Humanoid Sound Systems has announced the release of Scanned Synth Pro, the commercial successor to Scanned Synth VST, and Scanned Synth Mini, its free sibling. These new versions add many exciting new features, including:

• The Psycho! Button: antisocial behaviour in a button. This feature was requested by Trilby Temperley of The Resonance and should not be used by sensible people.
• A Polyphonic Filter with cutoff frequency modulation and pitch-tracking allowing the sound to be shaped naturally and intuitively as well as expanding the range of possible sounds even further.
• An Echo effect.
• Improved sound quality including making the distortion even more gorgeous.
• Improved efficiency allowing you to run more synths and effects simultaneously.
• A huge library of professionally designed factory preset sounds.
• Randomisation profiles: presets that contain ideal settings (initial parameter values and randomisation amounts) to produce particular types of sound through randomisation, thus enabling you to quickly generate a unique new bass or a dazzling special effect with just a few mouse clicks.

Scanned Synth Pro is available as a VST instrument for Windows, with a Mac OS X version planned, at the introductory price of €75 until the beginning of July, after which it will retail for €90. A demo version is available.

Scanned Synth Mini features the same synthesis engine as used by Scanned Synth Pro (they sound the same when using the same presets) but only allows new sounds to be programmed through randomisation. The user can set the amounts by which each group of parameters will be randomised but does not have direct access to the parameters themselves.

Scanned Synth Mini can load and save presets through the host application that are compatible with Scanned Synth Pro and vice versa. This means that Scanned Synth Mini can actually produce the full range of sounds that Scanned Synth Pro is capable of. Only the amount of control the user has over the sound is limited when compared to Scanned Synth Pro.