Two new titles from Sony (www.sony.com/mediasoftware), arhythmiA: Drums & Drones, Volumes One and Two ($99.95 each), are part of the Sound Series Premium Collection. Nine Inch Nails drummer Jerome Dillon and sound designer/remixer Keith Hillebrandt produced both 2-CD sets. The content consists of acoustic and electronic drum and percussion beats (most of them heavily processed), droning electronic textures, synthesized melodic and bass lines, and unnatural sound effects. Numerous one-shots are on hand, and several construction kits let you layer parts to create your own grooves. All files are in Acidized WAV format, and many beats and construction kits are also provided as REX2 files.
Pro Drum Works, Volume One ($249), from Smart Loops (www.smartloops.com), is a 6-CD collection of Acidized WAV files that incorporates three drum kits recorded with and without effects processing. On each kit, drummer Frank Basile plays more than 3,000 grooves and fills in rock, funk, and other pop-music styles, all of them in 4/4 time. Additional recordings include individual drum and cymbal hits played at different velocities. To simplify searching, patterns are identified by names that indicate their style, rhythmic content, and complexity. Pro Drum Works, Volume One, also offers plenty of tips for quickly arranging realistic drum parts and has useful demo files from other Smart Loops collections.
Garritan Orchestral Libraries (www.garritan.com) has announced Garritan Stradivari Violin ($199), the first sample library to use Giorgio Tommasini's proprietary Sonic Morphing technology. Sonic Morphing harmonically aligns sound waves so that notes transition seamlessly when changing vibrato or dynamic levels, greatly enhancing the realism and real-time expressiveness of sampled solo instruments. According to Garritan, you no longer hear two distinct samples during crossfades as you do with conventional sampled instruments. The 24-bit Garritan Stradivari Violin is packaged on a single DVD-ROM in Native Instruments Kontakt or Kontakt 2 format, and has its own Kontakt player.