Digidesign today announced D-Command; the newest member of the ICON integrated console family. ICON D-Command incorporates much of the same functionality, industrial design, and custom workflow capabilities of the ICON D-Control. With its compact size and powerful feature set — including dedicated EQ and dynamics editing sections, custom fader modes, and touch-sensitive rotary controls — ICON D-Command is a natural fit for facilities that want ICON's unique mixing capabilities at a more affordable price.

This is a nice project who was started in the context of ICMC 2005 (international computer music conference of Barcelona), and is a website for creative-commons licensed audio material exchange :

" The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, ... released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to

Sound Burst has announced North Mood, a virtual reproduction of the Clavia Nord Modular player, available as a VST plug-in for MacOS X. It features 650 Presets. 30,000 samples, up to 64 voices of polyphony (CPU dependent), 24 bit/96 Khz quality and 32 bit internal processing.

North Mood will be available in May, 2005 with for $/€149. (grrr...manufacturers, please note that US$ 1 = 0.77 euros, thanks !!!).

Pure Data announces a new version which now features a Pd.app rather than an installer. Pure Data is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio and graphical processing.It was planned as a free, better and more stable Max/fts, which has also been developed by Miller Smith Puckette at IRCAM.

This update is available in the MacMusic softwares section.

At MusikMesse, Korg unveils a new compact 4 tracks recorder, the D4, which allows you to record one or two tracks at a time, to a CompactFlash removeable media card. This small unit features 8 virtual tracks per track, for a total of 32 tracks, two tracks of simultaneous recording, extended recording times using MPEG-1 Layer-2 compressed recording format, XLR and 1/4 inch inputs and Built-in mic.