Homegrown Sounds has released two new sound banks for Access Music's Virus TI.

Starburst is a new collection of Pads/Textures for the Virus TI running OS5. If you think of Eno, Budd, Japan, Sylvian or Boards of Canada that would plant you in the right musical hemisphere for where these sounds belong. They are full of motion and harmonic content. Whilst holding notes will deliver great pleasure from the landscape that unfolds, most are also designed to be used in a general musical context so that they are not limited to specialist genres.

Each Preset makes use of the 3 Assignable Knobs so that variations can be created or morphed to on the fly, Knob 1 tends to be tempo related controlling LFO Speeds, whereas Knob 2 always controls the Delay or Reverb amount. Knob 3 Varies depending on the preset.

The bank contains 128 presets which make full use of OS5. Additionally there is a second bank which is identical except that they are devoid of Delay and Reverb, this is provided as a convenience for those that prefer a less saturated sound. Of course adding/removing delay can be done via Knob 2 easily anyway. There is also a Lite/Demo version available which has 10 presets from the collection.

Price: $29.99 (intro price of $14.98).

Astronomy is a free collection of 64 Presets for the Virus TI (OS5). They are all ARP based patches covering a full range of styles from grinding Bass riffs to ethereal sequences using the full potential of the Virus TI. Each preset makes use of the 3 Assignable Knobs for transforming the patches in real-time as well as channel pressure(Aftertouch) and Mod Wheel. Knob 2 is always assigned to the Delay Amount.

Astronomy can be downloaded directly from here or alternatively is available on the download page on the Access Website.