MOD Audio, the ‘rebooted’ MOD Devices, informed us that it’s now shipping orders to Europe, its established market, and for the first time to Japan, a new new market, as a result of a new distribution agreement with Electori. The MOD Dwarf, the company’s flagship product, can now be purchased at major retailers in these regions.
The company has also partnered with Scott Simon, of Sound Strategy Partners, with the goal of expanding into the United States.
“We are thrilled to be shipping again our products to Europe, our established market, and to have formed a partnership with Electori to expand to Japan, our exciting new market,” says MOD Audio’s Co-Founder and CEO, Gianfranco Ceccolini. “I am very happy to welcome Scott Simon as we continue to expand our reach and bring the MOD Dwarf to even more musicians worldwide.”
MOD Dwarf is a dual-channel multi-effects pedal. It lets you used 400+ free and commercial plugins, which can be patched using a browser-based visual interface that lets you split, join and feedback signals in a modular fashion. Find out more on the MOD Audio website.
Mic plus audio interface promises to be “an entire studio setup in one elegant, compact design”
IK Multimedia has released many iRig devices over the years, but, a mic built into an audio interface is it’s first release, and here it is now in the shape of the iRig Stream Mic Pro. In fact, IK claims that this is pretty much “an entire studio setup in one elegant, compact design”.
The iRig Stream Mic Pro looks very much like what we’ve just described. Up top there’s a condenser microphone with dual mic capsules and a choice of cardioid, figure 8, omnidirectional and stereo pickup patterns. Between them, these are designed to cover everything from recording podcasts and interviews to instruments and musical ensembles. There’s adjustable gain and a selectable high-pass filter.
The audio interface bit of the iRig Stream Mic Pro offers a 3.5mm stereo input for plugging in synths, mixers or anything else, while the monitoring mix control enables you to blend the direct and recorded signal going to the headphone output.
You also get IK’s Loopback+ technology, which is particularly useful for live streaming. You could, for example, plug a phone into the audio input to play music, but route the mic signal to an external effects app for processing, before sending the whole lot to an app such as Instagram or TikTok.
iRig Stream Mic Pro operates at 24-bit/96kHz, and all of its features are controlled by a single knob. Holding this down temporarily mutes the microphone, and there are LED indicators for visual level monitoring.
There are two modes of operation: stereo and multichannel. By default, iRig Stream operates in stereo mode, in which all inputs (plus loopback) are mixed to – you guessed it – stereo, but in multichannel mode the two capsules are routed to channels 3 and 4, giving you four channels of audio to send to your DAW.
iRig Stream Mic Pro ships with both mini-DIN to iOS Lightning and mini-DIN to USB-C cables, so can be easily connected to iOS, Android, PC and Mac hardware. If you use the optional DC power supply, you can also charge your Lightning-connected device while you are recording.
Supplied software includes iRig Recorder 3 LE (iPhone/iPad/Android), an audio and video recording app, and also MixBox CS (iPad) and MixBox SE (Mac/PC), an FX suite that includes dynamics, EQ, reverb processors. You get a 5/8-inch to 1/4-inch thread adapter in the box, as well.
KORG has announced an important update for drumlogue, bringing added functionality to the popular hybrid drum machine. It’s drum machine gets chromatic MIDI recording.
Shipping now, Korg Drumlogue is a flexible and powerful drum machine, but, one of the specific criticisms is the lack of a chromatic MIDI recording option, which would enable users to explore the full potential of the Drumlogue’s built-in and expandable synth engine. However, the good news is that this has now been added as part of the new V1.1.0 firmware update.
In addition, there are new parameters for the nano user synth, as well as a solo function with latch. And, it’s possible to latch into mute and shift modes now.
