Winter NAMM has come and gone again. Over the weekend there was a ton of new products that were announced this time, but overall I don’t think it was that exciting.
Here are some of the important things that happened.
As usual “Changing the game” was a popular marketing theme, Russ at the AIRUserBlog made this video poking fun at that.
Cubase 6 was announced, but honestly there’s only a few new features added. Phase accurate multi-track editing is the important one, but PT has had that for a decade, and their new comping function works just like Reaper. The promo video is just so terrible you must watch it.
AVID had some good products and announcements. Great academic pricing for Pro Tools, including free updates for 4 years. The Venom synthesizer seems pretty cool I guess.
Universal Audio announced the UAD-2 Satellite. A firewire based UAD-2 DSP option. Mac only though. I noticed they have a shiny new website this week too.
Tempest is a really cool Drum Machine/Synth from Dave Smith and Roger Linn. Very powerful and flexible and designed as an instrument rather than an appliance.
iZotope Stutter Edit is kind of a big thing right now, but its not that new of an idea. Most Ableton DJs have had this covered for years. Maybe if I try it I’ll change my mind.
Sonnox announced a mastering tool that will let you hear the effect of various encoding (mp3, etc) in realtime without exporting. Which allows you to preemptively compensate. It’s $499 though and that’s way too much for most of us.
Steven Slate announced Steven Slate Drums 4.0 which will include unprocessed drums and will not use the Kontakt engine. This I’m moderately excited about, I can’t afford the upgrade so I’m trying not to get too excited.
Rednet from Focusrite looks like an incredible system. Low latency, expandable audio interfaces that run on standard network cabling. I hope this does well.
Overall kinda blah IMO. What do you think?
Hmm, if those are the highlights, then I would agree it was kind of a boring NAMM.
Cubase 6 could have easily have been Cubase 5, I think Brandon said that over at RR, so I don’t really think that’s very exciting, but I’m not a Cubase user so maybe it is to some people.
The UAD satellite looks pretty cool, too bad it’s Mac only though.
I have no clue what to think about the Tempest, it looks cool but the Roger Linn demo didn’t really make it clear how it works.
I’m interested in Steven Slate 4, I jumped on the BFD bandwagon a little while ago but I’m interested to see if it’s going to be a “game changer.”
I’m not sure if there was anything revolutionary that I saw from online videos, so I guess like you said overall it wasn’t too exciting. There’s always next year…