Today the 25th edition of the "Fête de la Musique", or "Music Day" will take place in Europe and in a lot of other countries. Completely different from a music festival, the Fête de la Musique is above all a free popular fête, open to any participant (amateur or professional muicians) who wants to perform in it. This Music day allows the expression of all styles of music in a cheerful atmosphere. It aims at a large audience, working to popularise musical practice for young and not so young people from all social backgrounds. It gives an opportunity to communicate and share a very special moment through music. The musicians are asked to perform for free, and all the concerts are free for the public. It's the reason why they are used to play in open air areas as streets and parks or in public buildings like museums, train stations, castles…

Happy Music Day to all MacMusicians !

Rob Papen and LinPlug release the virtual synthesizer Albino 3. There are loads of amazing new creative features added like the two new filters "Scream" and "Comb"; four FX units with new FX like LoFi and WahWah, a Compressor and an improved Reverb. But the biggest new feature is that you can layer up to four instances of Albino in a single preset! Albino 3 has more than 2100 'Rob Papen' presets in various styles of music plus two banks.

Albino 3 ships for 199 euro, upgrade price is 39 euros or free upgrade if purchased from 1st February 2006.

Denon DJ announces the successor to the popular DN-X1500 DJ mixer. The new DN-X1500S is a 4-channel, 12" mixer featuring a brushed aluminum top panel, and is a perfect complement to the DN-S3500 tabletop CD/MP3 player. This club/mobile style mixer incorporates Denon's original high performance adjustable Flex Fader, a built-in sampler, matrix switching, parametric EQ, onboard effects and a host of other features all powered by the SHARC DSP engine. The new Denon DN-X1500S offers an intuitive control surface that is adaptable to any application and suited to the diverse needs of turntablists and mobile DJs performing in clubs, bars, and an endless array of venues.

The Denon DJ DN-X1500S will be available July 2006 for $899.00.

Widisoft announces the release of the version 1.2 of WIDI Audio To MIDI, first Audio Units version. WIDI Audio To MIDI is a plugin designed for real-time Audio to MIDI conversion. The plugin receives input from an audio channel and performs real-time music recognition. Resulting MIDI events can be sent to the VST host, System MIDI Out Device or to a MIDI file.

WIDI Audio To MIDI Audio Units costs $79.90 (with a special price of $63.90 until 1st July). Cross-grade from the VST version costs $23.90.

Lynx Studio Technology today introduced the LT-HD for the Aurora 16 and Aurora 8 converters. The LT-HD is an L-Slot interface for the Aurora A/D D/A converters that provides digital input and output in a format that is recognizable by Digidesign Pro Tools | HD systems. LT-HD equipped Auroras can be connected to HD Core or Accel Core cards with standard Digidesign cabling and can operate seamlessly with all HD-compatible versions of Pro Tools software. The LT-HD contains one Primary and one Expansion DigiLink port for up to 32 channels of conversion per HD Core or Accel Core card (using two Aurora 16's).

The LT-HD will be available in July, 2006 with a US suggested retail price of $395.