Steinberg today presented the new version of its Virtual Guitarist software product at the Winter NAMM show in Anaheim, California. Offering a full 6.8 GB of authentic, editable riffs, parts and licks in 88 musical styles, offering a staggering total of nearly 1100 different parts across 88 styles including pop, rock, metal, reggae and country to name but a few. Virtual Guitarist 2 offers a complete computer-based instrument that creates realistic electric and acoustic rhythm guitar parts from scratch. The new Part Editor allows full editing control over every single Virtual Guitarist 2 phrase. Each chord is broken up into slices, which the user can manipulate as desired.

Guitarist 2 is shipping February 2006 for Mac OSX for 239 euros. Existing Virtual
Guitarist or Virtual guitarist Electric Edition customers can update to the new
Virtual Guitarist 2 version for 79 euros.

There is a full package of news releases from our friends from IK Multimedia for this Winter NAMM 2006. IK announces that AmpliTube 2, unveiled at AES, will ship in February. AmpliTube 2.0 adds a completely redesigned interface and enhanced DSP engine, 5 separate modules, the ability to build your own custom Amp with more than 20,000 possible amp combinations, 21 stomp effects, 11 rack effects, 2 simultaneous guitar-rigs, more flexible routing, and advanced preset management.

AmpliTube 2.0 will cost $399.

Cakewalk has announced the release of Rapture, a new wavetable synthesizer designed to produce pop, dance and electronic sounds. Rapture combines an advanced modulation system with an non-aliasing wavetable resampling engine. It features 40 Envelope Generators, LFOs, and Step Generators per patch, and comes with more than 500 programs including Basses, Leads, Pads, Arpeggios, Textures, Electronic Percussion and Sequences.

Rapture will be available in February (AU, RTAS, VST) for $199.

Clavia released the V. 1.40 of the editor of his G2 synthesizer family. It's packed with: another color scheme possible for coloured impaired persons, a Patch Adjuster which is changing parameters in a patch at a global level, a Patch Mutator which is using interactive evolution to alter settings. Now when you drag a patch cord near the window edge, scrolling will occur, and the "z" key will display the last played note.

In the killed bugs list you find:
- tool tip text in OscMaster course parameter corrected
- Patch Level display in the synth and the editor are the same now.
- G2 stand safe from some modules crowded patches.
- Patches with more than 255 cable segments possible.
- Save As now suggest the entire filename and not only the valid 16 chars.
- Gain in FltStatic when cha ...

If you're involved in sound for film-video and Pro Tools LE user, this new DV Toolkit 2 is right for you ! DV Toolkit 2 will include three plug-ins TL Space Native Edition convolution reverb, DINR LE noise reduction tool, and Synchro Arts VocALign Project. This pack will also contain DigiBase Pro file management tool, DigiTranslator 2.0 option, and Pro Tools mp3 export option. DV Toolkit 2 allows users to expand their Pro Tools sessions to up to 48 mono/stereo tracks (up to 96 kHz) and adds several functions, such as : Time code and feet frames functions, export session text, scrub trim tools, continuous scrolling and more...The upgade to Pro Tools 7.1 will be included in this pack.

DV Toolkit 2 will be available soon for $1,295