Week of May 15, 2005 Tuesday, May 17 2005 | dmac Toxic 2.0 released by Maxx Claster Maxx Claster has released version 2.0 of Toxic, the FM Synth VSTi for Windows. New Features: Each of the 6 oscillators now has an IADSR envelope generator. Toxic's envelope generators are based on complex spline interpolation algorithms that are extremely precise and smooth. New effect module: a warm distortion algorithm. 90 sequencer patterns included for the 32 step sequencer/arpeggiator. Toxic now has more than 400 presets in 7 banks. Various bug fixes and improvements. Toxic still costs EU€69 and a new demo version is available. More @ maxxclaster.com. Tuesday, May 17 2005 | dmac Voxengo releases LF-Punch v1.0 Voxengo has released LF-Punch, a VST effect plug-in for Windows that adds low-frequency thump and punch, plus a little distortion, to bring your music's bottom end to life - LF-Punch is able to give you the elements of low-frequency FX usually associated with tape machines. LF-Punch dynamically emphasizes selected center bass frequency, performs adjustable amount of phase-shifting and then applies smooth distortion. Optional compression can then be applied to the resulting sound. Note that LF-Punch first splits the broad-band signal into low- and high-frequency bands and applies FX to the lower band only. This FX can be used with a wide range of program material: various drum tracks, bass tracks, contemporary music mixes: rap, trance, club music; even rock music can benefit from LF-Punch's low frequency adjustments. Features: FX center frequency control. Phase-shifting module. Variable distortion. Built-in compressor. FX monitoring switch. Two processing modes. "A-to-B" comparisons. Mono-to-Stereo, Stereo-to-Stereo processing. All sample rates supported. Native assembler DSP code. LF-Punch is currently available for the introductory price of US$39.95 and a demo version is available. More @ voxengo.com. Sunday, May 15 2005 | dmac KarmaFX Synth is now at v0.87 A new beta version of the KarmaFX Synth is now available (v0.87) Some Changes: SVF lost sound when turned off and then on, until cutoff was used. Fixed. GUI fix. Sometimes the modulation LEDs under knobs got lost at random when a patch was loaded. Fixed crash on systems with high latency. Max-latency is still 2048 samples though. A fix for the "tiny window bug" which appeared in Emagic's Logic has been added. Added support for resizing the window. User can choose between small (800x600) or large (1024x768). This is changed instantly in hosts that support dynamic window resizing. Otherwise it is changed the next time the synth is loaded. Setting is saved in the registry. Switching modulation module could cause other modules to freeze in polyphonic mode. Fixed. Poly12, Poly16 and Legato added to notepitch controller. More detials @ karmafx.