MOTU unveils Digital Performer 5
updated 01:25 pm EST, Thu January 26, 2006
MOTU Digital Performer 5
MOTU last week unveiled Digital Performer 5, a major upgrade to its digital audio workstation software that includes six new virtual instrument plug-ins, new track folders, a flexible Meter Bridge feature, new audio editing tools, a multitude of new film scoring features, new input monitoring modes, clip-based volume automation and many other feature additions and enhancements. "This major upgrade has incredible new features for beginner and veteran users alike, including several firsts never before seen in audio workstation software," said Jim Cooper, Director of Marketing for MOTU. Digital Performer 5 will ship in the first quarter of 2006 for a list price of $800. The company said it would offer existing registered DP users an upgrade path, but provided no details.
DP5 includes six new virtual instrument plug-ins
- BassLine is a one oscillator, two-waveform monophonic bass synth that lets users quickly dial up that perfect analog bass sound. With a streamlined design consisting of two waveforms (saw and square), one low-pass filter with cutoff and resonance, simple decay envelopes for the filter and amplifier, and several additional classic analog synth features, BassLine is described as an easy and enjoyable instrument that delivers "great analog bass sounds with just a few turns of its dials."
- PolySynth is a polyphonic synth with "a distinct look that harkens back to the classic Roland Juno 106." It is capable of a much wider variety of sounds than BassLine, thanks to its digitally controlled oscillator (DCO), which can be adjusted with varying amounts of de-tune, triangle wave, sawtooth, rectangle (square) wave, sub-oscillator 1 & 2 and noise. The single LFO can modulate pitch (for vibrato), pulse width, or filter depth. The resonant low-pass filter is equipped with frequency and resonance controls, key tracking, velocity control, and an ADSR envelope which can also be applied as an overall envelope for each note.
- Modulo significantly raises the subtractive synthesis stakes by providing two oscillators plus noise, 58 available digital waveforms for each oscillator, oscillator phase and symmetry modulation, two LFOs, a resonant multimode filter, three envelopes and a 5x7 modulation matrix, which supplies five sources applied to up to seven possible destinations. It also provides built-in bank and patch management features and dozens of clearly organized presets.
- Nanosynth allows users to drag and drop any sample (up to five seconds long) from anywhere in DP (or from the Mac OS X Finder) into its graphic sample display and then set a start time, end time, loop (if desired), and crossfade. A multimode filter, amplifier envelope, filter envelope and LFO provide all of the essential features needed for basic sampler programming. MOTU says that Nanosynth is highly CPU-efficient and that users can open as many instances of it as they need during a project to play back an infinite variety of sampler sounds.
- Model 12 is a twelve-part drum module that can load hundreds of supplied drum sounds and dozens of drum kits. Each Part can be individually programmed with controls for pitch (formant corrected or conventional pitch shifting), time stretch, duration (decay or gate), volume & pan, two sends, and a resonant multimode filter with drive. MOTU said that modulation of many of these controls is available by dragging controls in the virtual LCD display at the top of the window.
- Proton, the sixth and final instrument plug-in, is a two-operator frequency modulation (FM) synthesizer that delivers classic, bright, shimmering and expressive FM synth sounds. Proton delivers a broad palette of sounds with a streamlined 2-op architecture driven by what the company says is "a simple wavetable knob, instead of the added overhead and complexity of additional operators. As such, Proton may be the most easily programmable FM synth ever created." It features a real-time display in the center of the window that shows the user the spectral content or periodic waveform being generated by the current settings. Other controls include an FM LFO, modulation pitch envelope, FM amount envelope and overall ADSR envelope.
