The economy’s in the toilet, but at least September brought plenty of new music technology releases to distract our attention. Here are our highlights…

Avid Invite You To The Pro Tools Party…

Avid proved once again that software updates can be exciting when they announced Pro Tools 2022.9, with something a bit special that goes beyond the familiar roll call of compatibility and bug fixes - this one is BIG. Not least because it signifies Avid wanting to keep one of the biggest DAWs on the planet on everyone’s shopping list, including those who don’t necessarily make their money with their head in a DAW.

The new Aux I/O feature takes on audio Playback Engine possibilities that other DAWs have offered for some time, by allowing Pro Tools users to address multiple Core Audio devices in this Mac-only feature. This is big for anyone who needs to stream audio to and from multiple hardware or software I/O through Pro Tools. The new ARA 2 integration finally means that Pro Tools users don’t have to put on their boots for a trip to Melodyne and back for tuning and timing jobs. It’s all there in the Edit window.

Arguably the biggest feature for those doing simple work is the introduction of Pro Tools Intro. This brings back a simplified Pro Tools flavour that ditches a lot of the things that made Pro Tools First so baffling in the First place to anyone outside of PT-World. Gone are the ties to the cloud, with proper local functionality, and a generous set of usable features that won't make new users feel like second class citizens any longer. Not only that, but users can bring their own toys to use in Intro. Any third-party AAX plugin can be used, with no restrictions limiting users to Avid Marketplace-purchased plugins. What’s the catch Avid? Find out more about this massive release in our in-depth article Pro Tools 2022.9 Released - Everything You Need To Know

PreSonus Hit The Half Dozen

Dropping out of nowhere at the very tail end of the month, the latest full version update to PreSonus’ innovative Studio One DAW puts interface customisation front and centre, backed up by a couple of Global Track additions and some new plugins.

Studio One 6 lets you hide those functions and tools you never use or just don’t want to see, and save your setups as Customizations for recall as needed – build a Customization to suit your recording workflow, another for mixing, etc. Along similar lines, the new Smart Templates amalgamate specific sets of tools for a variety of production scenarios, from recording, mixing and mastering to podcast production and live performance, with optional ‘drop zones’ for easy import of audio, MIDI and video content.

Speaking of video, the new Global Video Track makes composing to picture straightforward and friction-free, featuring automatic thumbnail generation, slip and ripple editing, time and edit locks, and more. And also new to the Global Track menu, the Lyrics Track does exactly what the name suggests, enabling placement of lyrics on the timeline, with words and syllables optionally attachable to MIDI notes, and transferrable to the Show Page for live use.

Last but not least, Studio One 6 also throws in new Vocoder and De-Esser plugins, an update to Pro EQ adding dynamic equalisation and integrated sidechaining, and deeper integration with PreSonus Sphere.

Studio One 6 is available now, and we’ve got Everything You Need to Know right here.

Synchro Arts Pitch In

The latest plugin from those masters of audio alignment, Synchro Arts, landed in September, and it’s one that many producers have been eagerly awaiting. Billed as a one-stop shop for transparent vocal correction, RePitch adapts and expands on the core technologies behind the company’s flagship Revoice Pro software to make automatic and manual tuning quick and easy. Simply load in a monophonic vocal track and select a task-orientated preset to automatically snap it to the key of your track, or get hands-on with the graphical editor, altering pitch, timing, volume, formant shift and other properties as you see fit in extraordinary detail.

ARA 2 integration enables instant audio transfer in DAWs that support that protocol, and there are VST, AU and AAX versions for those that don’t, employing Synchro Arts’ clever real-time transfer system. Rather ingeniously, RePitch can also feed its output directly to sister plugin VocAlign Ultra’s Guide track, for subsequent alignment of harmonies and double tracks to the corrected vocal.

RePitch is out now, and our First Look article has all the details.

iZotope Get In The ’Zone

Arguably the jewel in iZotope’s generally spectacular music software crown, Ozone has long been the de facto standard for in-the-box mastering, and September heralded the release of its tenth full version.

The headline features are, as ever, a couple of swanky new processing modules for Ozone 10 Advanced’s rack. Stabilizer is an adaptive auto-EQ more than vaguely reminiscent of oeksound’s beloved Soothe, shaping its own response curve in real time to suppress resonances and bring the best out in the source material by attempting to match it to one of ten genre-defined Tonal Balance targets. Impact, meanwhile, is a multiband ‘microdynamics’ processor that applies compression or expansion to transients and other very short events independently in each of four frequency bands. It boasts tempo-syncable release time for rhythmic emphasis, and can really add to the punch and groove of a mix.

A couple of the existing modules have been beefed up, too. The Maximizer now incorporates a very tasty soft clipper (Magnify Soft Clip) with 4x oversampling, and Imager can pull the sides signal into the centre when narrowing stereo sources for maximum mono compatibility.

Beyond the new and improved modules, the other big change in Ozone 10 should catch the ears of those underwhelmed by the Master Assistant system introduced in Ozone 9. Previously a little – if you’ll pardon the pun – limited by its inability to offer much more than a very rudimentary starting point for further tweaking, the new Assistant makes the genre-based Tonal Balance targets accessible, requires no user input at the start of the process beyond playing eight seconds of the source track for analysis, and adds the Stabilizer, Impact and Imager modules to the chain, which can now be broadly adjusted in the new Assistant View. The resulting treatments are much improved over those yielded by v9, and it all bodes well for the future of automated mastering, for them as wants such sorcery.

Ozone 10 is out now, and you can find out what we make of it in our First Look article.

Zoom Take Recording On The Road

As much as we love puling out our laptops for mobile music production, there still is – and always will be – much to be said for the focus and tactility of the portable hardware recorder. Zoom’s just-announced entrant into that particular arena not only gives you everything you need to record on the go, but also throws a couple of creative curveballs into the mix in the shape of a built-in synthesiser and sampled drum kit. Weird!

The R12 MultiTrak provides eight tracks of recording and playback to/from microSD card, with mixing and editing facilitated by a bank of short-throw faders and a colour touchscreen, and onboard compression, EQ and a send effects channel (Reverb, Delay, Chorus or a preset stack of up to three ‘Guitar Lab’ processors) with dedicated return fader laying on the polish. You get XLR/TRS combi inputs with phantom power, line and headphone outputs, a USB-C port for connection to Mac or PC as a two-in/two-out audio interface and control surface, sample import via microSD or USB flash drive, and up to five hours of life out of four AA batteries.

As for that synth, it’s an eight-voice FM instrument with 18 preset sounds that you can program onscreen or play with a connected MIDI keyboard – alas, you can’t actually design your own patches. The same goes for the drums, which are pre-written into 150 genre-categorised loops and can’t be freely programmed.

Okay, so the synth and drums are clearly intended for scratch work, rather than final presentation, but they should prove handy as compositional aids complementing the R12 MultiTrak’s primary function as an easy-to-operate and eminently portable eight-track recorder. It’s slated to cost somewhere around $300 upon release later this year.

Toontrack And Hugh Padgham Step Back In Time

A golden era for rock and pop drum sounds, the 1980s saw forward-thinking engineers and producers capitalising on the technological advancements and budgetary excesses of the time to take the acoustic kit to new and hyperreal production heights, enhanced by the integration of then-cutting-edge electronic percussion. Among the most lauded of said pioneers, Hugh Padgham worked up the tubs for, amongst others, The Police, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, David Bowie and, most famously, Phil Collins, whose ‘In The Air Tonight’ centres, of course, on perhaps the most iconic drum sound of all time. Now, at long last, we can all bring some of that Padgham magic (madgic?) to our tracks via Hitmaker SDX, the fruit of an extensive collaboration between the great man and drum samplists par excellence Toontrack.

An add-on library for Superior Drummer 3, Hitmaker SDX presents six deeply multisampled acoustic drum kits configured, recorded (to tape, at British Grove Studios) and processed to evoke some of Padgham’s most acclaimed work, plus a ton of re-amped vintage drum machine (various Roland TRs, Simmons SDS V and Clap Trap, Oberheim DX, etc). Four of the main kits are ‘inspired by’ the diverse sounds of drum deities Phil Collins (Premier Elite), Stewart Copeland (The Police; Tama ImperialStar), Manu Katché (Sting and Peter Gabriel; Yamaha 8000) and Vinnie Colaiuta (Sting; Yamaha Maple Custom), while a pair of non-specific Yamaha 9000 setups come in regular and – very unusually – concert tom variants.

It all adds up to a huge amount of top-notch kicks, snares, toms and cymbals (94GB in total, including the drum machines), replete with similarly referential MIDI grooves with which to trigger them. And needless to say, with Padgham himself at the helm, the production quality and authenticity are absolutely outstanding throughout – you’ll swear Phil’s in the room with you!

It’s no exaggeration to say that Hitmaker SDX is one of the greatest drum libraries ever conceived, and if you’re not completely sold already, let our Expert Review tip you over the edge.

Tell us what new recording/production gear has warmed your Autumnal cockles in the comments.