Shadow Hills Industries has shown at NAMM its surround controller, a huge black thing with magic eyes all around. If you need surround mixing to impress your customers as the cleaning lady, here's the 1940's war room design look alike that'll win the deal. Specs and price tba.

Many thanks to Barry Wood of NAMM Oddities for the info and the picture.

Synthrestore, a dedicated repair facility in the UK has announced the introduction in march of the Aurora synth. This analogue keyboard will add a real instrument to the line of specific spares the shop sell besides the repair business. Aurora is a 3 VCO (not identical, beside common specs, one has pulse, the others have square and sub), 1 LFO (can go way out into the audio range ;), ADSR, 12dB VCF (Oberheim/early Odyssey caracter) high pass or low pass. No MIDI in sight! (me I like CV/gate) and a 37 note keyboard.

The instrument is announced at 499£ (tbc) and will be built to order only, expect a 2 weeks wait after the deposit. Now it's not a plastic box with 2 ridiculous chips inside sold for as much as this one, the casing seem to be here to last and smells the matched transistors.

Tritone Digital has just released V1.0 of its HydraTone EQ plug-in. Base on multi-staged convolution, it allows to blend both valve based and solid state equalization derived from historic circuits. You can mix them in your EQ profile, say one kind for bass, the other for medium and treble, save here we're talking of a 5 band EQ with fixed Bass and Treble, and fully parametric lo-mid, mid and hi-mid bands.

Now HydraTone doesn't stop there, you get also 2 filters, one on bass and one on treble to adjust the curves further. You have also a Phase control, a unique Fire parameter with his own valve coloration algorithm on the main output, with Blast to compress things till it's carbonized… you select too the way the main output stage is modeled. Last but not least, to save CPU usage, Channel turns only the channel you need on not CPU savvy software platforms if the signal is mono.

HydraTone run on OS X 10.2 or higher, G4 IGHz recommended, up to 32 bits/96 kHz, VST, RTAS and AU support through Pluggo. Pluggo users should run the free Pluggo 3.5 update. Before spending $149 you can try the "beeeping" demo. And you can buy HydraTone in bundle with ValveTone for $199 ;)

Heizenbox is a granulizor plugin for VST hosts running on Mac OS X. The incoming audio is recorded into a buffer. It then plays back slices of the buffer, offsetting loop points after each loop. With the interface you can change the loop length, offset, repeats, pitch , direction and applying effects.

Info and download in the MacMusic software section.

Antares has released the Audio Units version of Auto-Tune v4.2.5 for Mac OS X and updated the other OS X plug-in versions (VST, MAS, RTAS & TDM) to v 4.2.3. The Audio Units version is fully compatible with Apple Logic 7 and Garageband with fully functioning Graphical Mode and provides compatibility with iLok authorization.

Auto-Tune 4 AU is a free upgrade for current owners of Auto-Tune 4.