Thursday, August 16, 2007

Waves strikes back

In a recent article of Pro Sound News Europe we have learnt about a secret action of Waves against software piracy. Earlier this year, the company rent several private investigators who act as a potential studio client and checked several leading studio in the US and UK. During the demonstration they have secretly filmed as the studio guys showed them their Waves plug-in potential - these video recordings can prove the crime legally as Waves hopes. After the action they have sent out several letters to the studio leaders and let them know about the intent to prosecute, or, alternatively, to pay Waves a reasonable sum. There did not started not a single case until now and we are very curious about the next steps both sides.

Prophet reloaded

Dave Smith brings life into the hardware synth platform again: Prophet 5's 30th anniversary inspired him to continue this product line with Prophet 8, an all-analog but state-of-the-art piece electronic equipment. One of his employee, David Bryce has announced it via this Vintage Synth forum topic, and later a teaser YouTube-video has arrived also. They develop the instrument in complete secret, it has eight voice with built-in sequencer and arpeggiator, has a reasonable amount of patch memory, and costs only 2000 USD (street price).

Small but great-sounding piano plugin

Musicrow has assembled a tiny piano plugin for Windows/VST at a very low cost, and a very low hardware demand. It works with samples - 34 megabytes only -, but their own technology called SCS makes it a turbo-sounding piano beast which rivals the high-end piano products found elsewhere on the market. It is called PianoBoy, and its demos sound really nice, try them, and the software is ultra-fast really, again. It has a polyphony of 22, and costs 55 euro, here.