Toontrack Music has announced the release of Beatstation. Part sound design tool and part audio engine, Beatstation brings the best aspects of musical creativity together in one EZ and powerful virtual instrument.

Combining drums, bass and lead instruments with drag and drop, REX and MIDI support, plus a variety of functions and features, Beatstation is your companion for quickly getting tracks up and running, or for diving into the smallest details of what you want your sound to be.

Beatstation's 1.5 GB core content library is divided into three distinct categories - Lowbit, Synthetix and Organic. There are thousands of MIDI grooves, REX loops and drum/bass/lead instrument presets created from a massive collection of one-of-a-kind, rare, vintage, modern and custom instruments – all meticulously multi-sampled by Toontrack. Do you already have Toontrack EZX or SDX expansion packs? These can be combined and edited inside Beatstation too.

Furthermore, record your own sounds using the built-in recorder and easily drag and drop them on to the Beatstation pads, mixing and matching to build brand new personalised sound sets.

For the advanced user, Beatstation contains a number of powerful yet simplified tools for manipulating MIDI, sound design, instrument creation and full mixing. This includes full ADSR, pitching, reverse, sample off-set, note-on/off, mono/poly, 5 part sample/REX loop or slice layering per pad all with individual parameter control, variable swing, flam, transposition, 1/2 x tempo, 2 x tempo and a handy part separation feature for extracting a specific part from within the MIDI file.

And to top it all off, the Beatstation interface is also highly customizable. Download a choice of skins from the Beatstation website or use the Skin Tool to create your own.

Coming soon: BTXs – the Beatstation expansion packs.

Pricing & Availability

Beatstation is available for Windows and Mac OS X in stand-alone and AU, RTAS and VST instrument plug-in formats. It has a RRP of £79.00 / €89.00.

If you purchase your copy of Beatstation from timespace.com you'll receive a link to download an exclusive 100MB sample pack of Wav and Rex files to add to your Beatstation library and a free Time+Space skin. What's more, right now Time+Space are offering free UK shipping on all purchases.