SOUND ON SOUND
An hour spent fine-tuning the performance of your soundcard can yield permanent improvements in background noise, distortion levels and frequency response.
As well as bringing 192kHz capability to the project-studio market, ESI Pro's new range of soundcards also features revolutionary drivers which allow the PC user new freedom to route audio between applications.
CDXtract 4 is a handy cross-platform utility for extracting and converting sample data from CD-ROMs.
Many UK music technology retailers are now building specialist PCs to order, and Digital Village are no exception. Their Pentium 4 systems promise careful optimisation at a very competitive price.
Theoretical figures and manufacturers' measurements may suggest that the latency of your soft synths is negligible — but that's no use if their timing is all over the place when you actually play them. Our real-world results give you the true picture.
As Intel and AMD continue to push the clock speeds and architectures of PC processors, music software developers are taking advantage of the optimisations possible, as demonstrated by Waves with the latest update to their native plug-ins.
Although Native Instruments' Reaktor has offered sampling options for some time, it's taken the company a while to produce a dedicated software sampler: Kontakt. Can it make headway in what has become a crowded market?
A PC with CD burner and soundcard provides the ideal means to preserve old tape recordings or transfer your vinyl collection to CD.
For applications where space or portability are at a premium, it is hard to beat this compact, two-octave MIDI master keyboard, which also incorporates eight assignable real-time MIDI controllers.
The Wavestation can prove extremely frustrating to use, but can produce sounds that are almost impossible to recreate on any other instrument. So here's some hands-on advice for getting the best from Korg's Wavestation series of synthesizers.