??? GMEDIAGmedia's Acoustic Swing and Shuffle Grooves ($49.95) features a collection of audio grooves, MIDI loops, and individual hits on a single CD-ROM. You can use entire audio loops or have the MIDI files trigger the individual drum hits provided on the CD. The audio files are presented in a variety of audio formats, including WAV, AIFF, and SoundFont. The MIDI loops were recorded with Roland V-Drums.
The loops, grooves, and fills cover a wide range of styles patterned after the music of Bernard Purdie, Jeff Porcaro, Eric Benet, and Erykah Badu. The audio was recorded at Heliocentric Studios in Great Britain, using the same 1950s tube-powered mixing console employed by Bob Marley, Roxy Music, and Paul Weller. Gmedia Technology; tel. 44-1491-57-7147; Web www.gmedia.com/gforce.
SONIC FOUNDRYSonic Foundry has released two collections of loops for use with its Acid digital audio sequencer.
Karl Perazzo - a vocalist, percussionist, and writer on Santana's Supernatural album - arranged, produced, and performed the percussion tracks on Acid Latin 2.0 ($47.99). Perazzo performs in a host of Latin music styles, including cumbia, salsa, and slow ballads. Acid Latin gives you more than 600 royalty-free loops, with arrangements that include percussion, drums, horns, keyboards, and guitars.
Acid Techno 2.0 ($47.99) offers 600 loops, including heavy beats, percussion, vinyl, scratching, synths, and pads. Stylistically, sounds run the gamut of European-influenced techno music. As with all Acid loops, you can click and drag loops into Acid to mix and match styles, tempos, and pitch with other grooves. Sonic Foundry; tel. (800) 577-6642 or (608) 256-3133; e-mail customerservice@sonicfoundry.com; Web www.sonicfoundry.com.
ILIO ENTERTAINMENTSUnusual sound sources such as Kissing Fish, salad bowls, springs, plastic toys, and Styrofoam combine with drum kits, congas, surdos, koras, and mbira on Bashiri Johnson's Ethno-Techno (Akai, E-mu, Roland, or Kurzweil CD-ROM $299; audio CD $129). Produced by Eric Persing, Ethno-Techno is a new entry in Ilio's Groove Control sample CD series. A majority of the tracks were recorded at Donald Fagen's River Sound studio in New York.
The Groove Control feature - which was codeveloped by Ilio and Spectrasonics - allows the user to rearrange the tempo, feel, dynamics, mix, and even the pitch of individual loop elements. As with other Groove Control CDs, Ethno-Techno offers theme and variation on grooves, including fills, wet and dry remixes, and large and small mixes with a varying number of elements.
In addition to Johnson, Ethno-Techno musicians include Papa B. Susso (kora), Vinny Adams (drums and percussion), and Zeleka Jenkins (mbira). Ilio Entertainments; tel. (800) 747-4546 or (818) 707-7222; e-mail ilioinfo@ilio.com; Web www.ilio.com.
SONIC REALITYWith American Heartland from Sonic Reality (Akai, E-mu, Kurzweil, Roland, or SampleCell CD-ROM $199), the focus is on playable multisampled musical instruments. Nonetheless, the producers couldn't resist recording riffs and phrases to provide a bit of idiomatic flavor to the collection.
Instruments that are typically used in American "roots" music abound. Along with several drum kits and electric basses, you can find Dobros, banjos, harmonicas, dulcimers, pedal steel guitars, and more. Some instruments have layers that utilize Velocity and other MIDI messages for variations. For example, you get a multisampled Taylor acoustic guitar with Velocity-switching between finger-plucked and picked samples; fiddle samples use up and down bowing articulations. Ilio Entertainments (distributor); tel. (800) 747-4546 or (818) 707-7222; e-mail sales@sonicreality.com; Web www.sonicreality.com.
Shure is recalling all model E1 Earphones shipped between September 22 and October 22, 2000. A total of 68 units are affected out of 1,379 shipped during that time. Apart from a potential reduction in sound quality, it is possible that the acoustic damper component could fall into the user's ear. You can find more information at www.shure.com, or send e-mail to recall@shure.com. . . . A fully functional, native version of Digidesign's Pro Tools LE 5.01 is available as a free download at www.digidesign.com. The free version is limited to eight audio channels and two I/O channels, using Wave drivers (Windows) and Sound Manager (Mac). . . . Sonic Implants has released its sample library in Akai, Kurzweil, and GigaSampler formats. . . . Sampleheads now offers online delivery of its entire sample library at www.sampleheads.com. Sounds are available in SoundFont format, and other formats will be available in the future. . . . Lexicon is shipping the Macintosh version of its Core2 Desktop Audio System. . . . BIAS has announced that its Peak waveform editing software and its Deck multitrack recording application will be available for BeOS on the PC. The two programs are also being rewritten for Mac OS X. . . . Alesis has released version 3.0 software for the ADAT M20 modular digital multitrack recorder. Enhancements include faster lockup time and improved diagnostic capabilities. You can down-load the ADAT M20 software at www.alesis.com.