clavia has released a major upgrade for the Nord Electro. the V2.0 Software improves the polyphony, allows USB downloads, and brings new piano sounds and effects.

New from Harm Visser are a pair of plug-in collections for use with the Korg OASYS PCI card:
- MorphingDrums is a collection of three new percussion plug-ins. The plug-ins use physical modeling to create organic, fully controllable drum timbres.

- OAS7 is inspired but not limited by the classic DX7. The 32 OAS7 plug-ins combine phase modulation synthesis, multimode filters, and DSP-rate envelopes.

According to MOTU: Version 2.11 adds a longer list of available buffer sizes. This driver supports multiple interfaces on a single Firewire bus. This driver will not support multiple I/Os on Blue and White G3s, early "Yikes" G4s, or any PCI or PCMCIA firewire card with older PCI-Lynx firewire chips (consult to the manufacturer of your specific card).

Now available for the Mac, CDxtract is a program/sample converter that supports virtually every single sample format both ways. It can also read the samples before converting them. The following program formats are currently supported: Akai S1000 / S3000 / S5000 / S6000, MPC 2000/3000, Roland S7xx, EMU III / ESI / IV / EOS / Soundfont, Tascam GigaSampler/Studio, Emagic EXS24, Digidesign SampleCell, Creamware Pulsar STS, MESA, NI Reaktor map, Steinberg Halion, VSampler... as well as the following sample formats: Kurzweil, Wav, AIFF, SD2, MPC .snd, and Pulsar .s... Not bad ;-)

Transcribe is a great shareware that allows you to easily write out any kind of piece of music. Once the sample is loaded, Transcribe slows it down (without changing its pitch), and displays the fundamental notes on a piano keyboard, making it very simple to transcribe a music partition.