► iZotope Inc. has released Nectar® 2 Production Suite. Designed specifically for voice, Nectar 2 harnesses the power of iZotope’s vocal technologies to quickly and easily treat your voice to sweet results. Whether you’re tracking or mixing, Nectar 2 is designed to deliver professional vocals fast. “When developing Nectar 2, we focused on adding cutting edge tools like the new Harmony and FX modules, as well as classic tools that have made vocal recordings sound great for decades, like the new EMT 140-modeled plate reverb,” says Brett Bunting, Product Manager at iZotope. Exclusive to the new Nectar 2 Production Suite, two additional plug-ins are included for perfecting your vocal sound. Pitch correction is simple with the new Pitch Editor plug-in, and you can remove distracting breaths without tedious, time-consuming editing with the new Breath Control plug-in. Explore eleven powerful tools within Nectar 2: Harmony, Plate Reverb, FX, Pitch, Delay, De-Esser, Saturation, Compressors, Gate, EQ, and Limiter. Add impact and space to a vocal track with a new EMT 140-modeled Plate Reverb. Transform a vocal take into a dynamic, harmonized ensemble of up to twelve voices with a few mouse clicks or by playing your MIDI with the Harmony module. Get smooth, pitch-perfect takes quickly with new dedicated Pitch Editor and Breath Control plug-ins. Expand your palette of vocal sound with seven new creative effects in the new FX module. Tweak each module’s settings and controls in the Advanced View, or make quick adjustments in the streamlined Overview panel. Switch easily between Tracking and Mixing modes to improve vocals at all stages of production. Hear instant results with over 150+ new presets inspired by current and classic vocal styles. MSRP $299 USD / €185 EURO. Supported plug-in formats include 64-bit AAX (Pro Tools 11), RTAS/AudioSuite (Pro Tools 7.4-10), VST, VST 3, and Audio Unit. www.izotope.com/nectar.
► NETIA announced a partnership with Vecsys, a leader in the speech-to-text market, through which the latter company’s MediaSpeech® “speech2text” engine will be integrated into the NETIA MAM (media asset management) solution to make full-text transcription and search capabilities available alongside video in the MAM interface, This new capability enables the automated transcription of audio tracks accompanying any ingested video as well as greater control over indexing, enriching, storing, retrieving, and monetizing A/V content. “By converting audio tracks into searchable transcriptions, the MediaSpeech engine not only supports faster and more effective content searches, but also enables more comprehensive extraction of metadata and more extensive automated indexing,” said Paul Henri Oltra, vice president and CTO at NETIA. “These benefits are significant individually, and together they yield a tremendous boost in the efficiency with which users can find and use the content they want or need.” “Vecsys is very excited about this partnership with NETIA,” said Béatrice Bacconnet, Vecsys CEO. “Video and audio productions are extremely precious assets, but they are often underutilized because traditional searches are blind to their true content. The combination of the NETIA MAM with our Vecsys MediaSpeech speech-to-text solution is cracking the code to deep audio and video content management; it’s opening a range of new possibilities for producers, broadcasters, journalists, and analysts, as well as the public at large.” www.netia.com.
► Voxengo Soniformer version 3.4 update is now available for download. Soniformer is a spectral mastering dynamics processor plug-in for professional music production applications, available in AudioUnit, VST and VST3 plug-in formats (including native 64-bit support), for Mac OS X (v10.5 and later), and Windows computers. This update includes the following changes: VST3 support added. CPU load decreased by 10%. Every parameter in Soniformer is defined by means of a graphic envelope which is freely-modifiable and which may contain an unlimited number of control points. Beside usual threshold, attack, release and compression/expander ratio parameters, Soniformer offers you control over “stereo width” and “panning” parameters making Soniformer an effective tool for stereo field adjustments. USD 89.95. www.voxengo.com. ►