Arturia announces the release of Hip-Hop Producer, a complete, ready-to-go solution that will get you started in Hip-Hop music production.

Hip-Hop Producer includes four products bundled in one box :

• Live Lite 8 Arturia Edition is based on the reference software environment for writing, producing and performing music.
• Analog Factory Hip Hop Edition brings to you 250 high quality synthesizer patches dedicated to Hip Hop (including Minimoog and ARP 2600 classic sounds).
• Lounge Lizard Session delivers 4 electric pianos (including Wurlitzer and Rhodes) with outstanding sound quality, action and feel.
• The ModernBeats Hip Hop bank comes with more than 1200 samples and more than 30 MIDI loops, all dedicated to Hip Hop and made by Los Angeles based Hip Hop masters.

Priced at $129 / €129, Hip-Hop Producer is available now for Windows (XP/Vista) and Mac OS X (10.4+) Universal Binary.

QuikQuak has released the third version of Pitchwheel, their real-time pitch changing plug-in.

Changes :

• A new pro quality pitch shifter. After months of research, Pitchwheel gets a new engine.
• Superior pitch shifting - great frequency stability and transient accuracy, with low latency and CPU usage.
• 'Fixed Envelope' option that preserves formant shapes. Useful for changing pitch without the usual 'chipmunks' sound. Allowing natural vocal changes, with glides, vibrato and harmonies.
• 46ms (at 44k) latency - very fast response time for a high quality wide-band pitch shifter.
• New option to only output sound when playing through MIDI, allowing 8 note harmonies to be played very easily.
• Sample accurate pitch changes.
• 96 semitone pitch range.

All registered users can upgrade for free; new customers can purchase Pitchwheel 3 for £50.

Zplane, a industry leading provider of audio SDKs and smart tools for music applications announced today the upcoming release of v3 of [aufTAKT]

[aufTAKT] is able to identify the tempo and musical beat locations in an audio file and can be found as integral part of numerous category defining applications in the DJ and music production field.

The new version offers:

• Automatic downbeat detection
• Automatic detection of time signature
• Additional "forced straight tempo" mode for electronic music
• Improved tempo detection stability

The [aufTAKT] technology can be licensed as Software Developers Kit (SDK) at the zplane website.

Arjen and Aram of Audio Ease went by Frank Zappa's studio, the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, to meet with Dweezil Zappa and together record the acoustics of both the tracking room and the famous Zappa echo chamber. Microphones and speaker in the echo chamber were set up just the way Frank had left them.

The resulting impulse responses can be downloaded for free for use in Altiverb, Audio Ease's convolution reverb plug- in.

Ueberschall unveils Soundscapes, a universally useful sound library, which consist mainly of dreamy moods, with smooth harmonies and off axis accents. The moods are an excellent fit for the needs of scoring, game audio, temp tracks, trailers, songs, audio logos, advertising, websites and of course as background music.

Each of the 24 Construction Kits consists of an intro, outro and a main mix. Furthermore all parts used to create the main mix are available for individual selection and every single element within a part is further broken down. With the flexible Elastik engine, you can easily mix and modify several of the 809 single-stems at once to create on-the-fly complete new moods.

By the way, you can listen to each kit as demo mp3 on Ueberschall website.

These features give yo ...