Ableton is launching a special deal for the summer of 2009. Every customer who buys Ableton Live 8 before August 31st will get Sampler, Ableton's advanced sampling instrument, absolutely free.

Sampler, worth €99/$129, combines traditional sampling features with advanced sound design functions. Although perfectly well suited to handling multi-gigabyte instrument libraries, it's Sampler's sound design capabilities that make the instrument really unique.

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EastWest/Quantum Leap announces the debut of its latest release, Hollywood Strings virtual instrument — a collection of string instruments with unprecedented control over sound and performance.

"Hollywood Strings has many groundbreaking features not found in any other virtual strings collection. Finger position is, for the first time, controllable by the user, so they can play as far up the strings as they want, and get a fuller, more romantic, Hollywood sound. Vibrato intensity and extensive dynamics are controllable by the user. Extensive multi-dynamic true legato has been sampled for all sections in three different categories: slurred, portamento, and bow change. This results in unsurpassed legato performance that has never been available in the sample world, says EastWest. Hollywood Strings has five user-controllable microphone positions including main pickup (Decca tree), mid pickup, close pickup, surround pickup, and an alternate vintage circa 1945 RCA ribbon room pickup."

Pricing and Availability TBA.

The 'Electronic expansion' is a big preset and feature expansion pack for Gladiator 2, the hybrid virtual synthesizer by Tone2. Designed by the professional sound designers Markus Feil, Bryan 'Xenos' Lee and Bastiaan van Noord, 'Electronic' is a collection of more then 300 sounds and new add-on features.

Expansion highlights :

• 300+ inspiring, unique presets aimed at miscellaneous genres of electronic music. The additional sounds can be accessed directly from the interface.
• Stereo Trancegate: Featuring no less then 22 patterns for rhythmic gate effects
• Reverb Ultra: Reverb Ultra uses a new high-quality reverb algorithm, its soft and diffuse sound make it especially
suitable for larger rooms and sculpting the proper ambience.
• Three new early reflection effects: Early reflection, reverse reflection and gated reflection
• Aliaser: A LoFi retro-effect that works by mirroring the signal's spectrum at the cutoff frequency
• Stereo Enhance: A stereo width effect, equipped with a High-Shelf filter to expand the stereo field while keeping the lower frequencies intact.
• Three additional skins as free bonus content: Black, gold and red skin

Electronic Expansion costs €49 / $69.

Audio Ease today announces the release of Cabinet, a plug-in which contains the three features guitarists like best in Speakerphone :

• five guitar amp speaker cabinets
• a top class recording studio live room
• a classic spring reverb

The effects in Cabinet are convolution based and rely upon actual samples made of the speaker cabinets shown, a spring reverb and a top class recording studio live room. Cabinet and the 33 cabinets in its mother plug-in Speakerphone provide the ultimate real-world sounding final stage of your guitar tone: the speaker cabinet within a good studio live space.

Plug-in your favourite pre-amped signal from a real hardware amp, or your favourite pre-amp modeling plug-in and use Cabinet to put the real world into your tracks.

Cabinet is available for Windows and Mac OS X in VST, AU, RTAS and MAS plug-in formats at a price of $59 / €49. Demo versions are available.

Blue Cat Audio has launched education offers for all their audio plugins : it is now possible for students to purchase the plug-ins developed by the company with 25% reduction. A student card is necessary to access the offer.

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