Univers-Sons / Ultimate Sound Bank announces the release of a brand new UVI Soundpack, Italian Grand Piano. Here is what they say about it :

"After popular demand from the UVI community, our great sound designer team was back to work. The goal: find and record the best model of the Italian manufacturer Fazioli. We did choose a superb sounding F278 model, in our opinion, better than the usually sampled model F308.

For that kind of unique instrument, we did choose a very unique gear: the microphone set-up was a matched pair of Neumann M150 and the preamp/converters were the ones from the acclaimed Nagra D2. A unique combination of exceptional gear for the first time in sampling a piano library.

The UVI philosophy regarding pianos is to propose truly musical and excellent sounding pr ...

AcousticsampleS releases SmallDrumKits.

- The SmallDrumKits are 3 different Drum Kits, each has two toms, a snare, a
ride, a hihat and a bass drum.
- 506Mo of samples recorded at 24-bit/44.1kHz (kitA:149Mo, kitB 61Mo,
kitC:295Mo).
- Custom mapping, you can assign every element to any key from the
interface.
- Mappings presets: GM, V-DRUMS, IMAP, NSKIT (NDK) or default one.
- cc# controlled Hihat that features automatic closing sound.
- Cycle round robins (4 for kit A and C and 2 for kit B).
- Sensitivity button to adjust the response.
- Detailed instruments: up to 10 velocity layers per round robin.
- Kontakt 2 and 3 format to benefit from the interface and the custom
mapping. Easy to use Kontakt interface.
- Priced at €34 and as the summer sale is going on, you can get it for €22 until august 31.

You can find audio and video demos on the website.

The new Minimal Electro Soundset for Waldorf Largo from german sounddesigner Holger Steinbrink is now available in the Waldorf Webshop.

The soundset contains 128 single programs, created especially for the needs of electronic music producers. It was designed to provide crying leads, pulsating arpeggios and fat bass sounds for todays music production. The download package contains the soundset as FXB bank as well as all single sounds in FXB and AU preset format. VST3 presets for Steinberg Cubase 4 and 5 are also included plus a documentation sheet.

The Minimal Electro Soundset is priced at €30.

PreSonus has just released a demo version of its long-awaited new music creation and production application for Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista : Studio One.

This version will allow you to try Studio One Pro for a period of 30 days, after which the software will require purchase and activation to continue running. You will not be able to save documents or export audio in the Demo version. Otherwise, you will be able to explore all of the features Studio One Pro has to offer.

Please note that Studio One is still unavailable for purchase. You can make a request for the Demo version at :

"Ethnic Horns" by Soundprovocation is a sampler instrument, made from sampled full set of ancient wooden Lithuanian horns. The main goal was to recreate natural sound and subtleties of these instruments.

The idea was successfully realized by recording 225 different samples total.
Each note of two recorded octaves has 9 variations of around five-second sample. Every time you press a single note, you will hear a different variation. This gives natural feel of the instrument.

"Ethnic Horns" is dedicated to movie, theatre soundtrack producers and composers with special needs to add something unordinary and extra natural to their creations.

"Ethnic Horns" is available for samplers EXS24 and Kontakt at an introductory price of €9.99 instead of €14.99. This offer is valid until the end of September.