Oktava unveils the new universal USB Preamplifier for MK-012, MK-101, MK-102, MK-103 and MK-104 capsules.

This new device allows you to use your favorite Oktava capsules outside of studio without any special equipment. The only thing you need is the new USB Preamplifier and your laptop.

Features :

- no phantom power required
- no special software or drivers
- for XP, Vista or Mac
- high-quality A/D converter with 16Bit /48kHz resolution

Today we are glad to publish a new article about the Duet, the little FireWire audio interface by Apogee.

"Apogee has long been known for its high quality converters and more recently for working closely with Apple to make some of the best native based systems with extremely low latency and performance once only associated with DSP based systems like Pro Tools HD.

In the past Apogee gear might have been a bit pricey for the common man. That changed (...) At under $500 the Duet gives you 2 channels of AD/DA (with the same converters you find in the more expensive Ensemble) via Firewire, with Mic Pre's and support for Line In and Hi-Z Instrument In. As you'll read below, once you start using the Duet you will realize that Apogee has done more than just slap 2 channels from the Ensemble into a box."

The Filter, a personalized content filtering system which had been hanging around in beta status since sometime in 2006 has finally opened its doors to everyone and officially launched. The service was pioneered by musician Peter Gabriel and, at its beginning, was not much more than a playlist creation tool for iTunes. Today, The Filter has morphed into a larger recommendation system that finds not just music, but also movies, TV, and internet videos, customized to your personal tastes.

Some systems make recommendations based on your actions and history where others leverage the power of the crowd to find the best content, but The Filter combines both methods and uses data learned in one area to augment the other.

When you first sign up at The Filter, you begin by stepping through a brief profiling wizard in order for the site to establish an initial set of recommendations. As you begin to use the site, you can continue to personalize your recommendations in a way that's very much reminiscent of Amazon's "Recommended for You" section. On Amazon, items are rated with starts but The Filter uses a + / - sliding scale instead. However, like Amazon, you can mark items you own so they won't be recommended to you again while also helping the system get to know you better.

A second part to discovering your personalized tastes comes from "The Filter" which you download. This tool is a plugin application that works with either Windows Media Player, Winamp, and, of course, iTunes. Unlike other music player plugins like iLike, this piece of The Filter's system is not designed for social sharing, but actively collects data from your computer and sends it back to The Filter's servers. Where iLike uses the data it collects to help you discover friends of similar taste, The Filter solely uses that data for the purpose of improving recommendations.