God Bless Russian engineering. As of this summer, it’s the only ticket to and from our space station, via a capsule that Just Works. It gaves us the very first electronic instrument (thanks, Professor Theremin). And it gives us an insane music tracker slash production tool slash soft synth selection slash modular hosting environment that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm, Windows Mobile (yes, you’re reading this list right), and now iOS and iPad.

Well, don’t just thank Russian engineering. Thank Alex Zolotov, who sends along his latest work. Highlights:

• Waveform drawing
• A drum synth
• Sample recording
• Side chain compression (top)
• iPad MIDI keyboard support (second from top)

Fortunately, if you’re not a mad scientist, we’ve got a lineup of videos that show you what all of this does and how to get started with this eminently affordable, insanely powerful tool. (Cue someone complaining in comments that they can’t read the interface, etc. Uh… well, you can’t have everything, eh? Bifocals?)

And in case you don’t believe this is a music tool, we even have some music created in it. (Actually creating digital music – interesting.)

Now, let’s Crash Adobe Flash(TM) with a bunch of videos:

More New Features

Where to Start

And yes, even where to start performing live on an iPhone / iPod touch:

More video tutorials:

SunVox Video Tutorials @ warmplace.ru Forum

Official SunVox page:
http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

Plug-in crafter daz disley writes to alert us to his Windows VST plug-in collection. The beta-grade plug-ins are all available as donationware. There are various warnings about “try at your own risk,” which reads to me as an invitation. Three effects have been polished into finished versions; you can get all three for EUR25 if you want to use them beyond 28 days. But the betas are free to try.

There’s some nice-looking stuff in the beta-level collection, including:

• granulOSO: a granular “sample masher,” a bit like some of the Reaktor ensembles out there — and delicious as a result. Note that “granulOSO uses a mono trigger with polyphonic pitch so each new note’s samples join in rather than start again so it can be used as a gnarly harmonizer. “
• voldeLAY: a delay chain that uses volume to determine delay (that is, it integrates a side-chained compressor). Similar: freqDELAY uses multiple bands for delay, and deeeeeLAY, a “stoopidly” long delay. You could route something similar depending on the capabilities of your host, but nice to have it in one virtual box.
• wavePLAY: a “wave-explorer” synthesizer from a sound artist.
• sidePRESS, a hard knee compressor with virtual sidechain inputs — meaning you don’t need a host capable of sidechaining to use it (nice!)

… just for starters; you’ll find plenty of others. And they all have quite lovely interfaces, true to their name.

whiteLABEL plug-ins

I may be tossing this into my sound design / mangling arsenal this week, so stay tuned!