Toontrack Music announces Beatstation

Summarized by the developers as a 'Tonal and Percussive Open Surface New Generation Virtual Instrument', Beatstation represents a completely new direction for Toontrack Music. It is their first foray into tonal sampling and gives the user a complete workstation for creating and editing not just drums, but any kind of instrument.

Andreas Sundgren from Toontrack says "Although it is firmly planted in the Toontrack legacy of designing the best percussive virtual instruments Beatstation marks a departure for Toontrack, introducing melodic instruments, REX support, and recording capabilities making it the ultimate open surface sampler for sound designers, producers, musicians and songwriters alike."

Key features:

• Beatstation allows the user to design sound sets by dragging and dropping Wav, REX, MP3 and Toontrack library sounds on to the pads of Beatstation from the Beatstation browser or from the user's computer hard-drive, mixing and matching any sounds available to build brand new personalized sound sets.
• Beatstation records samples.
• Beatstation browses and plays back audio and MIDI with all components in the browser drag and droppable into a host application.
• Beatstation allows the user to customize their playing surface to fit their needs by designing and changing skins as well customizing the order of the playing surface.
• Beatstation compatible sound sets:
  • BTX: The Beatstation expansion packs.
  • EZX: The EZdrummer expansion packs.
  • SDX: Superior Drummer 2.0 expansion packs.
  • Toontrack MIDI libraries.
  • REX files of any description.

Pricing & Availability

Beatstation will be available for Windows and Mac OS X in VST, AU and RTAS instrument plug-in formats. Pricing has not yet been announced. Release is expected to be in May 2010.