Arturia has announced a new series of plugins – FX Collection 2. The new bundle adds seven more plugins to the existing 15, taking the total to 22 individual plugs. The new FX units include a clone of the Juno chorus, Mu-tron Bi-phase pedal and what appears to be a clone of the SSL buss compressor – busFORCE. 

The Head of Apple Music, Eddy Cue, has said he “can’t tell” the difference between lossless and compressed audio in blind tests with the Apple Music team. In an interview with Billboard, the Apple Music boss said: “The reality of lossless is: if you take 100 people and you take a stereo song in lossless and you take a song that’s been in Apple Music that’s compressed, I don’t know if it’s 99 or 98 can’t tell the difference.”

ODD ball is a musical instrument disguised as a ball – hook it up to the included app and you can create sounds by bouncing and catching the rubber device. You can use the app to trigger sounds and then loop them and layer the sounds to create track ideas using just a ball. There’s also FX within the app to tweak your loops and get them sounding unique. There’s a library of sounds within the ODD ball app including disco, grime, rock, arcade and more as well as quantising any of your bounces to lock down the timing and keep the process fun! 

Spatial Audio – Apple’s immersive audio concept that launched on their Apple Music streaming platform this week – is coming to Logic Pro X in the form of new mixing tools. In a post by Apple Music 1 host and figurehead Zane Lowe introducing the Spatial Audio concept, he claims “Apple is building immersive music-authoring tools directly into Logic Pro later this year.

Beatport has launched a new app for iOS as well as a full rebrand of the website and logo. The new app essentially allows LINK users to create and tweak playlists on the go, as well as being able to access and listen to Beatport charts, DJ charts, DJ sets as well as trending artists and the ability to search through the whole catalogue. 

Splice has announced a new plugin called Bridge that lets users browse their sample collections in time and key with their current DAW project. The new plugin is available to Sounds+, Creator and Creator+ plans by opening the Splice app and visiting the Tools section and installing Bridge from there. Once the plugin is installed it will appear in your DAW like any other plugin – load it on your instrument and it’ll automatically link to your Splice app. 

Black Corporation is re-making a classic polysynth in the form of a new hardware device, the ISE-NIN. Based on Roland’s classic polysynth the Jupiter-8, the new synth is a rackmount unit with an almost identical layout to Roland’s revered poly, with an extra screen and some modern features like MPE and micro-tuning. No specs have been released for the new synth, which was posted on Black Corporation’s Instagram account on Monday May 31st, it seems to feature most of the same features with two oscillators, two envelopes, arpeggio, LFO and VCO modulation section. 

Bitwig has announced Bitwig Studio 4, the latest major update in their modular DAW. The main addition to Studio 4 is – much like their friends at Live – audio comping, which lets users record audio takes, which then create different lanes and then can be ‘comped’ together, to create a single take using the best versions of each recording. You can comp in both clip mode and arranger. 

VirtualDJ has announced a new Summer 2021 version, that includes the ability to export both Playlists and individual stems from any song straight to USB to work with any CDJ or XDJ hardware. Last year, VirtualDJ introduced an AI stem separation feature that let users ‘mix’ individual parts of any song, such as isolating the acapella from a mixed stereo file. 

Apple’s iPod Touch is rumoured to be making a comeback, 20 years after the iPod was first launched in 2001. In a tweet by MacRumours.com contributor Steve Moser, pics of the potential new version of the popular touchscreen device were shared with the caveat that the info was a “rumour, not a leak”.