Arman Bohn has sampled the favourite instrument of the non-musician: tuned glasses, filled with water. It has a single octave and completely free; its name is Glass Armanica. Click here to download.

Sonic Charge released a new software synth, Synplant, which breaks all your expectations that are related with a synthesizer plugin. Instead of dealing with usual parameters, Synplant uses a seed (a program patch) which you have to plant, and develop into different directions. Sound generation parameters are nested into a DNA-spiral far under the very simple surface. The program is a fun to use and I recommend it - it is worth a free try at least.

If you want to own it fully, you have to pay 89 USD, here.

You can buy SONiVOX's great sampled instruments nested into virtual instruments: they work both as stand-alone and as a plugin. Every piece of them are cheap - 20-30 USD -, but contains only a single theme: Bass - Rickenbacker, Guitar - Stratocaster, Guitar - Les Paul etc, so anyone can build an own orchestra with only the relevant samples. Go click here to learn more.

Antares formed a new version of Auto-Tune: Auto-Tune efx costs only 129 USD, and does all the big things that are commonly known but graphical editor and formant correction. Go check here.

PC users can have this fine environment for 20 USD. It is called MorphVOX Effects Rack, and deal with VST effects - you can arrange them into any configuration. It runs all the processors real-time - with a small latency, of course. try or buy - here.

Music industry has become a Halloween-addict these days. We found the best guys at SSL, whose free plugin, X-orcism is a good deal: it transforms your sound into a real voice of the crypt. Try it immediately, both on PC and Mac.

The next winner is genoQs, makers of the wonderful hardware sequencer, Octopus. They provide a special edition of it, Octopus Vampire, check it here.

DSK dropped a fine free synth plugin called Bluez. It has two oscillators with 134 waveforms, plus waveform drawing feature, nice filters, and a bunch of effects. The surface is clear, straigthforward. Download it from here.

SM Pro Audio started to hype their upcoming instrument in this spring - now it is almost ready as they say. V-Machine is a hardware VST player with a front-end software for Windows, Mac and Linux. It can upload several VST instrument plugins into the brain of the box and organise them into a complete performance with dual, layered and split architectures. It receives controller information and performs MIDI Learn to modify the sounds. USB connectors are present to hold protection keys and to handle hard drives to stream samples of soft samplers like Kontakt. There is still no pricing information and availability date - but a comprehensive product site is up and running.

At GForce, three days to renew the legendary Mellotron's finest software emulation, M-Tron. The new M-Tron Pro will have several surprise inside and outside: contains 3.5 gigabytes of samples, more than 700 presets, works in dual and split modes, vintage effects are present at the end and more - all this wonder will be step forward from shadow in Monday, at GForce's website, for 199 USD.

HG Sounds will soon introduce a new big synth plugin, Astralis Bion. For a preview, they shared now its cut-down version, Astralis Baby Bion for free download. It has wonderful ambient patches with two oscillators, 32-stage envelopes, multimode filters, distortion, flanger. Developed partly in SynthEdit. Download it here.

A musician/composer from Norway, Erik Wollo made this lovely plugin synth, Wollo Voyager. It works in VST and stand-alone, has two oscillators, effects, and costs 25 USD. Try it here.

Sonic Projects' emulated Oberheim synth, OP-X grew up, and it is a full synth family now. The basic, entry level version is OP-X Free, an insrument which has only a few presets, and you cannot change or rewrite them. Next, OP-X Player has more sound slots, and you can load any OP-X preset bank into it, for 39 USD only. At the top, OP-X Pro is the best one, having multimode filters. Check here the family website.

Koblo's new, small green synth is Vibra2000, cots 30 USD - check it here if you like.

IK Multimedia's fine mastering suite, T-RackS got a new version. It also runs in stand-alone, and has a grand total of nine processing algorhythms - five of the are new, for example the emulation of the legendary Fairchild 670 compressor. You can configure the order of the effects freely, and it has a very safe and sophisticated metering system. A new, refined oversampling method is also implemented. The full Deluxe version costs 500 USD, while the Standard that lacks all the new effects but has the new frame costs 200 USD. Here is the product page to know more.

LinPlug's  RMV is a serious instrument, having a heavy-weight sample playback engine and a sophisticated drum synth, too. It has 48 instrument pads, all polyphonic, and all have an own 12x12 modulation matrix as well as envelope generators, parametric EQ, distortion, lots of insert effects at the same time, and a humanizer. Six groove player and slicer serves the musician, and a library module with advanced search capabilities. More than 10,000 sound samples is coming with the package, plus 1,500 audio loops and 2,600 MIDI grooves. RMV costs 139 euro, check here the details.

Audio Damage wants a good reputation therefore they dropped out a new, analogue modeling compressor for completely free. Rough Rider works on both PC and Mac as a VST effect, has a stylish analogue design, and has some modern functions like MIDI Learn. Download it from here.

This plugin instrument was named after some metal god as we learnt somewhere. Image Line's Ogun is made for producing metallistic sound and noises with its additive synthesis engine. An enormous quantity of 32 767 harmonics guarantees a very precise sound tailoring process - all of this is extended with some effects of delay, chorus, EQ and reverb. It costs 79 USD, click here to know more.

White Label has created this simple reverb plugin, bucketEER, which is basicly a 16-part delay module. If you use the channels parallel with very different parameters it can mix enough the sound to create a reverb-like effect. To make a real chaos, randomize functios help you. Go here to download for free.

Voxengo's Elephant mastering plugin reached version 3.0 recently. It has ten types of limiting, converts bit resolution, kills DC offset, oversamples 8 times, calculates with 64-bit resolution and so on. Purchase it until 15th, October for only 70 USD - later you have to pay 90 USD. Here.

de la mancha is still very active, now they introduced a two-band compression plugin, Bathtub. You can switch the two independent stereo compressor parallel or serial, what is a really new feature. It costs 29 USD, check here and try.

This is Alchemy, a new supersynth software from Camel Audio. It is a sample/VA based instrument, packed with a huge array of digital sound manipulation funtions. It loads almost any sound sample (you get two gigabytes with him), has sound morphing, and analogue modeled filters. The arpegggiator inside is a powerful one, also. Price is still not known, but there is a detailed web page about.

Supersynth specialist Spectrasonics promised the top-of-the-line Omnisphere months ago - and finally it is here. Priced at 499 USD, it is not a cheap toy, but it serves for the money heavily. It has a maximum of 10 oscillator per voice, plays back samples and has VA-generators also, and has an extremely wide range of sound manipulation tools. Beyond them, 6 LFOs, 8 envelope generators, 12 effects plus 8 arpeggiators per sound move the sound in the regular way. The package is coming with 40 gigabytes of samples. Check here the rest.

Don't you have groove? No problem, erratic2 from de la mancha will make it. This drum sample player has several random functions to make your life happier - random layers, random velocity, random pan and swing functions color the mechanical beats. It has 15 sound slots, six velocity layers per sound, 15 independent outputs, and the package contains 300 megs of drum samples. For 39 USD, it is quite attractive. Check here.

VRSonic has a new VST reverb, HeadSpace Room which accurately models the environment of the sound source. You can adjust the exact dimensions of the room, and the material that covers the walls. An extensive library of 35 different material is modeled within the program. It produces mono, stereo and 5.1 surround output. Payment is required to own it, as low as 99 USD only, here.

Steinberg updated Cubase seriously in all platforms - 64 bit Vista version has arrived also as a beta. The new Cubase 4.5 supports all the new Steinberg interface-controllers that were introduced earlier. New on the support topic is the VST integration of the Yamaha Motif XS synths - you just connect it via Firewire and the hardware synth acts as a plugin. A new format is also introduced: VST Sound, which can hold any type of a synth sound for any gardware or software synth or effect. A useful extra is bundled: 1.5 gigabytes of sound sample material for HALion. Here is the detailed spec list, and here is the download link.