MacJams.com has announced the opening of its new "Loop Store," an online site where musicians can browse, listen to, and immediately download over 40,000 loops and sound clips in a huge variety of styles and instrumentation. Loops may be purchased with credits costing as little as 40 cents each, and loops are available in a variety of formats for nearly any audio program for the Macintosh platform. To celebrate the grand opening of its Loop Store, MacJams is giving away 10 free 10-credit accounts and 10 free PowerFX Apple Loops Disc Jams CDs. Loops and audio clips for the Loop Store are professionally recorded and produced by PowerFX, which provides audio content to Apple, Sony Pictures, Propellerhead, and others.

Unitonic announced the release of Aurora, a new plug-in synth for Pro Tools|HD Accel systems. Aurora features sound synthesis with eight Tone Partials, each with built-in modulation and stereo panning, independent, multi-step envelopes for every parameter, and dynamic polyphony that permits voicing of 16 to 128 or more notes.

Aurora costs $699 but Unitonic will be offering Aurora at an introductory price of $499 via its online store.

Cycling '74 announced the release of Incidental Gesture, the third volume in the Cycles series of audio source libraries. Produced and edited by Ron MacLeod, Incidental Gesture features active sonic textures and melodic meanderings that provide movement, emotion and narrative expression to musical compositions or media projects. Each piece is composed to integrate easily into existing pieces yet intricate enough to stand on their own as incidental beds. These long (30 sec. to 3 min.) files were designed for direct use in Digital Audio Workstations yet are seamlessly looped end to end for extended play as well.

Incidental Gesture is now available directly from Cycling '74 for US$99.00.

Apple has updated Quicktime to version 6.5.2. This new release of Apple's digital media software includes a security update and bug fixes. In addition this release includes enhancements in the Apple Lossless Encoder and AAC codecs, as well as improved support for iTunes and other QuickTime-based applications.

Quicktime 6.5.2 is available in our Softwares section.

Trilium Lane Labs announces two new plugins available on November : TL Aggro, a vintage modeled analog FET compression and TL AutoPan, an analog style stereo and surround panning.

These two plugins will be available for Pro Tools LE and Pro Tools HD on Mac OS X.