The Seventh Annual Remix Technology Awards

Jan 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Markkus Rovito

DIGITAL AUDIO WORKSTATION Ableton Live 7 Last year, Ableton sneaked into the country club of big-time DAWs, making unglamorous but significant improvements to Live's audio and MIDI engines, as well as countless other areas. Meanwhile, the exceptional new Drum Rack plants an explosion of rhythmic possibilities.
	BEST SOFTWARE VALUE Native Instruments Kore Player and Kore Soundpacks After spending years developing its Kore technology, NI decided to give away the stripped-down, yet still-powerful Kore Player version for free, along with 300 MB of sounds cherry-picked from its industry-leading collection of instruments. Need more juice? Sixteen Kore Soundpacks with hundreds of sounds each start at just $59.
HYBRID HARDWARE/SOFTWARE PRODUCT Universal Audio UAD-2 It would take two-and-a-half bowls of UAD-1 cards to equal the plug-in hosting DSP power of one bowl of UAD-2 cards. That stark fact and new software features such as LiveTrack for latency reduction and support for up to eight UAD cards make this last year's star for CPU offloading.
	DIGITAL DJ SYSTEM Vestax VCI-300 With Serato Itch Vestax built the VCI-300 with the same attention to precision performance and professional, rugged quality as its popular VCI-100. The company also scooped the first partnership with Serato's new Itch software, the MIDI DJing equivalent of Serato Scratch Live for turntablists. All told, this all-in-one laptop DJing system can't be beat.
DJ CONTROL SURFACE Stanton SCS.3d DaScratch Da word is out: DaScratch rocks. This multitouch-sensitive MIDI controller has no moving parts, but rather relies on the capacitance of your electric fingers to send messages. With five modes and two “decks” to instantly reconfigure the layout, DaScratch will only get better as Stanton and its users add more application-specific presets.

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