New Plugsound Instrument Released

(Click for a close-up)

USB is now shipping Plugsound 1 "Keyboards Collection," offering a wealth of acoustic and electric pianos, clavinets and organs.

Plugsound 1 is a sound module that offers 256 presets using more than 3,000 samples. Under the hood is the powerful UVI-Engine which features dual multimode filters, separate amplitude and filter envelopes, keyzone editing (a feature only found on a few high-end samplers) and much more. Plugsound is now in version 1.72: new features include the ability to control every knob and slider via MIDI, a new integrated reverb effect, Release Trigger, and about 20% more voices than before.

The Keyboards Collection features acoustic Pianos in classical, jazz and pop styles, and alternative sounds like Honky-Tonk and Detuned. It also featured a best-of selection of famous electric pianos from the most respected manufacturers of these bygone instruments. A wealth of Clavinets, Electric Organs and Synth-based keyboard sounds complete the modern part of the collection. Featured traditional keyboard instruments include Church Organs, Accordion, Celesta, Vibraphone, Music box & Xylophone. Finally, an extensive Harpsichord section benefits from the new "Release Trigger" feature that allows realistic recreation of this difficult instrument.

Keyboard instruments may seem simple to reproduce in a library, but that's only true when you let presets take hundreds of megabytes, and it doesn't automatically make the sounds better. Most users don't have that much RAM to devote to their sounds, or don't want to wait endlessly for sequences loaded with enormous samples to open. Enter Plugsound: the sound design team worked really hard and went out of their way to ensure that all instruments use the amount of RAM they need, and no more. Why create a 200 MB Piano if you can achieve a better sound with 96 MB? In return, this extra work allowed the team to include more sounds in the 650 MB sample library, and make sure that the collection is as complete as it can be.

Each Plugsound volume is a virtual instrument based on a professional sample library, available as a VST2 plug-in (Mac-PC), and a MAS and RTAS plug-in on the Mac. Plugsound 1 "Keyboards Collection" is supplied on a CDROM with printed manual and sound listings, plus multi-language PDF manuals & tutorials. Plugsound 1 is available worldwide now, for a price of 99 USD (Recommended Retail).