At NAMM, Alesis introduces the 25 key Photon X25. This little keyboard has as a four character LED display, an AirFX inspired X/Y dome to control Pitch Bend modulation and other parameters, pitch and mod wheels and high-resolution continuous knobs. Plus stereo 24-bit 48kHz audio balanced I/O and is bus powered. A light version , the Photon 25 has the MIDI features but has a joystick control in place of the dome and wheels and no audio interface.

Photon X25 costs $299 and Photon 25 costs $249.

At summer NAMM, Arturia announces the version 2.0 of its Moog Modular V. This faithful reproduction of the legendary Moog modular systems comes back with major improvements. Among the features added in the upgrade are:new ergonomics, improvements on the oscillators, new Unison mode, new Audio-In possibilities, soft-clipping emulation is now done on each mixer, new modules (ring modulator, formant Filter,...), 200 new presets and much more...

This upgrade is free to all registered users. Shipment is planned for the 2nd half of August 2004.

Roland announces a new DS range of digital monitors. The DS 8/7/5 can handle 24-bit audio (up to 192 kHz) for a truly all-digital signal path. Each monitor is equipped with digital inputs (AES/EBU, coax, and optical) and analog inputs (Neutrik 1/4"/XLR).

Details will be soon online on the Roland web site.

Since july 8th, Wave version 5 for Mac OS X is available. This version features a lot a new items : TempoSync (new functionality enables plug-ins to lock to the host application's tempo), Morphoder MIDI Control, Waves 360° Bundle is now native on Mac, the Waves 360° Bundle now supports Native processing, running as RTAS & HTDM. HTDM Support, HD Accel Support, Digi 002 and Command/8 Control Surface support and Automatic Delay Compensation support for Pro Tools.

During current NAMM, Waves announces that a 14-day demo of Waves 5 is available on download on its web site.

PG Music has just posted an update (v12b21) of its automatic music accompaniment software Band In A Box. Band-in-a-Box automatically generates a complete professional quality arrangement of piano, bass, drums, guitar and strings in a wide variety of popular styles. This new version updates few styles, and is a general maintenance release.

Band In A Box 12b21 is a free update.