Facing all the competition for data storage and even more so for musical storage, MiniDisc needs a serious lifting. It's almost done as Sony has announced the release in April of it's Hi-MD. It will contain up to 45 hours of music at 48kbps and also serve as a 1 GB USB removable Data storage.

The 1 GB Hi-MD discs should cost about 7 euros each. As for the current minidiscs they should be compatible with the new players, these should cost less than 400 Euros.

Steven Philips has released volume 1 of his sounds for FM7. The CD includes 20 banks - each including 32 patches for Native Instruments FM7. More details on the included sounds can be found here.

Berkleemusic, the online extension school of Berklee College of Music, is now enrolling three brand-new online music production courses for their April 5th semester. Essential knowledge for engineers, producers, or hobbyists who have their own home studio up and running, Mixing and Mastering with Pro Tools will provide you with a greater understanding of advanced mixing and mastering techniques using Pro Tools. Sound Design for the Electronic Musician walks you through the necessary steps to create your own electronic sounds and musical productions, as well as explores more detailed aspects of sound creation and manipulation using the software synthesizers provided in Logic and Reason.

Learn to create musical-sounding MIDI arrangements and gain a firm understanding of the roles of the various instruments and arrangements used in the creation of dance and blues music in the MIDI Sequencing Intermediate course. Berkleemusic's Student Advisor is available toll-free at 1.866.BERKLEE (237.5533) for one-on-one advice or questions on any of these courses. To view the complete course catalog, or to enroll in an online course, please visit:

Digidesign has announced a bugfix for its Impact compressor Plug-in (ProTools with HD Accel). The patch is available (beta 1.1 version) on the Digidesign site.

Ed: Melenko has pointed us to free plugins for RTAS, AU, VST, OS 9 and OS X. Inspector is a mastering plugin for spectrum analysis with peak and RMS meters. Free demos are also available for some of the other plugins, as well. These plugins are new to us here, so hit that link, give them a spin, and let us know what you think! Thanks, melenko. -PK