Our friends of Native Instruments are pround to announce that a demo version of XPress Keyboards is available as a free download. XPress Keyboards is a new series of software instruments combining the sound of three famous vintage keyboards with maximum ease of use and affordability. It includes the B4 XPress vintage organ, the PRO-53 XPress virtual analog synthesizer and the FM7 XPress digital FM synthesizer.

Info and download on the Native Instruments web site.

Digidesign has announced a new update to version 6.7cs5 for both LE and TDM Pro Tools systems. This "weekly" update fixes bugs : volume and Pan Automation Are Sometimes Improperly Advanced When Using Surround Paths and Delay Compensation (TDM version), occasional System Freeze While Using Pro Tools and random Characters When Using Chinese Simplified OS with Pro Tools 6.7r2.

MOTU has updated Digital Performer to version 4.51 . Quite a few changes: Dynamic CPU Management, Multi Bounce, performance enhancements, Enhanced Digidesign DirectMIDI support, Better previewing of effects plug-in region operations, Plug-in preset enhancements, Bypass automation for AUs and more.

WireTap Pro is the new version of WireTape by Ambrosia Softwares. It allows you to record any audio, saving it to a file for later listening or processing. Streaming Internet audio, sound snippets of a DVD movie, voice notations/narration, audio from a game, digitized audio from a line-in.

Wire Tape is now available only as a "Pro" version and costs $19,00.

VirSyn has announced an update to version 1.5 for Canto. This release is a major upgrade incorporating a completely revised vocal synthesis engine. The new engine makes it now much easier to produce intelligible vocal lines.  This was achieved with an improved filter model and a new kind of rule based phoneme sequencer which adapts the phoneme transitions according to the context inside a word.